BUBBLING OIL.

Thames Star, Volume LVII, Issue 15885, 25 July 1923, Page 2

BUBBLING OIL.

PETROLEUM IN CANADIAN NORTH WEST. Christian Leden, the Norwegian Arctic explorer, who has been on three exploring and ethnographic expeditions to Greenland, and who recently returned from a stay of more than three years among the Eskimos ,of north east Arctic Canada, declared in an address at the French Museum at New York that the unmapped regions of the Canadian north east, far within the Arctic circle, contain immense deposits of metal ore and, he believes a great reservoir of petroleum. Hardly any of the Arctic islands in this region, he said (reports the Christian Science Monitor) have ever been visited by white men, but the Eskimos, who detest the smell of the white man’s fuel oil and readily detect its scent, tell of one island in particular where in some weather the oil bubbles all over the ground and its deposits and its pollution of the sea is such that Eskimo fishing boats give it a wide berth. Mr Leden, whose explorations have been assisted by the King and Queen of Norway, and by the University of Copenhagen, will make an ethnological voyage to Greenland this summer under Norwegian auspices to add to the social and racial data he has collected on Eskimo life, on which he is one of the greatest present day authorities. Eskimo civilisation, he said, has a special interest to the world to-day in that to this people war is an unknown thing; there is not even a word of war in their language. Likewise, he said, there is not a Avord Ave could call an abusive Avord, and cooperative social life is so close that lying and stealing are almost unknoAvn.

His intimate study of the Eskimos has convinced him, Mr Leden said, that they have a common ancestry Avith the North American Indians, yet the Eskimos speak a common source there is in this one product if language over the vast territory from East Greenland to the Behring Sea, and display a tenacity and unity of primitive culture that is entirely their OAvn race quality. “The Eskimos are the most genuinely peaceful people I have eA r er met,” he said. “They save their war for the inhospitable nature of their bleak land, but they Avould not have their country otherAvise and they will not even enter the northern timber line if they can help it. “With the natural handicaps of their climate, they have built up as advanced a human culture, I believe, as any race of men Avould have been able to do under these circumstances.

Mr Leden proposes to organise another expedition to north east Canada as soon as he has completed his present mission to Greenland.