INTERESTING ARCTIC DISCOVERY.

King Country Chronicle, Volume VI, Issue 412, 8 November 1911, Page 3

INTERESTING ARCTIC DISCOVERY.

A letter from Vilhjmar Stefansson, the leader of the American Museum's scientific expedition for the Artie coast of British Columbia, which left here in April, 1908, has (says the correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph) been received at New York,. It is dated October 18,1910, and was sent to Mr Perry, secretary of the Artie Club. It was written in the camp at the mouth of the Deuse River, where Richardson and Roe wintered at the time of the Franklin search expedition. Stefansson's reference to the discovery of men of Esquimo speech, but of Scandinavian habits and appearance, is particularly interesting. "This find," he writes, "is the beginning of the solution of one of two broblema— (a) What became of Franklin's men? (b) What became of the 3000 Scandinavians who disappeared from Greenland in the fifteenth century?" It is Stefansson's theory that the Scandinavianlooking Esquimo discovered by him are the descendants of one of the above -mentioned parties, brobably of Franklin's. The hardships encountered by Stefansson are treated rather lightly by him, when he writes: — "We lived badly at times. We even had to eat our skin clothes, but I trust we did not do so ostentatiously; and I hope to resist the temptation to play that up in the bid for glory." As Stefansson added a postscript on November 4, 1910, to the effect that he was going to the Norton River to look for Anderson and his companion, and as no word I has been received from either since