24 A rctic and A ntarctic Exploration [part i 
The most interesting tribe of Eskimos is that which 
was discovered by Sir John Ross on the north coast 
of Baffin's Bay, probably descended from the last 
Asiatic arrivals. Having no canoes their progress south 
was stopped at the curving shores of Melville Bay, 
300 miles round, nearly all occupied by glaciers coming 
down to the sea. Ross named them the "Arctic High- 
landers." They had dogs and sledges but no kayaks, 
consequently there was no communication with the 
Greenland Eskimos to the south. 
The coast from Cape York to Etah, within Smith 
Sound, is the country of the Arctic Highlanders. It is 
broken by deep fjords, separated by magnificent headlands, 
the breeding-places of guillemots and kittiwakes, and 
the favourite home of millions of little auks or rotches. 
The Arctic Highlanders are stout well-built little men, 
thick-set and muscular, with round chubby faces, oblique 
eyes, and small and very thick hands. With marvellous 
endurance they are courageous, are ready to close with 
a bear, and have been known to enter into a conflict 
of four hours' duration with a fierce walrus, on weak ice. 
Without wood, without bows and arrows, without canoes, 
they still secure abundance of food with their spears and 
darts.. In summer they live in seal-skin tents, in winter 
their habitations are circular stone huts built at permanent 
stations along the coast. Their utensils consist of shallow 
cups made of seal-skin for receiving the water as it melts 
from a lump of snow and flows down a shoulder blade of 
a walrus, and of stone lamps. They eat their food raw 
and in large quantities. Their weapons are a lance of 
narwhal ivory and a harpoon, and nets to catch the little 
auks and other birds. The Arctic Highlanders possessed 
knives of meteoric iron, made by inserting in a row along 
a slit made in a haft of stone or ivory a number of thin 
flakes, carefully chipped to a circular form. This meteoric 
iron came from three huge boulders at the back of 
Bushnan Island, near Cape York. 
The Arctic Highlander wears a shirt of bird-skin 
neatly sewn together next to the skin, with the soft 
down inwards, over which there is a loose kapetah or 
jumper of fox-skin, tight round the neck, where a hood 
is attached to it. The nessak or hood is lined with 
