It is difficult to imagine anything more multifarious than the cargo which these caravans import into the inland districts: deal boards, rope, kegs of brandy, sacks of rye or wheaten flour, salt, soap, sugar, snuff, tobacco, coffee; everything, in truth, which is necessary for domestic consumption during the dreary winter season. In exchange for these commodities the Icelanders give raw wool, knitted stockings, mittens, cured cod, fish-oil, whale-blubber, fox-skins, eider-down, feathers, and Iceland moss. The exports of the island in wool amount to upwards of 1,200,000 lbs. of wool yearly, and 500,000 pairs of stockings and mittens. [Illustration: ICELANDERS FISHING FOR NARWHAL.] Iceland offers abundant sport to the enthusiast in fishing. The streams are well supplied with salmon; while the neighbouring seas abound in seals, torsk, and herrings. The narwhal-fishery is also carried on, and has its strange and exciting features. The implement used is simply a three-pronged harpoon, like a trident, with which the fisherman strikes at the fish as they rise to the surface; and his dexterity and coolness are so great that he seldom misses his aim. Numerous works, in English, have been written upon Iceland and the Icelanders; the most trustworthy are those by Dr. Henderson, Professor Forbes, Holland, Chambers, and Lord Dufferin. The King of Denmark visited Iceland in 1874. CHAPTER VII. THE ESKIMOS. The land of the Eskimos is of very wide extent. From Greenland and Labrador they range over all the coasts of Arctic America to the extreme north-eastern point of Asia. Several of the Eskimo tribes are independent; others acknowledge the rule of Great Britain, Denmark, Russia, and more recently of the United States. The whaler meets with them on the shores of Baffin Bay, and in the icy sea beyond Behring Straits; the explorer has tracked them as far as Smith Sound, the highway to the North Pole; and while they descend as low as the latitude of Vienna, they rove as far north as the 81st and 82nd parallels. They are the aborigines of the deserts of ice and snow, the ancient masters of the Arctic wilderness, and all Polar America is their long-acknowledged domain. To a certain extent they are nomadic in their habits; compelled to migrate by the conditions of the climate in which they live, and forced to seek their scanty sustenance in a new locality when they have exhausted the capabilities of any chosen habitat. As Mr. Markham tells us, traces of former inhabitants are found throughout the gloomiest wastes of the Arctic regions, in sterile and silent tracts where now only solitude prevails. These wilds, it is known, have been uninhabited for centuries; yet they are covered with memorials of wanderers or of sojourners of a bygone age. Here and there, in Greenland, in Boothia, on the American coast, where life is possible, the descendants of former nomads are still to be found.