1885.] and their former range Southward. 557 
seal, fish, birds and other game, and partly to contact with the 
civilization of this coast, their close winter houses inducing con- 
sumption and other chest troubles; but whatever the causes, the 
race is rapidly fading away, going by entire families. Cole was 
intelligent and could read and write. 
On our way to Strawberry harbor we were boarded by an Es- 
kimo who paddled up to our vessel in his kayak. He had been 
living in the bay during the summer. The next day I landed on 
a little flat islet near our harbor, and found traces of recent 
Eskimo occupation. An Eskimo family had evidently been sum- 
mering there in a seal-skin tent. The marks of their temporary 
sojourn were the circle of water-worn stones which had been 
used to pitch the tent, the feathers and bones of sea-fowl which 
had been shot or snared, scattered bones of the seal and other 
unmistakable signs of Eskimo occupancy and of Eskimo personal 
uncleanliness. While here we learned that some Eskimo were 
spending the summer on an island hard by, and we tried to find 
one to pilot us to Hopedale, but were unsuccessful. We, how- 
ever, obtained one who had received some education and was 
then living ten miles up the bay with a Norwegian in the employ 
of the Hudson Bay company, his pay being fifty dollars a year. 
The number of Eskimo on the Labrador penisula is estimated 
at 1400, but this is probably an overestimate, as most of this race 
are now partly civilized and gathered at the Moravian Mission 
stations of Hopedale, Nain, Okkak, Zoar and Ramah. 
At the time I visited Hopedale, which was in the summer of 
1864, in the expedition of Mr. William Bradford, the well known 
artist, the Eskimo population of that station was about 200. It 
was reported to us that during the preceding March twenty-four 
Eskimo had died of “colds ;” while at Okkak twenty-one had 
died, and the same number at Nain. Thus over a tenth part of 
the native population at these stations had died of chest diseases 
in a single month. This high death rate may be the result of 
their partial civilization and less hardy out-of-door life, but their 
houses are not very different from those their savage ancestors 
inhabited. The missionaries have wisely not attempted to force 
upon them European standards of living as regards dress and 
houses, and their system of trading with them as well as teaching 
them does not appear to have been accountable for this rapid de- 
crease. On the contrary, anthropologists as well as humanita- 
