CHAPTER VI.THE LAST WHITE MAN.

Asthis was to be our last tie-up in Melville Bay, and as every body was well satisfied that Melville Bay had been thoroughly “done,” there was now some impatience to hear the order given to “cast off.”

But the order did not come even with the close of the day, and there we were clearly to remain until the morrow. Meanwhile a light wind set in from the south-east, and, coming directly from the Greenland glaciers, it brought the temperature down below the freezing-point; and when at length “seven bells” aroused the ship’s company from their slumbers, thePantherwas a prisoner. In every direction, as far as the eye could reach, the sea, where it had been open the evening before, was now covered with ice. In many places this young ice would bear a man’s weight. It was a very needless predicament to have been placed in, but these Newfoundland sailors must not for the world be robbed of their night’s rest.

Luckily thePantherwas strong, or we should have lain there beside the ruined castle all winter. It was at least a quarter of an hour after we had actually at length cast off from the floe before we budged an inch, and then it was a long while before we made much headway. By-and-by, however, we went ahead at the rate of one knot an hour, and then, after that, crunched through the transparent film that was on the sea. The crystals flew to left and right; and when the sun came out, shining upon the flying fragments, it seemed as if we were cutting through a waste of jewelry. A few hours of this sort of running brought us into the clear water of an opening lead, and thence our flight from Melville Bay was made much after the same fashion as that of our going in—the same cutting through and breaking down of floes, and the same wild excitement as before.

WE STEAM AWAY FROM THE MIDNIGHT SUN.

Our good ship seemed to have a realizing sense of her situation, and to enjoy as much as we the prospect which had so suddenly overtaken us together of wintering in the dreaded “pack.” Welch, the fireman, declared that thePantherwas a ship “as knowed a thing or two.”

When the day closed we had Wilcox Point and the Devil’s Thumb abeam. The great ice-fields which on our way north had so much embarrassed us on entering Melville Bay had by this time either drifted or melted away; and now through an unobstructed sea we held our course for the Duck Islands, and steamed away from the midnight sun.

From the Duck Islands we groped our way down the coast through one of those provoking fogs which so often come to pester the life of the Arctic voyager, and which set upon us early in the night.

I do not remember to have ever seen any thing more gloomy than the scene before us when the fog lifted in the early morning. We had been lying to for some time, not really knowing where we were; but, as good-luck would have it, we found that we were pointed fairly between two remarkable islands, known from their conformation as Cone and Wedge. Beyond was a straight passage of twenty miles, between lofty, cavernous, brownish-red, rocky islets; and beyond these, again, was to be seen, in the far distance, the cold line of themer de glace, from which come pouring down cold glaciers to the sea. Cold icebergs lay upon the leaden waters; a cold wind wasmoaning from the hills; and although the sun shone out after the fog had vanished, it failed to throw any glow of warmth over the general desolation, or to dissolve the oppressive chill.

Steering south-east, we passed presently around a large iceberg which had before obstructed the view, and then we opened a low point of land, rugged as any other land in sight, and as utterly without sign or trace of vegetation; and yet a little white house stood upon the naked rock, and the white and red emblem of Danish sovereignty fluttered from a little flag-staff on the roof. This was the house we had seen and photographed on our way north—the most northern house of all the world; and in this little house, in this fearful desert, dwells a Christian family, with no other human beings within fifty miles of them save a few ignorant savages.

The head of the family met us among the ice in a boat a mile or so away. He had a swarthy crew of skin-clad men, and as he hauled in alongside of us, and stood up in the stern of his boat, I recognized at once the sturdy figure, sandy hair, and striking features of Peter Jensen. I was heartily glad to see him, and had him on board and by the hand without a minute’s loss of time. Then we steamed into a good anchorage and went ashore, and called upon his wife, and petted his children, and dined with him off venison and eider-ducks. The wife made us some capital cakes, and we had cigars and Danish pipes and excellent coffee; and we smoked and drank and chatted away the evening, and were very much surprised, when we came to think about it, that we had had a very pleasant time here in this remote and solitary place, within a thousand miles, measured as the crow flies, of the North Pole.

THE MOST NORTHERN HOUSE ON THE GLOBE.

But there was something indescribably sad to me in the dreadful isolation of this family who had entertained us. It is worse than loneliness, for the savages around, with their filth and wretchedness, and their packs of howling, vicious dogs, can not give companionship to a woman bred in Copenhagen, nor to the three little children whom she nurtured with the carefulness of a Christian mother.

These children were two pretty flaxen-haired girls—Johana Maria and Jennie Caroline—of five and seven years. But the hope of the house was Julius Christian, aged three years and some odd months.

They had all been troubled with the scurvy, and I did not wonder at it. What could these poor children do to preserve their health by outdoor exercise and outdoor pastime in a climate where the snow is on the ground nine months out of the twelve, and where the sun is not seen in winter for more than a hundred days; where the house must be banked with snow, the windows double glazed, the stoves and lamps kept burning constantly, to ward off the piercing cold, which often sinks to 50° below zero, and even lower, and where howling gales, filling the air with snow-drift, are of almost daily occurrence?

The four rooms of the house were fitted up with a reasonable degree of comfort, and with great neatness. There were some ornaments upon the walls—photographs of relatives and friends, and cheap colored prints of Danish battle-scenes, in some of which Jensen had patriotically borne a musket in the ranks before he came to Greenland, and was deservedly proud of the share he had in the war of 1848 against the hated Prussian.

For warmth they had stoves and Danish coal; and then there were huge bags of eider-down, among which the children buried themselves through the dark cold nights, piled upon the beds, and one might think the cold could never reach them when they had crawled to rest. Buteven children can not sleep all the time, though it may be always dark; and the loneliness of that prison-house to those three little creatures, when the winter comes, was a painful thing to contemplate. But then the wife! The children were born there, and had no other associations; but through the desolate winter do the wife’s thoughts not wander sometimes mournfully and regretfully back to the society and the changing delights and changing fashions of the world wherein she lived before she became a bride, and left it for this desert, simply that she might be with the man she loved? For surely there could be nothing else than love to tempt her there. She made no complaint; she appeared cheerful, and may have been happy. It was hard for me to think so. Hopeless, indeed, to her this life of toil, anxiety, and suffering, unless the blind god gives her some vast measure of bliss utterly beyond man’s power of appreciation. Alas, how little men really know of the sacrifices women make for them continually! Was the man ever born who was capable of such an exhibition of unselfishness as this Betty Jensen? I doubt it.

And the life of her husband is a very hard and, as it seems to me, a very thankless one. Strange as it may seem, Jensen came here to seek his fortune. The little money that he had saved up from my expedition of 1860-’61, enabled him to return to Denmark, and there to marry, and come back to Greenland and set up for himself. He had been promised the charge of this remote settlement of Tessuisak, which is fifty miles above Upernavik, and on the very confines of the great ice-barrier. He was always a fine shot, an active man, and an expert hunter; and he thought by coming here he would in a few years accumulate a competency, which he would carry back to Denmark. But I fancy it must have been something of his restless nature besides that impelled him to this life. He had lived several years in Greenland before I knew him, and, like all other men who have returned to the primitive life of the hunter, he never again took kindly to other ways, but clung lovingly to independence. It is not, however, so with women, and hence to them the greater hardship and privation. Without the same motives to action, they can not find society in the animals of the chase.

JENSEN AND HIS FAMILY.

Unhappily, Jensen had overestimated his skill and the resources of Tessuisak, and in spite of all he was disappointed. The whole productions of the place per annum do not exceed five thousand dollars, chiefly made up from seal-oil, eider-down, and bear and fox skins. On this Jensen receives but five per cent., a salary besides of five-and-twenty dollars, and one Government ration. There is no provision for his wife and children. Clearly the Royal Greenland Fishing Company never contemplated such a thing as a wife going to so distant and woe-begone a place.

But if the fact of Christian people selecting this remote, forlorn, and frigid corner of the world, voluntarily, for a residence is incomprehensible to the ordinary understanding, the pluck of the thing will be appreciated by all. I know of nothing that would require a greater degree of moral courage than to face life in such a situation. Yet Jensen gloried in the work he did, and grew very animated when he recited his bear and reindeer hunts, the skill and success he had in the seal and white whale fisheries, and boasted of his good-luck in making the natives be to him, what no other Dane had succeeded in doing, “hewers of wood and drawers of water;” or rather, to speak practically, as we must of a region where there is no wood to hew, and where all the water used is made from snow, the butchers of his game, and the drawers of hisblubber. In a small way he is a sort of feudal lord, with natural rights and privileges which I doubt if he would exchange for the benefits of an inferior station in some inferior latitude.

The population which he thus rules comprises sixty-two savage souls, scattered about in huts and tents upon the rocky hill-side. The dogs, which in the winter-time are used to drag the sledges, are beyond counting; and the stench that arose from the carcasses of decomposing fish and seals, and other offensive sources, exceeds belief. I pitied the wife, and mentioned it to Jensen. “Oh, she’s got used to it, and don’t mind!” One of the native families had, with peculiar impudence, pitched a tent close beside Jensen’s door, and he told me that it could not be removed without giving offense to the whole village. Barren though the land, the Esquimaux, with laughable gravity, proclaim themselves the true proprietors of the soil, and they do not hesitate to tell the Danes—though not in hostile fashion, calling them foreigners—that they are intruders.

What made the presence of this tent the more obnoxious was that the wife was supposed to be a witch, and often made night hideous with her devilish incantations. Although nominally a Christian now, she can not yet refrain from her old practices. And surely if ill looks had ever any thing to do, as they always seem to have had, with the general make-up of a witch, she was entitled to be looked upon as the mother of them all, for a more frightful-looking being surely never walked in darkness and conspired with the evil one. Yet this monster had a child, and its innocent baby face did not exhibit any evidence that it was conscious of its dangerous parentage, but it sucked its fist as contentedly as any other baby that had been born all right and in the mortal fashion. Her original name was Annorasuak, which is something equivalent to “Mother of the Winds.” Her history, as I had it afterwards from Jensen, is not without romantic interest, and will be again referred to.

AN ARCTIC WITCH.

I could not part from this little family of Jensen without emotion. For seven long years the wife had seen no living soul from the great world from which her love had called her, and the children looked upon us with amazement. They had never seen a ship in all their littlelives before, and the smoking, snortingPantherwas a wonder in their eyes. We made them up a store of such good things as we had on board, including every thing of an antiscorbutic character that we could lay our hands upon, added a couple of tons or so of coals, and then, with Jensen on board to pilot us through the intricate passages between the islands, we bore away from this most northern house of all the world, and shaped our course for Upernavik.

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