AMONG THE ESKIMOS.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXV, Issue 91, 24 April 1913, Page 4

AMONG THE ESKIMOS.

Not long ago, before the Royal Geographical Society, Mr Vilhjalmur Stefanssou told the interesting story

of his life among the Eskimos of Canada and the Arctic islands. Mr Stefanssou, who is of Icelandic origin hut American-bred, spent five years wandering in these regions, and next summer he will lead a new expedition, starting from Behring Strait and largely financed by the Canadian Government, to evplore the dimiy surmised lands in the Arctic Ocean. The tiling that (says a correspondent) has roused greatest interest in his account of his five years’ trip has been bis discovery of some Eskimo tribes of an unusual type. These tribes had never seen white men, at all events in recent times. They had distinct European characteristics (light bine eyes, brown boards, and so on), and to-night Mr Stefanssou suggested that they might lie descendants of some Scandinavian settlors from Greenland, who disappeared from there in the fifteenth century and may, he thinks, have made their way westward into tlie.se remote snowy places. He scouted the idea that these people might he descended from survivors of Sir John Franklin’s expedition. Mr Stefans,son is an ethnologist, and the lecture was only geographical in pieces, as it was made up of all sorts of good stories about the Eskimos, ■whom lie found, “before the missionary and the trader had had the chance to contaminate them.” He gave quite a touching account of the naive friendliness of these people to the unknown white man and of the swift degradation and decimation which comes upon them when brought within tlie circle of “civilisation.”