III 



often feels in Rink's works on the culture of the Eskimo, that they 

 are based less on personal experience, than on the study of literary 

 sources, or on the old Greenland tales. What renders Captain Holm's 

 work so valuable, is its direct relation to a group of heathen Eskimo 

 in Greenland who had been quite untouched by modern civiliza- 

 tion. The accuracy of his observations and the truth of his descrip- 

 tions of the life of the Ammassalikers are in every respect borne 

 out by my own impressions, gained during a year's sojourn among 

 the same population, though after the lapse of 20 years. His work 

 can be supplemented, but there are no corrections of any importance 

 to be recorded. I am for the moment disregarding the fact that his 

 mode of spelling the East Greenland names and words confounds 

 the East Greenland and the West Greenland dialects. This confusion 

 Avas mainly due to his West Greenland collaborators, the interpreter 

 and steersman. 



Parts I to VI of the present work correspond pretty closely to the 

 contents of "Meddelelser om Grönland", vol. X (containing the 

 contributions to the ethnology, anthropology, language and folklore 

 of the East Greenlanders). Part VII, however, contains new con- 

 tributions of some considerable extent, namely illustrations of 

 Holm's, Amdrup's, Johan Petersen's and other ethnographical collec- 

 tions from Ammassalik, together with my own comments on the 

 East Greenland forms of implements and the material culture in 

 general of the population. However, a small number of the illustra- 

 tions in this work will be recognized from the original edition; 

 among them a few of the excellent woodcuts (portraits of the natives) 

 with which it was furnished. They originated from photographs 

 made during the first wintering at Ammassalik in 1884—85 by the 

 mineralogist of the Expedition, H. Knutsen. The drawings of the 

 Eskimo objects from the "dead house" were executed, after AxMdrup's 

 return in 1901, by one of the members of his expedition, the painter 

 and draughtsman E. Ditlevsen (most of them are reproduced here 

 in Part VII). The remainder of the illustrations are made from 

 photographs taken on the spot by Johan Petersen, the Danish 

 colonial governor at Ammassalik (from the time of the foundation 

 of this colony till now), or by myself during my journey in East 

 Greenland; also from photographs of the collections made at Copen- 

 hagen by various establishments. In the original edition all the 

 ethnographic figures were collected on plates in a separate part of 

 the volume. In this book I have adopted the same principle, in so 

 far as I have brought most of the ethnographic illustrations together 

 in the last paper containing my description of them. 



I have treated the older papers as historical documents, leaving 



