Rensselaer Republican, Volume 18, Number 38, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 May 1886 — Savage Map Makers. [ARTICLE]

Savage Map Makers.

In the collection recently taken to Denmark from the east coast of Greenland by Capt. Holm are several objects that have excited the astonishment of several European geographers. They are maps made by the natives. The maps are. made by their rude cut- . ting implements on * boards that drifted ashore. They were found among the natives who live along the shores of a deep fiord near the most northern point attained by Holm. Only ten or twelve of these 400 people have ever visited the Danish settlements in South Greenland, owing to a stretch of glaciers and ice-fields which have so nearly isolated them from the world that their existence was not known until recently. They had never seen a white man until Holm and Dr. Knutzen came among them. Some of these curious maps, Capt. Holm says, represent quite accurately the contour of the coast, with all its many big and little indentations, along which they live. Other maps give the outlines of islands lying near the coast, and the explorers say the maps reproduce the shape of the islands with a good degree of fidelity. The existence of these maps among a savage and almost unknown people has aroused much interest, and some geographers have expressed the opinion that they were not the work of the East Greenland natives. Mr. HansenBlangsted, for instance, suggests the theory that some survivor from the ship Ldlloise, which years ago started for East Greenland and never returned, may have lived and died on the coast at Angmagsalik flord, and that he may have made these maps. This suggesknown that the Esquimaux have more talent for cartography than is often found among untutored savages. Dr. Hall, for instance, in his explorations north of Hudson Bay found one or two of the jrude native charts of a part of that region somewhat serviceable, and at leastoneof them has been reproduced in the report of his work published by the United States government:

God is absolutely good, and so as> suredly the cause of all that is good, but of anything that is evil he is no cause at all'— Sir Walter Raleigh.