INNUITS OF OUR ARCTfO COAST. 131 



times of plenty, and left to perish when food tails. They are accused of treachery and crime 

 when Europeans are in their power, but sueli was not the experience of such of the arctic 

 explorers whom disaster caused to seek their hosjiitality and assistance. It is true that 

 they attacked Franklin on his western boat expedition from the mouth of the Mackenzie 

 river, but the Eskimo of his da}' had not learned to distinguish between the daring explorer 

 and christian gentleman, and the grasping Russian trader of the straits, who did not scruple 

 to use powder and steel to urge the trade for his brandy in exchange for the ivory and 

 whalebone, seal skins and oil of the Eskimo, and there is good reason for believing that had 

 Crozier's gaunt and scurvy-stricken band met with and trusted Eskimo aid the sad cairn 

 record found by McOlintock might have been spoken by the lips of rescued survivors. 



"We now come to the difficult question of the probable origin of these denizens of the 

 most inhospitable regions of North America and of part of Asia, and are met at the outset, 

 not only by the ordinar}' diiUculties of such an attempt in regard to the better known 

 aboriginal tribes of the continent, but with the very distinctive difference which exists be- 

 tween them and the Innnits of the polar basin. The movements at least, if not the origin of 

 all the other Canadian Indians has been fairly well ascertained, but the habits, manners and 

 customs, the religious beliefs, and language as well as their habitat so far as we have any 

 account of them have remained the same with the Eskimo since the}' were first seen by 

 European ej'es. Migrations there have been, but these, since the eleventh century at 

 least, have partaken more of the character of the natural overflow of population, seeking in 

 bands of several families new fields where food was to be procured than any general hegira 

 from internal or external causes. Unlike in appearance, manner, habits, disposition and 

 language from all Indian tribes near them, they have sought no communication with them, 

 discouraging even marriage with captives taken in war, they have nearly everywhere re- 

 mained of pure blood, "Innuits," the '■'■People" who live in plenty where all others would 

 starve, resisting all temptation to leave their boulder strewn and ice furrowed shores, and 

 who languish and die when forcibly removed from their bleak headlands and barren rocks. 



I pass by the ingenious arguments which would have us believe that man is the result 

 of evolution, or that men of difterent colours were created as unworthy of a single thought 

 when we possess the divinely inspired account of the origin of our species, and accept with- 

 out hesitation the present general belief derived from the conclusions reached after much 

 research by those who devoted nnxch time to its study, that all at least of the northern por- 

 tion of the aborigines of North America reached this continent by chance from the Aleutian 

 islands, or with intent across some part of Behring Straits. 



Accepting this belief we may suppose the progenitor of, these Eskimo or " Skraelings " 

 seen early in the eleventh century on the Newfoundland and Labrador coasts by the Scan- 

 dinavian discoverers of Greenland to have been one of the Mongolian offshoots of the great 

 dispersion caused by the confusion of tongues, and we must suppose them either to have 

 adopted their present mode of life by being forced to the northeastern portion of arctic 

 Asia by tribes stronger and better armed than they, and having acquired the habits of life 

 necessitated by a residence in the polar basin, gradually found their way over five thousand 

 miles of arctic and Atlantic coast line to where first met near the straits of Belle-Isle, or, 

 the (to me) far more probable conjecture that their progenitors were the Mongolian tribe or 

 tribes who first peopled America and the great eastern and southward tide of occupation, 

 which, increasing in its flow southward along the great river valleys and lake basins .of the 



