CHAPTER III 



Our Country has wide borders... and it bears secrets in its 

 bosom of which no white man dreams. Up here we live two 

 different lives; in the summer under the torch of the warm 

 sun; in the winter, under the lash of the north wind. But it is 

 the dark and cold that make us think most. 



Saying of a Greenlander quoted by KNUD 

 RASMUSSEN in The People of the Polar North. 



The Eskimoes and their rulers. Greenland a 'closed' country. 

 Danish methods of government. Life, personal characteristics, 

 language, and dress of the Eskimoes. The kayak and the umyak. 

 Coal in Greenland. 



NANSEN in Eskimo Life^ a book which gives 

 an admirable description of the people 

 written with sympathetic appreciation, though the 

 condemnation of the Danish method of govern- 

 ment is much too sweeping, thus sums up his im- 

 pressions of Greenland and the Greenlanders : ' It 

 is a naked lonely land, like no other land inhabited 

 of man. But in all its naked poverty, how beautiful 

 it is... strange is the power which this land exer- 

 cises over the mind; but the race that inhabits it is 

 not less remarkable than the land itself.' A race 

 which has been able to exist entirely by virtue of 

 its own resourcefulness and mastery over nature 

 in its hardest manifestations, in former days with- 

 out metal, except perhaps in a very few localities 

 where native iron was available, and with no wood 

 save logs of drifted timber washed up on the beach, 

 compels our admiration and respect. 

 The present Eskimo population is about 14,000, 



