ESKIMO WANDERINGS INTO GREENLAND 



difficult here, because of the floating inland-ice and its crevasses; and even 

 if these were passable, a sensible man with wife and children would hardly set 

 out on a 200 kilometres long wandering through the waste if he did not know 

 anything beforehand about the natural conditions with which he would meet 

 when at last the risky journey had come to an end. If a wandering from the 

 north-west to the north-east of Greenland has taken place, there is only the 

 way north of Peary Land; but no conditions for existence are offered here. 



To sum up, all observations made during the expedition point to the 

 probability that in Melville Bay we must look for the great main route which 

 lias led the Eskimos from the North American Archipelago to Greenland. 



The entire migration has gone southward, and even to the east coast they 

 have come south of Cape Farewell. It has been maintained that the collections 

 brought home from the north of East Greenland point towards north, but 

 even such an argument appears to me futile to discuss. For it would seem 

 much more natural to relate the North-East Greenlanders to tribes which have 

 been offshoots from the colony at Angmagssalik, which has no doubt always 

 been thickly populated. Right down to the time of the colonization there were 

 people here who went north, and many hunting traditions point to a north- 

 going movement. Along this coast there are no passages which can compare 

 with the stretch between Hall Basin and Independence Fjord. As these people 

 from the sub-Arctic climate gradually settled down under quite different con- 

 ditions and quickly became acclimatized and adapted their tool-making tech- 

 nique to a definite or exclusive winter culture, so everything found after them 

 will bear the high Arctic stamp, although it must not necessarily have come 

 southward from the north, wherefrom no way is to be found. And could 

 anybody imagine a folk-wandering — and that numerically a rather large one — 

 traversing more than 1,000 kilometres along the coast without leaving the 

 slightest trace? The tent-rings in Independence Fjord must therefore be due 

 to reconnoitrings from Sophus Miiller Point. 



In full accordance with the views here maintained, we lose the traces of a 

 folk-wandering, both on the west and the east coast of Greenland, in and 

 with the localities where the sealing during the hunts of spring and summer 

 cannot form the base of an existence such as the Eskimo desires. 



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