Unsolved Mysteries of the Arctic

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Vilhjalmur Stefansson. Unsolved Mysteries of the Arctic

Unsolved Mysteries of the Arctic

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Disappearance of the Greenland Colony

Chapter 2

The Lost Franklin Expedition

Chapter 3

The Strange Fate of Thomas Simpson

Chapter 4

How Did Andrée Die?

Postscript

Chapter 5

The Missing Soviet Flyers

Comparative Safeties of the Seas

Arctic Flying Conditions

The Search

The Possibilities

The Compensations

Bibliography

Disappearance of the Greenland Colony

The Lost Franklin Expedition

The Strange Fate of Thomas Simpson

How Did Andrée Die?

The Missing Soviet Flyers

Отрывок из книги

Vilhjalmur Stefansson

Published by Good Press, 2021

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Nörlund and other somewhat less recent commentators have, then, added new trimmings to the Bardarson-Egede-Rink picture. One of them is that the climate of southwestern Greenland has deteriorated since the colonization, and that poverty and scarcity of food resulted in part from the growth of ice fields on land and the filling of the sea with drift ice, thus restricting the acreage of the grazing fields and meadows, decreasing their output through a shortening and chilling of the summer—rendering commerce less profitable to European ships because there were now fewer things for which to trade, and making navigation difficult because of the ice blockades.

This theory proceeds along the line that commerce declined through these natural causes and through the Norwegian monopoly of trade. There came, as a result, a physical deterioration which has been shown by archaeologists, particularly through skeletal proof of rickets and other deficiency diseases. It is no mere theory, says Nörlund, but is actually proven through the skeletons, that the people were weakened by malnutrition—the assumption being that, although Eskimos are healthy on a meat diet, Europeans cannot be; and that the cereal and other vegetal elements in the food of the Greenlanders became insufficient for health through the above mentioned decrease of commerce.

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