The been termed the smoke of ice, is a vapour which rises from BOOK the crevices of marine ice. The rare occurrence of rain, LXXVII. the small quantity of snow, and the intense degree of cold produced by the east-north-east wind, lead us to suspect smoke that the most eastern parts of Greenland form a great archipelago, incumbered with perpetual ice, which, for many centuries, has been piled together by the winds and currents. of ice. There is some land that admits of cultivation; and proba- Vegetably barley might be made to grow in the southern part of tion. the country. The mountains are covered with moss to the north, but the parts that have a southern exposure produce very good herbs, gooseberries, and other berries, in abundance, and a few little willows and birch. Not far from Julianshaab, is a valley covered with birch; but the tallest of the trees are only eighteen feet high. Near the Danish colonies cabbage and turnips are cultivated. Among the animal kingdom we meet with large hares, Animals. which are excellent eating, and afford a good fur; rein-deer of the American variety, white bears, foxes, and large dogs, that howl instead of barking, and are employed by the Greenlanders in drawing their sledges. An immense number of aquatic birds live near the rivers, which abound with salmon. Turbots and small herrings swarm in every direction in the sea. The natives have been supplied with nets, and now begin to experience their utility. In north or west Greenland, the Danes and natives go in companies to the whale-fishing; but this tumultuous, and, to the natives, far Whales. from lucrative occupation, spreads vice and misery through this district.* The natives of the south confine themselves to hunting the seal. The flesh of this animal is their prin- The seacipal food; its skin furnishes them with dress, and at the dog. same time they construct their boats of it; thread is made of its tendons, and its bladder is converted into bottles; its fat is sometimes used as a substitute for butter, and at other Ross, Vol. I. p. 64, 65. BOOK times for tallow; and even the blood itself is considered by LXXVII. the Greenlander as excellent for making broth; in fact, he cannot possibly comprehend how any one can live without the sea-dog, which, to him, is like the bread-fruit tree to the Otaheitan, or wheat to the inhabitant of Europe. Exportations. The indi genous The Greenland Company, established at Copenhagen, estimates its annual revenue at 140,000 rix-dollars, (20,000 to 25,000 pounds Sterling); and the exportations alone have amounted to 50, or 100,000 rix-dollars, without including the produce of the whale-fishery. The expenses of the company are estimated at 16,000 pounds Sterling.* The natives are of a very low stature, have long black hair, small eyes, a flat face, and a yellowish brown skin, evidently indicating them to be a branch of the Esquimaux or Samoiedes of America. This connexion is particularly proved by their language, which is also remarkable for the copiousness of its grammatical forms. The particles and inflections are as numerous and as varied as in the Greek; but the rule which directs them to introduce in the verb all the parts of the sentence, gives rise to words of a disproportionate length. The consonants r, k, and t, predominate in this language, and produce, by their frequent repetition, very harsh sounds. It must be observed, however, that the Greenlanders of the north of Greenland speak a dialect almost unintelligible to the inhabitants of the south. Their dialect is named Humooke. The Greenland women, like those of the Caribbeans, employ words and inflections, which none but themselves are permitted to use. The GreenlandTheir true ers sometimes call themselves Innouk, or brothers; but their true national name appears to be Kalalit, and they generally designate their country by the appellation of Kalalit Nounet. name. The Greenlanders have not preserved any positive trace of a communication with the Scandinavian colony, whose *Note on the Commerce of Greenland, in the Danish Minerva. + Greenland Dictionaries and Grammars, by Egéde. Ross's Voyage to Arctic Regions, I. p. 109. with the establishments they invaded and destroyed. The sun, they BOOK consider to be a deified female, and the moon, a man, con- LXXVII. formably with the belief of the Goths, which differed from that of the other Scandinavians; but as we find a God called Lunus, or Men, among even the classical nations themselves, this analogy either proves too much or nothing. As to ourselves, we have, on the contrary, recognised in Connexion the Greenlander, a crowd of characteristic circumstances, Esquiwhich demonstrate his connexion with the Esquimaux, maux. even with those that live at the remotest distances from them. The fishing implements employed by the inhabitants of Russian America, among others, are made exactly like those of the Greenlanders. Both of these people, too, make use of the bladder of the sea-dog, distended with wind, and attached to the javelin with which they strike the whale, in order that it may thus serve to prevent the animal, when once he is wounded, from remaining any length of time plunged under water.* A similar invention observed both at the eastern and western extremity of North America, must lead us unavoidably to infer that an habitual communication is kept up between those distant tribes. The little boats used by the inhabitants of Oonal- Their aska, in Prince William's inlet, (the Tchougatchian Gulf of the Russians,) by the Esquimaux of Labrador and the Greenlanders, are all precisely of the same construction, and resemble a box formed of slight branches and covered on every side with the skin of the sea-dog. They are twelve feet long, but only a foot and a half wide. In the middle of the upper surface there is a hole surrounded by a wooden hoop, with a skin attached to it, which admits of being drawn together like a purse, by means of a thong. It is in this hole that the rower places himself. Supplied with a single oar, which is very thin, three or four feet long, and becoming broader at the two sides, the navigator, or to speak more correctly, the man-fish, pad John Egéde's History of Greenland, chap. VII. (in Danish.) La Peyrouse's Voyage round the World, chap. IX. Our Hist. of Geography. canoes. BOOK dling rapidly to the right and left, advances in a straight LXXVII. line across the foaming waves in the midst of the tempest itself, without incurring more risk than the whales and phoca of whom he is become the companion and rival. This invention, which was admired by Captain Cook, and is adopted in part by the Norwegian and Danish pilots, could not possibly have made its appearance by mere chance under exactly the same form, among all the tribes of the northern extremities of America. These tribes, consequently, must have the same common descent, and must long have communicated together.* Explana- passage of nius Mela. "A king of the Suevi, according to the former, or of the Boii, according to the latter, made Quintus Metellus Celer, then Proconsul of Gaul, a present of some Indians, who," Mela asserts, "had been thrown by a tempest on the coast of Germany;-having," as Pliny adds, "been thus hurried away by the storm, while engaged in a trading voyage in the Indian Ocean." The Romans concluded from this circumstance that, coming, as these savages did, from India, it was practicable to make the tour of Asia and Europe round the north, by traversing the imaginary ocean which, as they supposed, occupied the site of Siberia and of the north of Russia. To us, this explanation is inadmissible, but the fact still remains, that Indians, or dark Still it must be remarked, that this, and every other nautical artifice, is quite unknown to the aboriginal Esquimaux of Prince Regent's Bay. Ross, I. p. 175.-TR. + Plin. Hist. Nat. lib. II. cap. 67. Pomp. Mela, III. 5. Vossius reads Baeti for the name of this nation, and thinks them Batari. Other MSS. read Lydi, and the Lygdi are mentioned by Tacitus and Cluverius as a Suevian tribe; as also the Boii. The latter dwelling nearest the Helvetian territory, probably made the present of these foreigners to Metellus Celer, who was Proconsul of Hither Gaul only, sometime before A. U. 694, the commencement of Cæsar's conquests.-TR. complexioned people of some nation or other, reached the BOOK coast of Germany or Gaul. In all probability, they were LXXVII. Esquimaux, either from Labrador or Greenland. The same circumstance again occurred in 1680 and 1684. Some Greenlanders arrived at the Orkney islands in boats, constructed in the manner which we have just described.* They were mistaken for Laplanders, and, consequently, were called Finn-Men; but their boats, preserved in the College Museum at Edinburgh, and in the church of Barra, prove that they came from Greenland. of the ers. The present character of the Greenlanders is an inde- Character finable mixture of good and bad qualities; while their at- Greenlandtachment to their national customs, opposes the influence of foreign civilization. The Greenlanders bitterly accuse the Danes and other navigators of having brought among them the double scourge of small-pox and spirituous liquors. The present well-regulated Danish administration follows a plan of colonization calculated for establishing order and happiness; but the ancient defects and modern vices of the Greenlanders present great obstacles to the system. Almost entirely destitute of every idea of religion and of law, our religious worship appears, in their eyes, nothing but a useless ceremony, while they look upon our criminal punishments as an unjust abuse of power. The malefactor appears to them to be sufficiently punished, when, in a public assembly, he is loaded with reproaches. The missionaries confess, that the conversion of the Green- Christian landers advances slowly, and exerts but little influence missions. over their moral ideas. For some years back, however, the preaching of natives, educated as missionaries, has been productive of a happy change. The Moravians have also succeeded in a remarkable manner in engaging the affections, and reforming the conduct of this simple people, who are gifted with considerable quickness of perception. The commercial administration, by introducing numerical calculation, and even paper money, have given them new notions with Wallace's Account of the Islands of Orkney. London. 1700, p. 60. VOL. Y. 7 |