Page:The Zoologist, 3rd series, vol 1 (1877).djvu/340

314 Homo grœnlandus.—The most northern known inhabitants of our globe are the Eskimo that dwell along the coasts of North Greenland between Cape York, the northern extremity of Melville Bay, and the great Humboldt glacier, which discharges into Smith Sound on its eastern side, between the seventy-ninth and eightieth parallels of north latitude. These εσχατοι ανδρων were first brought to notice by Captain Sir John Ross, who discovered them during his voyage to Baffin Bay in 1818, and they were called by him the "Arctic Highlanders." Since then Dr. Kane, Dr. Hayes and Dr. Bessels, with their different Expeditions, wintered in the vicinity of these people, and have published graphic and interesting accounts of their habits and ways of life. The most northern settlement of these Eskimo at the present day is Etah, on the northern shore of Foulke Fiord, from whence the hunters of the tribe travel along the Greenland coast as far north as the southern edge of the Humboldt glacier, a little beyond the seventy-ninth degree. That they also at times cross the Sound and visit the opposite shores is evident from Dr. Bessels having reached latitude 79° 16', on the east coast of Grinnell Land, by sledging, in company with two of the Etah Eskimo, on April 16th, 1873. In 1875, I found at Cape Sabine the remains of several ancient Eskimo encampments, but nearer to the shore traces of a recent visit, a blackened fire-place made of three stones placed against a rock, with the hairs of a white bear sticking to the grease-spots, an harpoon with iron tip, and the excreta of the dogs who had fed off the bear's hide. Further north, on the shores of Buchanan Strait, we came upon deserted settlements containing the ruins of many "igloos"; in one instance the ribs of a large cetacean had been used as rafters to a hut; bones of Reindeer, Musk-ox, White Bear, Seal and Walrus were strewed around, and I picked up several articles of human workmanship, both in bone and ivory. Still further north, Norman Lockyer Island, in Franklin Pierce Bay, at some distant period, must have been the home of numerous Eskimo. On the 11th August, 1875, I landed and walked along the northern shore of this island for some two miles; it was strewed with the bones of walrus, whilst skulls of this animal were lying about in hundreds, all broken more or less by human agency, in every instance the tusks having been extracted. Skulls of Phoca barbata and P. hispida, broken at the base in order to extract the brain,