The Germania, owing to the uselessness of her boiler, made the rest of her voyage under sail, and arrived at Bremen in safety on the 11th of September, with all well on board. It is worth notice that, with the exception of two accidental wounds, this interesting expedition was accomplished without any kind of sickness,—a circumstance which speaks highly for the forethought and carefulness of those engaged in equipping and conducting it.
We have been indebted for our brief notice of the voyage of the Germania to a paper by Captain Sir Leopold M’Clintock, who sums up its results in a condensed and intelligible form; and to the narratives by Captain Koldewey and his officers, translated by Mr. Mercier, and published under the direction of Mr. H. W. Bates.
The Greenland shore, under the seventy-fifth parallel of latitude, is not the frozen desert which it has hitherto been supposed to be. It is frequented by large herds of reindeer, as many as fifty having been sighted at a time. Musk-oxen were by no means rare, but made their appearance in troops of fifteen or sixteen; while smaller animals, such as ermines and lemmings, were also met with. Birds were not numerous; shoals of walruses were noticed, but no whales.
Geographically speaking, the voyage was valuable from the observations obtained in reference to a region which previously was almost unknown.
The absence of natives, and of all recent traces of them, is a remarkable fact. In 1829, Captain Graab found the northern Greenlanders ranging as high as 64° 15’ N. lat.; but they knew nothing of any human beings living further north; nor could they themselves travel in that direction, the way being blocked up by huge impassable glaciers.
In 1822, when Scoresby partially explored the Greenland coast between the parallels of 70° and 72° 30’, he discovered many ruined habitations and graves, but no recent indications of human beings.
In the following year, Captain Clavering met with a party of Eskimos in 74°; but neither he nor Scoresby found reindeer or musk-oxen; and the fact ascertained by the Germania that, in 1869, these animals were numerous, and devoid of any fear of man, gives reason to suppose that few, if any, of this isolated tribe of Eskimos are now in existence. Now, as the musk-oxen, and also the reindeer, seem to have wandered hither from the northward, we may conjecture that the natives followed the same route.
“If it be true,” says M’Clintock, “that this migration of men and animals was effected from west to east along the northern shore of Greenland, we naturally assume that it does not extend far towards the Pole; that, probably, its most northern point is at the eastern outlet of Kennedy Channel, and that it turns from thence sharply towards the east and north-east,—the distance, in a straight line, to the most northern point reached by Koldewey, is not more than six hundred miles. It is not less strange than sad to find that a peaceable and once numerous tribe, inhabiting a coast-line of at least 7° of latitude in extent, has died out, or has almost died out, whilst at the same time we find, by the diminution of the glaciers and increase of animal life, that the terrible severity of the climate has undergone considerable modification. We feel this saddening interest with greater force when we reflect that the distance of Clavering’s village from the coast of Scotland is under one thousand miles! They were our nearest neighbours of the New World.”
Returning suddenly to the sixteenth century, we find the names of some Dutch seamen of eminence inscribed in the record of early Arctic Discovery, and amongst these the most illustrious is that of William Barents. We refer to him here, because he is connected with Carlsen’s voyage in 1869, which went over much the same ground as that which the Dutch explorer had surveyed nearly three hundred years before.