Page:The Zoologist, 3rd series, vol 1 (1877).djvu/341

Rh were numerous, and I came across fragments of the skeleton of one cetacean. Patches of green moss marked the sites of ancient habitations, and circles of stones summer tents, whilst numerous stone "caches" and cooking-places, now overgrown with moss and lichen, but containing calcined bones, bore silent witness to the former presence of inhabitants. At various points of Grinnell Land, still further north, notably at Cape Hilgard, Cape Louis Napoleon, Cape Hayes and Cape Fraser, I came across old traces of Eskimo. At Radmore Harbour, in 80° 25' N. lat., I found the ruins of another large settlement, apparently as long deserted as the one on Norman Lockyer Island. After removing the green moss and overturning some of the large stones that had once formed the walls of the "igloos," I discovered several interesting ivory relics. On Bellot Island, at the entrance of Discovery Bay, 81° 44' N. lat., were several rings of lichen-covered stones that marked the sites of old encampments, fragments of bone and chips of drift-wood being strewn around. A few miles south of Cape Beechey I found more circles of tent-stones; and near at hand a small heap of rock-crystals and flakes showed where the artificers in stone had been making arrow or harpoon heads. Close under Cape Beechey, and about six or seven miles from the eighty-second parallel, I came across the most northern traces of man that have yet been found; they consisted of the frame-work of a large wooden sledge, a stone lamp in good preservation, and a very perfect snow-scraper made out of a walrus-tusk. Taking into consideration that where I found these relics is at the narrowest part of Robeson Channel, not more than thirteen miles across, and that a few miles to the south, near Cape Lupton, on the opposite shore of Hall Land, the 'Polaris' Expedition found traces of summer encampments, I am inclined to believe that this must have been the spot selected for crossing over the channel, and, owing probably to the difficult and dangerous nature of the ice to be encountered, the heavy sledge and impedimenta had been left behind. It may perhaps have marked the ultima thule of human advance, and of a cruel destiny that forced poor beings to render up their lives at the altar of discovery, under the light of the midnight sun. This thought crossed my mind as I came across these relics, and human imagination can scarcely depict a spot more wild or more weird than that I then gazed on, or one more befitting the enactment of such a tragedy. Northwards from this point no trace of man was