II 



description of Amdrup's collection was to be published jointly with 

 an English edition of Holm's Ethnological Sketch of the Angmag- 

 ^alik Eskimo along with the anthropological papers, which had 

 appeared in "Meddelelser om Grönland" as the results of his famous 

 expedition, and with new illustrations of his collection. At the recom- 

 mendation of the Commission, the Carlsberg Fund, with great libe- 

 rality, granted the means for the execution of this plan. In support 

 of my proposal I had advanced, firstly, that the original edition of 

 Captain Holm's book was out of print and that the illustrations of 

 his ethnographical objects in the original edition were no longer 

 quite satisfactory; secondly, that it was desirable for various reasons 

 that Captain Holm's important work, which had hitherto been pub- 

 lished only in Danish, should be translated into English, and thereby 

 be made accessible to international science. 



It should be borne in mind that the east coast Eskimo remained 

 unknown to Europeans a long time after the discovery of the 

 Eskimo of West Greenland. The 18th century colonists on the 

 southernmost part of the west coast only occasionally learnt a little 

 about the Easterners, either by rumour, or when a travelling party 

 of natives from the East coast came in their umiaks and kaiaks 

 to the west coast to barter. The first Europeans who endeavoured 

 with some success to penetrate up along the east side of the 

 country in the teeth of the ice current, in order to investigate this coast 

 and its inhabitants, were P. Olsen Wallöe in 1752 and the naval 

 officer V. A. Graah in 1829—30; the latter got as far as 65° N. lat. 

 But it was reserved for Captain Holm to work his way up to the 

 great fjords Sermilik and Ammassalik, where there dwelt a more 

 numerous population than at any other place on the east coast, 

 unknown to the world, and who had never even seen Europeans 

 before the arrival of this expedition in 1884. 



G. Holm's work on the Ammassalikers is based on his personal 

 experience and observation, and contains the most comprehensive 

 representation of the ethnology of the Greenlanders which at present 

 exists. Otho Fabricius' minute description of the hunting weapons 

 of the West Greenlanders, which appeared in 1810 and 1818 in two 

 small papers in "Det kgl. Danske Videnskabernes Selskabs Skrifter", 

 is still valuable, nay even classic — in fact these two papers are 

 far in advance of their age, in virtue of the concise technological 

 treatment of an important point of the Eskimo ethnography; the 

 subject of these papers, however, is of but limited scope, and its 

 treatment is in various respects out-of-date. Nor do Rink's otherwise 

 meritorious works on the Greenlanders supply sufficiently detailed 

 information as to the ethnography of the Greenlanders. Besides one 



