ADVANCE OF EMIGRANTS TOWARDS GREENLAND. 



step, along the whole length of the Parry group, from Banks Island 

 to Baffin's Bay. This- region does not afford the necessary con- 

 ditions for a permanent abode of human beings. Constant open 

 water during the winter, — at all events in pools and lanes, — appears 

 to be an absolute essential for the continued existence of man in 

 any part of the Arctic Eegions, when without bows and arrows, or 

 other means of catching large game on land. This essential is not 

 to be found in the frozen sea, whose icy waves are piled up in mighty 

 heaps on the shores of the Parry Islands. Eeindeer, musk oxen, 

 and hares are in abundance on Melville and Banks Islands through- 

 out the winter, but the emigiants, whose course we are endeavouring 

 to trace, were no more able to catch them than are the modern 

 " Arctic Highlanders." There animal food, too, without blubber of 

 seal or walrus for fuel with which to melt water for drinking pur- 

 poses, would be insufficient to maintain human life in the Arctic 

 zone. As they advanced farther east they would come to the 

 barren limestone shores of Bathurst and Cornwallis Islands, where 

 the club moss ceases to grow, where all vegetation is still more 

 scarce, and where animal life is not so abundant. A few years of 

 desperate struggling for existence must have shown them that their 

 journey half round the world was not yet ended. Again they had 

 to wander in search of some less inhospitable shore, leaving behind 

 them the ruined huts and fox-traps which have marked their route, 

 and helped to identify them with the fugitives who left their yourts 

 at the mouths of the Indigirka and the Kolyma. "We have every 

 reason to believe that no Eskimos have since visited the Parry 

 Islands. 



The emigrants probably kept marching steadily to the eastward 

 along and north of Barrow Straits. They doubtless arrived in 

 small parties throughout the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth 

 centuries. They seem to have been without canoes, but to have 

 been provided with dogs and sledges, and on reaching the mouth of 

 Lancaster Sound they appear to have kept along the shore, leaving 

 traces in the shape of ruined huts at the entrance of Jones Sound, 

 and finally to have arrived in Greenland, on some part of the eastern 

 shore of Smith Sound, not improbably at the " wind-loved" point of 

 Anoritok. Thence, as new relays of emigrants arrived, they may 

 be supposed to have separated in parties to the north and south, the 

 former wandering whither we know not, the latter crossing Melville 

 Bay, appearing suddenly among the Norman settlements, and even- 

 tually peopling the isles and fiords of South Greenland. Some of 

 the wanderers remained at the "wind-loved" point, established 

 their hunting-grounds between the Humboldt and Melville Bay 



