4 THE INTERIOR OF GREENLAND. 



Sound the charts and other documents will have so fully explained 

 to the Expedition, that it is manifestly out of the province of the 

 present writer to enter upon this subject. The physical charac- 

 teristics of the country do not, so far as a mere study of the pub- 

 lished sources of information which we possess in regard to it will 

 allow us to judge, differ in any remarkable degree from the region 

 already spoken of. 



2. The Interior of Greenland. 1 



The interior of any considerable tract of land has always a mys- 

 terious interest surrounding it, especially when its coasts have long 

 been a familiar object on our maps. Indeed, now-a-days, when the 

 broad features of the world, excepting those of some of the more 

 remote Arctic and Antarctic regions, are tolerably well known, 

 little remains to the geographical explorer but the investigation 

 of the interior of some of the older continental masses of land. 

 Even with his ambition so bounded, the traveller need not, like a 

 second Alexander, sit down and weep because there are no more 

 worlds to conquer. The geography and resources of scarcely any 

 great mass of land, from Australia to Greenland, with the exception 

 of the long civilised and inhabited European countries, are well 

 known, and some even very near to the great centres of population 

 and enterprise of the world, such as Iceland and Greenland, are 

 little, if at all known, or even attempted to be explored. Yet the 

 superficial area of Greenland cannot be less than 750,000 square 

 miles— in a word, it is a continent. 



It is now upwards of 1000 years 2 since the banished Iceland 

 Vikino 1 , Eed Erik (Thorwards' son), discovered the land to which 

 he applied the somewhat couleur- de-rose name of " Gronland." For 

 upwards of 700 years it was settled on its southern shores, or visited 

 for hunting, fishing, or trading purposes, by his countrymen from 

 Iceland and Norway. Thirteen bishops were ordained to preside 

 over this frozen diocese, and churches and villages yet remain, in 

 the shape of massive rude ruins, to attest how strong a hold it had 

 taken on the colonising spirit of Scandinavia. For nearly 300 years 

 exploring vessels of almost every European maritime nation have 

 passed along its ice-bound shores, either for the purpose of exploring 

 its northern termination or of tracing the trend of its unknown 



1 Condensed and re-cast, with corrections, from ' Das Inuere von Gronland ' 

 (Petermann's ' Geog. Mittheilungen,' 1871). 



2 This date is not certain; some authors give it as a.d. 983. See also Konrad 

 Maurer's ' Island, von seiner ersten Entdeckung bis zum Untergange des Frei- 

 staats' (1874). 



