xjv.] THE POPULATION OF NORTH-EASTEKN ASIA. 5C5 



and appeared to have a somewhat different cast of countenance. 

 They themselves would not allow that there was any national 

 difference between them and the old warrior and conqueror 

 tribe on the north coast, but stated that the race about 

 which we inquired were settled immediately to the south. 

 Some days after we anchored in Konyam Bay (64° 49' N.L., 

 172° 53' W.L. from Greenwich). We found there only pure 

 reindeer-owning Chukches ; there was no coast population 

 living by hunting and fishing. On the other hand, the 

 inhabitants near our anchorage off St. Lawrence Island 

 consisted of Eskimo and Namollo. It thus appears as if 

 a great part of the Eskimo who inhabit the Asiatic side 

 of Behring's Straits, had durincr recent times lost their own 

 nationality and become fused with the Chukches. For it is 

 certain that no violent expulsion has recently taken place 

 here. It ought besides to be remarked that the name Onkilon 

 which Wrangel heard given to the old coast population driven 

 out by the Chukches is evidently nearly allied to the word 

 Ankali, with which the reindeer-Chukch at present distin- 

 guishes the coast-Chukch, also that, in the oldest Bussian 

 accounts of Schestakov's and Paulutski's campaigns in these 

 regions, there never is any mention of two different tribes 

 livinsr here. It is indeed mentioned in these accounts that 

 among the slain Chukches there were found some men with 

 perforated lips, but probably these were Eskimo from the 

 other side of Behring's Straits, previously taken prisoners by 

 the Chukches, or perhaps merely Eskimo who had been 

 paying a friendly visit to the Chukches and who had taken 

 part as volunteers in their war of freedom. It therefore 

 appears to me to be on the whole more probable that the 

 Eskimo have migrated from America to Asia, than that, as 

 some authors have supposed, this tribe has entered America 

 from the west by Behring's Straits or Wrangel Land. 



The tent-village Nunamo, or, as Hooper writes, "Noonah- 

 mone," does not lie low, like the Chukch villages we had 

 formerly seen, on the sea-shore, but pretty high up on a 

 cape between the sea and a river which debouches immediately 

 to the south-west of the village, and now during the snow- 

 melting season was much flooded. At a short distance from 

 the coast the land was occupied by a very high chain of 

 mountains, which was split up into a number of summits and 

 whose sides were formed of immense stone mounds distributed 

 in terraces. Here a large number of marmots and lagomys 

 had their haunt. The lagomys, a species of rodent that 

 does not occur in Sweden, of the size of a large rat, is remark- 

 able for the care with which in summer it collects great stores 

 for the winter. The village consisted of ten tents built without 



