Prof. Nordenskiold — Expedition to Greenland. 417 



matter was given, the G-reenlanders in the neighbourhood made an 

 accurate inventory of everything on board that could be turned to 

 any useful purpose. They found bread and sundry other provisions, 

 also potatoes, but no paper or any indication of the name the ship 

 had once borne, or the nation to which it had belonged, further than 

 that the brass bolts by which the timbers were fastened together 

 bore the stamp " Skultuna ; " they were therefore from the Swedish 

 brass-foundry of that name, and it is perhaps probable that the 

 vessel itself was either Swedish or Norwegian. It was a two-masted 

 vessel of 100-150 tons burden, according to the estimate of the 

 Danes, and, according to the Greenlanders, could take a cargo equal 

 to about half that of a three-master. The timbers were of oak, the 

 outer covering of pine, the sides were not strengthened to resist ice, 

 the stern was round " as a Dutchman's." The Greenlanders as- 

 serted that undoubtedly the ship was neither a whaler nor intended 

 to sail amongst ice — and there is not the slightest reason to doubt 

 the accuracy of their judgment, which is most sagacious in such 

 matters. We have then here an example of a wreck drifting hither 

 from the southern seas. Similar events must of course have often 

 happened before, and what an abundance of iron the wreck of a 

 ship supplies to a Greenland colony with its limited wants, is evi- 

 dent from the quantity of iron lying, at our visit, scattered around 

 the houses in Godhavn, and obtained from whalers that had been 

 stranded there in the preceding year. Here again was evidence of the 

 Greenlander's improvident character. It never entered the mind of 

 any one of them, out of all that quantity of iron — sufficient perhaps 

 to supply the wants of the Greenlanders for a century — to preserve 

 more than what he for the moment required ; and if the regular ex- 

 portations from Europe were to cease, the colony would again in a 

 few years have to go back to the bone-knife, the bow and the flint 

 implements. 



For bone-knives, such as are sometimes found in old graves, the 

 edge of which is formed by an iron plate let into a groove in the 

 bone, a piece of an iron hoop of a barrel, that may have washed 

 ashore, may easily enough have been used ; an old worn-out iron 

 knife would have been less fit for the purpose. These iron-shod 

 bone-knives are therefore by no means always remnants from the 

 time when the iron brought into the country by the Northmen in 

 the beginning of the present millennium had begun to be scarce, but 

 merely examples of the Greenlanders' way of turning to use for 

 their simple wants, in the most appropriate manner, any objects 

 that may come in their way. 



At Kaja persons have been buried, not only in ordinary graves, 

 but in low caves formed at the foot of neighbouring steep cliffs of 

 gneiss by huge blocks of rock fallen from the mountain one over 

 another. Most graves in the vicinity of the colonies have been long 

 ago plundered by searchers after antiquities. This was not the case 

 in this distant locality; nevertheless, all that we found in the graves 

 was a pair of water-ladles and arrow-heads. On the other hand, as 

 has been already said, a rich harvest was gathered at the sites of the 



VOL. IX. — NO. xcix. 27 



