put barriers in the way of future navigators, draw
large continents, where no one has dared to penetrate to see whether
there be such or not, and block up natural outlets without cause or
reason.

[Headnote: _ESQUIMAUX TRACES._]

I will now, with the reader's permission, carry him back to a subject
that here and there has been cursorily alluded to throughout these
pages--the Esquimaux traces and ruins, every where found by us, and the
extraordinary chain of evidence which, commencing in Melville Island,
our farthest west, carries us, link by link, to the isolated
inhabitants of North Greenland, yclept Arctic Highlands.

Strange and ancient signs were found by us in almost every sheltered
nook on the seaboard of this sad and solitary land,--signs indubitably
of a race having once existed, who have either decayed away, or else,
more probably, migrated to more hospitable portions of the Arctic zone.
That all these traces were those of the houses, caches, hunting-posts,
and graves of the Esquimaux, or Innuit, there could be on our minds no
doubt; and looking to the immense extent of land over which this
extraordinary race of fishermen have been, and are to be found, well
might Captain Washington, the talented compiler of the Esquimaux
vocabulary, say, that they are one "of the most widely-spread nations
of the globe."

The seat of this race (arguing from traditions extant during Baron
Wrangell's travels in Siberia) might be placed in the north-east
extreme of Asia, the western boundary being ill defined; for on the
dreary banks of the Lena and Indigirka, along the whole extent of the
frozen _Tundra_, which faces the Polar Sea, and in the distant isles of
New Siberia, rarely visited by even the bold seekers of fossil ivory,
the same ruined circles of stone, betokening the former abode of human
beings, the same whalebone rafters, the same stone axes, the same
implements of the chase, are to be found as to this day are used, and
only used, by the Tchuktches of Behring's Straits, the Innuit of North
America, or the Esquimaux of Hudson's Straits and Greenland,--a people
identical in language (of which they all speak different dialects),
habits, and disposition.

Supposing, then, that from the east of Asia these people first migrated
to the American continent, and thence, eventually wandered to the
eastern shores of Greenland, it became an interesting question to us,
how the lands upon our northern hand, in our passage to