CHAPTER III 
Our Country has wide borders...and it bears secrets in its 
bosom of which no white man dreams. Up here we live two 
different lives; in the summer under the torch of the warm 
sun; in the winter, under the lash of the north wind. Butit is 
the dark and cold that make us think most. 
Saying of a Greenlander quoted by Knup 
RasMussEN in The People of the Polar North. 
The Eskimoes and their rulers. Greenland a ‘closed’ country. 
Danish methods of government. Life, personal characteristics, 
language, and dress of the Eskimoes. The kayak and the umyak. 
Coal in Greenland. 
ANSEN in Eskimo Life, a book which gives 
an admirable description of the people 
written with sympathetic appreciation, though the 
condemnation of the Danish method of govern- 
ment is much too sweeping, thus sums up his im- 
pressions of Greenland and the Greenlanders: ‘It 
is a naked lonely land, like no other land inhabited 
of man. But in all its naked poverty, how beautiful 
it is...strange is the power which this land exer- 
cises over the mind; but the race that inhabits it is 
not less remarkable than the land itself.’ A race 
which has been able to exist entirely by virtue of 
its own resourcefulness and mastery over nature 
in its hardest manifestations, in former days with- 
out metal, except perhaps in a very few localities 
where native iron was available, and with no wood 
save logs of drifted timber washed up on the beach, 
compels our admiration and respect. 
The present Eskimo population is about 14,000, 
