POLAR REGIONS. 



399 



Davis, Button, Hudson, Baffin, Parry, and Ross, in seeking for a northwest passage, have 

 added much to the knowledge of arctic geography. 



2. Islands. Greenland is surrounded by many thousands of islands, which are mostly bar- 

 ren rocks, interspersed widi valleys covered with perpetual ice. They are visited by the 

 Greenlanders, during spring, for the purpose of catching seals. In 61° 21', an uninhabited 

 island of considerable magnitude, called from its terrific appearance, the Cape oj Desolation, 

 is always surrounded by masses of floating ice. Spitzbergen was long considered as forming 

 a part of Old Greenland, but is now ascertained to be a cluster of islands, scattered between 

 76^ and 80° north latitude, and 9° and 24° east longitude. The principal of these is 300 

 miles in length, and presents to the eye numberless peaks, precipices, and ridges, rising from 

 3,000 to 4,500 feet above the sea level. This country is claimed by the Russians, who main- 

 tain a colony from Archangel. West of Greenland are the JVorth Georgian Islands, and 

 Melville Island, where the English discovery ships wintered. 



Polar Rrgiuns. 



3. Inhabitants. Early in the 10th century an Icelandic colony was planted in Greenland, 

 of which the records show a flourishing state down to the year 1408. At that time the small 

 trade between Norway and Greenland was for a long period discontinued, and the colony has 

 not since then been discovered, if it can be supposed to exist. The colony had many stations 

 and churches. The Skrmllings, or dwarfs, as the Norwegians called the Greenland race of 

 Esquimaux, made their first appearance in the colony about the year 1350, and are the present 

 inhabitants of Greenland. The colonists are supposed to have been destroyed by them, to 

 have perished by famine, or the pestilence called the black death, that raged in Europe in the 

 middle of the 14th century. There are, however, some traces of the present existence of a 

 race of people in the north, in manner of life different from that of the southern natives. In 

 1822 Captain Scoresby found a dead body recentlv enclosed in a coffin, and it is related, that 

 in 1530 an Icelandic Bishop who was driven near the coast, saw upon the shores people with 

 herds of cattle. The accumulation of ice has been a barrier to modern discoveries. 



The inhabitants of Greenland are of the same stock with the race of Esquimaux, that extend 

 over the whole northern coast of America : and who resemble more the natives of the North 

 of Europe than the tribes of American Indians. Between the Greenlanders and Esquin:aux 

 there is a similarity of figure, d-ps'^, houses, bont^, \^-e3pons, manners, and bnguages. The 



