393 



(see Appendix, fig. 85i. It was found on the same day that the 

 Expedition was about to leave the country to return home (16lh 

 August 1870) near an old Eskimo settlement at Cape Hold- 

 with-hope (Cape Broer Ruys) at 73° 30', just north of the mouth 

 of Franz Joseph's Fjord M- It is both larger (208 cm long), 

 more unwieldy, and more clumsily fashioned than the ordinary 

 Greenland sledges. Clumsy as the sledge is, when we consider 

 the hardness and weight of the logs of drift-wood out of 

 which it was fashioned, and the big holes, most of them rect- 

 angular and on an average 7 or 8 cm in length, which they 

 have managed with their primitive tools to pierce in the run- 

 ners, one cannot refrain from wonder at what they have ac- 

 complished. 



Doubts might well be entertained as to whether this sledge 

 is of the Eskimo type, for it is widely different from the Green- 

 land sledges with which we are familiar. I believe, however, 

 that along with the picture one will be obliged to form of 

 the North East Greenland sledge, it will be necessary to modify 

 to a certain extent one's conception of the East Eskimo type 

 of sledge. The sledge model found by Amdrup corresponds in 

 all essential details with this complete sledge found by the 

 German Expedition at 6V2 degrees of latitude further to the 

 north on the same coast; and the sledge runner found in 1899 

 by the Swedish Expedition (illustrated in the Appendix, fig. 86 ^)) 



') Die zweite deutsche Nordpolarfahrt, Vol. 1 (1874), page ()8.5 : "The still 

 well-preserved and almost entire pieces of an Eskimo dog-sledge which 

 were found further to the east, by the shore, lying by each other in 

 the right order. They consisted of both of the runners, roughly fashioned 

 out of drift timber, on the lower surface of which the holes and to 

 some extent the wooden nails with which the rails of bone or ivory 

 had been fastened to them, were still in preservation. Besides this, 

 there lay by them some of the connecting cross-pieces, as well as one 

 of the pieces of wood which are fastened on behind as uprights. The 

 circular and .square holes through which the dog-traces and the rawhide 

 straps for fastening them were passed were distinctly preserved, but not 

 a vestige of the leather itself was to be seen". 



''l This sledge is in the Nathorst collection in the Stockholm Kiksmuseum. 



