JOUltNEY ALONG THE COAST OF GREENLAND. 185 



boats, things never before seen coming from the north 

 alonof the coast ! Must we not have filled the faint- 

 hearted, superstitious Greeulanders with indescribable 

 terror, and wherever they saw us, put them to a burried 

 flight ? We may have sailed close under their villages ; 

 it is even possible that, at Sedlevik, we passed the night 

 close to one of them. But the lovr, oven-shaped, grass- 

 overgrown huts can only be seen and recognized when 

 close against them, or when the eye is familiar with their 

 appearance; besides which, the Eastlanders go between 

 the islands to catch the seals. The greater part of them 

 were, therefore, absent.*^ Of their condition the mis- 

 sionaries knew little. In former times, some intercourse 

 had been kept up with them, and on Alluk Island there 

 was every year a sort of exchange market between East 

 and "West Greenland. This had long since been given up. 

 Visits from the east side were very rare.^ The people 

 are, it is said, finer and stronger than those of West 

 Greenland, and have light and brown hair. Does not 

 this remind us of the old Northmen? If it happens 

 that East Greenlanders settle in the west, they must 

 first be acclimatized; they must go through a skin 

 disease, which the missionaries call " Eskimokratze." It 



' 111 a particularly interesting letter from the missionaries, receive 

 hy our Society on the 4th of Nov., 1871, and vi^ritten by A, Gericke, 

 Friedrichsthal, 22ik1 August, it is said, — "A short time since a great 

 number of the heathenish inhabitants of the east coast of Greenland 

 came to us to barter, as they are in the habit of doing in some years. 

 They said that they had seen the crew of the Hansa on the ice-floe, 

 but from terror at such an appearance on their desert shore they had 

 not ventured to go to them." 



■^ See the detailed account of East Greenland by Giaah. " Voyage to 

 Greenland," p. 114. 



