sors in the territory stretching on both sides of the Gulf of St. Lawrence were "little men." With regard to the dwellings of those "little men," the Algonquin tradition is also justified by the Norse records. One reads in the Saga of Thorfinn Karlsefne that when that leader and his followers were in the territory now known as New Brunswick, in the year 1011, they encountered five Skroelings, of whom two were boys. They captured the boys, but the adult Skroelings disappeared "beneath the ground." From the boys, whom the Norsemen carried away with them to Iceland, they learned that the Skroelings possessed no houses, but dwelt in caves and dens. Thus the Indian tradition that they were preceded by "little men, dwellers in rocks," is wholly verified by European Chronicle.[1]
In connection with these references, especially with that of Glaus Magnus as to the "pigmies" or "Skroelings" of Eastern Greenland, the account of the Italian voyager, Antonio Zeno, was also fitly cited. According to this traveller the natives of Eastern Greenland seen by him in the latter part of the fourteenth century, were "half-wild" people of small stature, di picciola statura, and very timorous, who, as soon as they were seen, hid themselves in caverns.[2]
The eleventh century cave-dwellers of Maine and the St. Lawrence region were not, however, only styled "Skroelings " by the Norse writers. Arnas Magnusson, a native of Iceland, writing about seven centuries after the first encounter with the Skroelings, observes: "These people are called 'Lapps' in some books."[3] This reference is very suggestive. To what extent modern Lapps and modern Eskimos resemble one another is not a question that needs to be considered here. '
- ↑ Antiq. Amer, p. 149, n.
Dr. A. S. Packard ("The Labrador Coast." New York, N. D. C. Hodges, 1891, chap, xiii.) gives many interesting references which show that the Eskimos were still pretty numerous in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in the eighteenth century. At that time they frequently visited Newfoundland, spending the summer months there, and in 1771 one of them was seen in his "kayak" hunting the great auk, off the east coast of Newfoundland, south of the 5th parallel. Assuming that they had retreated from more southern regions at a similar rate, it is easy to accept the first quarter of the 15th century, (the date given by M. Beauvois, Les Skroelings, p. 48), as the period when they were finally expelled by the Algonquins from Maine and the adjoining territories.) - ↑ Les Skroelings. par E. Beauvois (extracted from the Revue Orientale et Americaine. Paris, 1879, p. 45.
- ↑ Antiq. Amer., p. 196.
