DESCRIPTION or GREENLAND. 231 



reached it, and should be incHiied also to believe that the two 

 savages whom he took from this place were perhaps descend- 

 ants of those ancient Norwegians, whose end we are anxious 

 to find out ; but so many people who have seen and studied 

 them at Copenhagen, assured me that neither these men 

 nor those who were brought from Davis' Gulf, although they 

 differed among themselves in language and manners, had 

 anything in common with this same language or those man- 

 ners with Denmark and Norway ; and the language of these 

 savages was so different from that of this part of the world, 

 that the Danes and Norwegians could understand nothing 

 of it. 



The Danish Chronicle remarks, that the three savages 

 whom the English pilot brought from Davis' Gulf, spoke so 

 quickly and stuttered so much, that they pronounced nothing 

 distinctly but these two words, " Oxa indecha", of which 

 they could never learn the signification. It is certain that 

 what we call the Old Greenland, was only a small part of all 

 this extensive northern land which I have described to you, 

 that that was the nearest shore to the passage of Iceland, and 

 that the Norwegians who inhabited it did not proceed far- 

 ther inland, any more than those who discovered New 

 Greenland, who only touched there at its ports and coasts, 

 and, as you have seen, hardly dare hazard setting foot on 

 land. The Grand Master of Denmark told me that the 

 Danes, in the last voyage of Greenland, which was made in 

 1636, having inquired by signs of the Greenlanders with whom 

 they traded, whether there were more men made like them 

 beyond the mountains which they saw inland at ten or twelve 

 leagues from the sea, these savages answered them by signs 

 and demonstrations, that there were other men beyond these 

 mountains who had no hair on their heads, and that they were 

 men of great size and carried large bows and arrows, and that 

 they killed all those who came near them. Now, neither these 

 men nor the land they inhabit, have been ever known to any 



