THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 1912. THE NORWEGIAN "ESKIMOS."

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIX, Issue 15096, 12 September 1912, Page 6

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 1912. THE NORWEGIAN "ESKIMOS."

The romance of migration lias never been more graphically illustrated than by the recent discovery of blueeyed, fair-haired Scandinavians liv- • ing as '.'Eskimos'* on the Canadian 1 coast of the Arctic Ocean. The ' Maori settlement of : New - Zealand and the Malay' settlement , of Madagascar are full of permanent interest, and; furnish unfailing material for the - investigation and speculation of scientists; but the- discovery that a •wandering branch of our own race has managed to survive in the harshest ,of climates and under the most primitive of conditions, completely severed from its parent stock and deprived of what we are accustomed to regard as ,thS essentials of Aryan life, is more than interesting. It compels us to realise not only that the capacity for civilisation may lie dormant in the brains of seeming savages but that the highest of races may be forced by imperative necessity to return to that plane of social, . - industrial and intellectual development where every human energy is absorbed "in the grim and unadorned struggle ; for bare existence. If it is ' a sound assumption that these Norse " Eskimos" are a. : surviving remnant of the Scandinavian" settlement of- Greenland which opened that bleak land to Christendom from the tenth to the fourteenth century, wq have most startling proof of what ; may happen to - a people in less than five centuries. According to recorded . history, that famous Norse-Icelandic hero and viking, Eric the Red, explored and settled • south-western Greenland towards the close of the tenth century. This was a hundred years after Alfred' the Great governed England and. immediately before the viking acquisition of Normandy. This Greenland settlement, scattered over a wide area, lasted for nearly four hundred years and at one time I contained some thousands of inhabitants with churches, a monastery and a nunnery. In the fourteenth century, , communication between Greenland and Norway gradually ceased ; after the beginning of the fifteenth century no ship is known to have made • the . passage. There are legends of a great drift of packice which blocked navigation, and the more probable explanation that the royal monopoly and Hanseatic competition . broke the maritime enterprise of Norway. In any case, when English navigators appeared on the Greenland coast, towards the end of the sixteenth century, the Scandinavian . colonies had disappeared. The memory of them survived only in Eskimo story. It is usually, assumed that they disappeared at about the - close * of the fifteenth century at the beginning of the twentieth century 'we find what are thought to be their descendants living a thousand miles away, .not in Scandinavian - but -in Eskimo fashion'.

The movement westward of these Norse " Eskimos" is easily understood if it is assumed that their ancestors survived "the cutting off

of their Home supplies and resorted to native methods of living. The original Greenland, settlers were daring and hardy travellers, and have left traces of their expeditions far from their settlements. The ceaseless search for good hunting grounds, carried on by men who had lost the ' civilisation of their fathers but retained . their - boldness and daring, would naturally lead them along the icebound coasts of the seas which gave them food. Arctic hunters must necessarily abandon fixed habitations, and we may be certain that no respect for the tribal rights' of the aboriginal people hampered the movements of these desperate sons of the Vikings. They had no timber to build ships and no metal to make weapons; they could have no schools for the learning of letters, no centres for the practise of arts and industries; they became uncultured savages but they lived. While their kinsmen in Northern Europe were being stirred by the Renaissance, were evolving complex and civilised society, were circumnavigating the globe, were specialising and civilising to a degree unconceived of by the last known settlers of Greenland; while America was being rediscovered and settled, while the British Empire was growing, while steam and electricity were being harnessed for the service of men while the whole known world seethed and foamed with wars and revolutions, with religious strife and political upheavals and social unrest: ' these Scandinavian cousins of ours forgot their past and bent their minds and bodies to the catching of seals, and the hunting of bears, driven always by hunger and cold, seeking only to eat and to keep warm. That they succeeded speaks volumes for their strength , and courage, testifies as completely to their energy and enterprise as do all our modern inventions to' the strength and enter- ; prise of the Northern'stock itself. If we compare their conditions in the Arctic regions to our conditions in New Zealand, thinking of all that we owe-to the genial climate and to uninterrupted trade • and commerce, we must recognise that their mere survival is in itself a victory. Detailed information of these most remarkable p'eople will be awaited by the civilised world with impatience, for although'occasional men have left civilisation to live as savages this is the first known instance of a body ,of North Europeans having been .forced into the life of savages - and surviving the experience.