MYSTERIOUS ARCTIC RACE.

Colonist, Volume LIV, Issue 13277, 30 November 1911, Page 4

MYSTERIOUS ARCTIC RACE.

MEN W THOSE ORIGIN IS A PROBLEM.

Ward has been received in New York from Vilhjmar Stefansson, the leader of the American .Museums' scientific expedition, which started in April, 1908, to explore tho Arctic coast to the north of British Columbia, that he has discovered a new race of Polar men, of European type, who have never seen white men before.

The inforamtion is contained in a letter from Stefanssou received by Mr H. L. Bridgmau, of Brooklyn, secretary to the Peary Arctic Club. It is dated November 18, 1910, and was written at the mouth of the Dease river, where Richardson and Roe wintered &\ the tjme of the search for Sir John Franklin. Stefansson writes:—

"We have discovered people in a region supposedly uninhabited, who have never seen a white man or an Indian, and who did not even know I was not an Eskimo, so little were they informed on what white men wore like. We have discovered Eskimos in speech and habits w]io are Scandinavians in appearance. This find is the beginning of the solution of one of two problems, (a) what became of Sir John Franklin's men, (b) what became of three thousand Scandinavians who disappeared from Greenland in the fifteenth century.

"If neither of these questions is answered, thon we have introduced a new scientific problem: Why some people in Victoria Land differ markedly from the rest of their race, and why they arc so European in type? We found these people on the south coast of Victoria Land, having heard about them at Capo Boxloy. My Eskimo companions said, 'These aro not Eskimos; they are fo'es'le men. Two men had beards much like mine, and mine might be referred to as re<l» There are about forty individuals of this group, and thero aro said to be others like them further north.''