l's
anchorage, but at many places along the beach there were seen marks
of old encampments, sooty rolled stones which had been used in the
erection of the tents, broken household articles, and above all
remains of the bones of the seal, reindeer, and walrus. At one
place, a large number of walrus skulls lay in a ring, possibly
remains from an entertainment following a large catch. Near the
place where the tents had stood, at the mouth of a small stream not
yet dried up or frozen, Dr. Stuxberg discovered some small mounds
containing burnt bones. The cremation had been so complete that only
one of the pieces of bone that were found could be determined by Dr.
Almquist. It was a human tooth. After cremation the remains of the
bones and the ash had been collected in an excavation, and covered
first with turf and then with small flat stones. The encampments
struck me as having been abandoned only a few years ago, and even
the collections of bones did not appear to me to be old. But we
ought to be very cautious when we endeavour in the Arctic regions to
estimate the age of an old encampment, because in judging of the
changes which the surface of the earth undergoes with time we are
apt to be guided by our experience from more southerly regions. To
how limited an extent this experience may be utilised in the high
north is shown by RINK'S assertion that on Greenland at some of the
huts of the Norwegian colonists, which have been deserted for
centuries, footpaths can still be distinguished,[237] an observation
to which I would scarcely give credence, until I had myself seen
something similar at the site of a house in the bottom of
Jacobshaven ice-fjord in northwestern Greenland, which had been
abandoned for one or two centuries. Here footpaths as sharply
defined as if they had been trampled yesterday ran from the ruin in
different directions. It may therefore very readily happen that the
encampments in the neighbourhood of our present anchorage were older
than we would be inclined at first sight to suppose. No refuse heaps
of any importance were seen here.

This was the first time that any vessel had lain-to on this coast.
Our arrival was therefore evidently considered by the natives a very
remarkable occurrence, and the report of it appears to have spread
very rapidly. For though there were no tents in the neighbourhood,
we had many visitors. I still availed myself of the opportunity of
procuring by barter a large number of ar