CAPTAIN KLINKENBERG 55 



The reason for my having come north on a polar ex- 

 pedition was that I had once written a paper upon the 

 history of Greenland. From my studies of that history 

 I knew that something like three or five thousand Norse- 

 men had been lost from Greenland about the time of 

 Columbus or a little before. No man knew what had 

 become of them. Some thought they had died; some 

 thought they had intermingled with the Greenland Es- 

 kimos and disappeared; and some thought they had 

 moved from Greenland to the islands to the west of 

 Greenland. It was not impossible that some of these 

 might have penetrated to Victoria Island. Neither was 

 it impossible that a few survivors of Franklin's last ex- 

 pedition of sixty years ago might have escaped starva- 

 tion by settling among the Eskimos. No matter how un- 

 likely it might be, it was not impossible that the Olga 

 had discovered the descendants of one group or another 

 of these lost Europeans. All this was fascinating to 

 ponder upon and made me watch all the more eagerly 

 for the arrival of our schooner, Duchess -of Bedford, 

 to pick me up and carry me east to where Klinkenberg 

 had seen these strange people. 



When Klinkenberg had met these Eskimos with blond 

 complexions and with copper knives, he had noted the 

 blondness; but what had interested him was the copper 

 and he had tried hard to find out where they got it. About 

 that he had learned a good deal more than the truth. 

 One of his stories was of a mountain of solid copper in 

 Victoria Island. This apparently fabulous tale really 

 has some foundation, for there has been located since in 

 Victoria Island a hill that has a boulder of copper in the 

 side of it as big as a piano. There is of course a good 

 deal of difference in size between a piano and a mountain. 



