A New People

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Sep 12, 1911

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 38, No. 36.

A New People.—Vilhjalmur Stefansson, leader of the American scientific expedition which left New York in April, 1908, in a letter to his wife dated October 18, 1910, says that they had discovered a people in a region supposed to be uninhabited, and had lived among them a few months. "These people had never seen a white man nor an Indian, tho they had heard of both, and did not even know I was not an Eskimo, so little are they informed of what white men are like. They seem to be Eskimo in speech and habit, but Scandinavians in appearance. The question is, Are they descendants from some of Franklin's men and native women, or are they descendants of some of the 3,000 Scandinavians who disappeared from Greenland in the fifteenth century?" He tells us that his party had undergone many hardships. Once when the food supplies ran out and no relief was in sight, they ate the skins to their fur clothing.