Report on the expedition. 133 
easily manoeuvre between the floes. The ice opened more and more, 
and from then onwards there would have been no hindrance for navi- 
gation. 
While living at Cape Philip Broke our time was divided between 
hunting and digging out some Eskimo remains. The result of this latter 
work was very meagre, as we only found one winter-house. Tent-rings, 
however, and particularly shooting-shelters and meat-cäches we found 
in large numbers. The only thing of interest which we found in the 
house, was the hollow part of the bottom of a bottle, carefully chipped 
so as to make a small vessel, and it was buried under the caved-in roof 
and about one foot of turf. In one of the meat-cäches behind Cape 
Philip Broke we found another bit of glass, apparently belonging to 
the same bottle, which we had found in the house, as the broken-off 
pieces fitted together. No European who in our knowledge had visited 
the east coast of Greenland could have left this bottle, as the thick turf 
must have been very long in forming. The bottle must then either have 
been brought to the coast by a whaling-vessel or have come down with 
the polar current. This latter seems unlikely, as a bottle could hardly 
drift across the Polar Ocean without breaking, either by being hammered 
against a piece of ice or by being burst by the frost, and the most likely 
theory seems to be the one that the bottle must have been brought 
there by a whaling vessel. 
The finding of these pieces of glass and the assumption that the 
original bottle must have been brought by a whaling vessel may give a 
vague explanation of the total disappearance of the Eskimos from this 
part of the coast, as diseases may then have been introduced amongst 
these people by stray whaling vessels, which have reached Greenland 
and got into connection with the Eskimo, though news of it never 
seem to have penetrated to the outer world. Any disease will spread with 
a surprising rapidity and will almost certainly be fatal to these small 
communities, as shown with painful plainness for instance in Alasca. 
A few utensils belonging to former inhabitants were found amongst 
the rocks on the point, and a whole whale-bone was discovered in a 
cache far inland. 
The hunting gave rather good results as regards bears, musk-oxen and 
sea-gulls. The bears were numerous, until the Freeden Bay broke up, 
and it was probably due to the fact that a very great amount of seals 
were basking on the ice. We did not get near enough to see what kind 
of seals they were, but we shot a few in the water, and found them to 
be the common ringed seal. A couple of walrusses were also seen. 
The stomachs of all the seals we shot were full of shrimps. 
On land we saw and shot musk-oxen on August 8th and August 14th, 
in both cases bulls — four in all. Further we saw hares, of which there 
was a very large amount near Cape Philip Broke, and in one day we 
shot seven. This was on June 20th, and their kittens were probably 
