FKOZEN FAMILIES. 
133 
It was not very far from Cape York that we met 
these men. They belonged, probably, to the same de- 
tached parties of seal and fish catching coast nomads, 
that were met by Sir John Ross in his voyage of 1819, 
and whom he designated, fancifully enough, as the 
“ Arctic Highlanders.” 
Eleven years after his visit, some boat-crews, from 
a whaler which had escaped the ice disasters of 1830, 
landed at nearly the same spot, and made for a group 
of huts. They were struck as they approached them 
to find no beaten snow-tracks about the entrance, nor 
any of the more unsavory indications of an Esquimaux 
homestead. The riddle was read when they lifted up 
the skin curtain, that served to cover at once doorway 
and window. Grouped around an oilless lamp, in the 
attitudes of life, were four or five human corpses, with 
darkened lip and sunken eyeball ; hut all else preserved 
in perennial ice. The frozen dog lay beside his frozen 
master, and the child, stark and stiff, in the reindeer 
hood which enveloped the frozen mother. The cause 
was a mystery, for the hunting apparatus was near 
them, and the hay abounds with seals, the habitual food, 
and light, and fire of the Esquimaux. Perhaps the ex- 
cessive cold had shut off their supplies for a time by 
closing the ice-holes — perhaps an epidemic had strick- 
en them. Some three or four huts that were near had 
the same melancholy furniture of extinct life. 
ESQUIMAUX ON SNOW-SHOES, 
