Keystone of 

 dome of snow 

 house about to 

 be put in place 



Earth -shod 

 iced runners 

 of Coronation 

 Gulf sled 



packed in 

 snow to pre- 

 vent ice from 

 melting 



Teutonic) colony in its en- 

 tirety. This colony had a 

 bishop of the Church of Rome, 

 two monasteries, a nunnery, 

 fourteen churches and over 

 three thousand inhabitants, 

 who at one time sailed their 

 own ships to Norway, to Ice- 

 land and to America. [Leif 

 Ericson was one of these 

 Greenlanders, and to the gen- 

 eral public best known of 

 them all.] This colony was 

 in a fairly prosperous condi- 

 tion as late as 1412 and we 

 have Vatican documents of 

 a later date referring to it; 

 when Hans Egede came there 

 in the seventeenth century 

 he found only house ruins to 

 tell the story, and no sure 

 trace of Scandinavianism in 

 the language or blood of the 

 Greenland Eskimo. Either 

 the colony had been massacred by the Eskimo, had disappeared through famine or 

 pestilence, or had emigrated in a body. This last view many scholars have favored 

 from the first, and if they did emigrate they may be represented in part by the 

 present inhabitants of Victoria Land. 



There are many philological points to suggest Scandinavian origin of these 

 people. For instance, their word for "wolf" is arg-luk, a word convej'ing no 

 analogy to any of my companions, even after they understood its meaning. Now 

 the common Old Norse word for "wolf" is rarg-ur. Not to go into fine philological 

 reasoning, it is enough to say that an Eskimo is as likely to attach a -Ifik to a foreign 

 word as an Italian is to attach a final -o. One of the characteristics of the Hancrag- 

 miut dialect is the dropping of initial consonants. Thus the Icelandic vargur becomes 

 arg-ur; change the final syllable to -luk (as Herschel Islanders change Cottle to Kar- 

 luk) and you have arg-luk. 



We heard here also a song alliterated in much the Old Norse scaldic style. This 

 sort of alliteration and anklang is unknown to me personally or through books 

 as^a feature of Eskimo songs anywhere. 



Again, in the forties of the last century Franklin's cxi)edition with its full comple- 

 ment of men was lost near the east coast of Victoria Land. Some of these men are 

 accounted for by journal entries of officers who themselves later perished, and others 

 by graves and unburied skeletons along the route toward Hack's River. Franklin's 

 men must have known there was a boat route to the Hudson Bay Company's posts on 

 the Mackenzie River, for Franklin's own three expeditions had discovered and mapped 

 it chiefly by boat voyages. Is it unlikely then that some of his men attempted this 

 route? And even if they did not, might not a few of his men have found their way 

 to the Eskimo of Victoria Land and have had sufficient adaptability to learn Eskimo 

 methods of self-sui)port? A readily apparent objection to this hypothesis is that 



10 



