thern origin, and of their tales of remote
regions where beacons on hills had been erected to denote the way.
Surely all this points to the long and landward route pursued by this
extraordinary people.

It may be quite possible that a portion of the Esquimaux crossed
Davis's Straits by accident from the west to the east: such things have
occurred within the memory of living men; but I deny that it would ever
be a voluntary act, and therefore unlikely to have led to the
population of South Greenland. A single hunter of seals, or more, might
have been caught in the ice and been drifted across, or a boat's load
of women may have been similarly obliged to perform a voyage which
would have been very distasteful to an Esquimaux; but such accidents do
not populate countries.

Lastly, before I quit this subject, it would be as well to call the
attention of those interested in such questions to the extraordinary
fact of the existence of a constantly starving race upon the _east_
side of Greenland. The Danish surveyor's (Capt. Graah) remarks lead me
to the opinion that these people come from more northern parts of their
own side of Greenland; and it would be a curious circumstance if future
geographical discoveries should give us grounds to believe that from
the neighbourhood of Smith's Sound the Esquimaux migration divided, and
the one branch of it followed down the shores of Baffin's Bay and
Davis's Straits, whilst the other, tracing the northern coasts of
Greenland, eventually descended by the eastern seaboard to Cape
Farewell. The nursery, the hot-bed of this race, I believe to exist
northward of spots visited by us in Baffin's Strait,--for bay it is
not, even if it had no other outlets into the Polar Sea than Lancaster,
Jones's, and Smith's Sound.

_Revenons a nos moutons!_ The 2d, 3d, and 4th of September passed with
much anxiety; the signals thrown out by our leader, "Where do you think
the 'Intrepid' is gone?" and on another occasion, "Do you think the
'Intrepid' is to leeward of the pack?" denoting how much he was
thinking of the missing steamer. We of the sister screw had little
anxiety as to her safety or capability of escaping through any pack;
especially when alone and unhampered by having to keep company. A
knowledge of the screw, its power, and handiness, gave us a confidence
in it, which we had never reason to regret. At first we had been
pitied, as men doomed to be cast away: we had since learned to pity
othe