CHAPTER VIII.UPERNAVIK.
I hadset my heart upon making a thorough survey of the fiord of Aukpadlartok. As recorded in a previous chapter, I had previously been there and penetrated to within five miles of the glacier. It was, therefore, with much regret that I found the water wholly impassable to a boat. Even the air was so thick that I could not see the front of the glacier, so that I failed to note any changes which might have taken place in the interval of eight years since I had visited it before. Philip told me, however, that during the past two or three years the discharge of icebergs had been much greater than formerly, and that if they continued to increase in the same proportion he would be obliged to quit the place, as he could hardly at any time get in and out from his hut. Indeed, his residence appeared to me even more dreary than Jensen’s, for about the latter the icebergs were comparatively few, while Philip was thoroughly encircled by them. What measureless powers of endurance and hardihood such men as these must possess! I confess that I never look upon them except with astonishment.
Our voyage to Upernavik was without incident worthy of note, except that our mate was blessed with his usual fortune in discovering soundings. In a place where a rock was never before known to exist, he found one which by a miracle we grazed without damage to thePanther’skeel or bottom.
To our arrival in Upernavik I had looked forward withsome real pleasure; and not the least among those which I actually found was a civilized bed, and other homelike luxuries which Dr. Rudolph was good enough to place at my disposal. And oh the luxury of that bed after eight weeks in the narrow quarters of a ship’s bunk, always damp, and black with coal-dust, and daily rendered worse by the unsuccessful attempts of an idiotic cabin-boy to put it to rights and keep it clean!
The window of my room opened upon the sea, and was full of sweet flowers that had been nurtured tenderly by my good hostess, as if they were children. It was strange to look out through a little wilderness of roses, mignonnette, and heliotrope, upon a great wilderness of icebergs. The sea was, indeed, as cold as cold could be, and the waves broke fiercely right beneath me on the rocky shore; but about me all was peace and quiet—the pictures on the wall, the fire in the stove, the home comforts of the modest house which sheltered me—all spoke defiance of place or climate, and told a tale of tranquillity and contentment that was worth going thrice three thousand miles to see, even though the storms were never so threatening, and ice-barriers without number intervened.
We remained a week at Upernavik, and during that time I never saw thePanther. I never was so gladnotto see any thing in all my life before. I was quite willing to believe that the artists were painting and photographing icebergs without limit, and were getting into their camera every thing from a native to a mountain, but I did not want to see it. My enjoyment of the little home into which I had fallen was too fresh to court disturbance. To forget for a time that there was ever such an enemy to man as a ship’s cook, and to partake of some simple fare with which a woman’s hand had had to do, was too great a luxury to be profaned, and I lived along through my weekat Dr. Rudolph’s in a state of bliss. I wrote, and read, and played with the children, Anne and Christian. I talked with Jensen about his life, and the Greenland legends which he had gathered in his long experience. I helped my host, the governor, to make up his annual accounts for the next ship home and I bungled through my Danish with his amiable wife, making her laugh continually at my mistakes; and altogether, quite free from care, gave myself up wholly to enjoyment for the seven days.
Now the coming of the ship was a matter of serious concern to Governor Rudolph. The store-rooms were very empty, and there was much danger of famine if the ship did not come at all. To the governor’s family there would be a lack of every luxury. She was overdue almost a month, and great alarm was in the settlement already. But she did come at last, and I never saw people more rejoiced. The ship was theConstancia, and Captain Bang, her master, was as intelligent a man as he was good fellow. He spoke capital English, and helped us with our pipes and punch in the evening, and enjoyed the flowers as much as I did, and the delightful breakfast of smoked salmon, venison sausage, and pickled halibut, and the substantial lunch, and the late dinners, that were none the worse for the cigars and wine and Santa Cruz that he brought off one day to help out with; for the doctor was the most hospitable of all old-fashioned gentlemen and having three times dined our whole huge cabin mess, and opened his house to every body every day, his supply of cigars and liquors, after a whole year’s pulling at them on his own part, had run rather low. Our mess would gladly have replenished the doctor’s fast-failing stock; but with true American energy we had gone to work at the start as if to get through with what supplies we had in the shortest possible space of time; and there was notnow among us so much as a single “Havana,” or even a bottle of ale, to bless ourselves with.
The doctor surprised me one day by coming into my room, and in his genial way calling out, “You know dis man; you know dis feller, eh?” producing from behind his coat a rascally face, which I never could forget in any length of time. It was the face of Hans Heindrich.
Now Hans is a man of some celebrity. In 1853 Dr. Kane took him from Fiskernaes, South Greenland, upon his famous voyage into Smith’s Sound. His age then was about twenty years; and he lived well on board the brigAdvance, and waxed fat, and tricked his master, from whom he finally ran away, and joined the Smith Sound savages, marrying one of their women, by name Merkut. Among these people I found him in 1860, and took him aboard with his wife, Merkut, and his baby, Pingasuk. I ought to have known better. He tricked me worse than he had tricked Dr. Kane. I am fully convinced that he was instrumental in causing the death of two of my command, though it was never possible to prove any thing against him positive enough to insure conviction. It is hard to collect evidence where there are no eyes to see nor ears to hear. Being unable to verify my suspicions, I brought him back in 1861, and delivered him over to the Danish authorities, from whom Dr. Kane had taken him eight years before. Even now he could not cease from mischief, breeding quarrels wherever he went; and his wife was in a state of chronic dissatisfaction because she could not live in her old-fashioned savage way, and her children (she had two now) were a burden on the poor-fund. I gave Merkut some money to buy clothes for the children, and within an hour it was all spent at the Government store-house for figs and sugar-candy.
HANS AND HIS FAMILY.
HANS AND HIS FAMILY.
The untutored savage is not a peculiarly delicious creature under the best of circumstances. He is apt to have very crude notions aboutmeumandtuum, and the truth is not in him. Truth, indeed, seems to be, like gallantry, a fine art, and men have to be cultivated to the understanding of it. But Hans was not altogether an untutored savage,for the missionaries had control of him before Dr. Kane took him in charge, and had taught him to read the Testament and Thomas à Kempis, and to sign his name. The story of his proficiency in these respects having got abroad, in connection with supposed services rendered to Dr. Kane’s party in Christian charity, Hans has been made much of in a Sunday-school book that I have seen somewhere within a year or so, as a striking example of the power of Christian labor among the heathen—just as if he did not use what he had acquired for a cloak to hide his true character, something after the manner of Uriah Heep when playing a part before the pious Creakle and the zealous board of visitors.
I do not mean to be understood to give this as by any means a fair sample of the influence of Christian civilization upon the Greenlanders, for I have had frequent occasion to testify to the excellence of the native character in many conspicuous instances. Hans is nothing more than one of that very numerous class common to all peoples. Even the pastor of the little church at Upernavik can do nothing to help the mischief-making sinner; for the reader must know that Upernavik has a church. It was here that Mr. Anthon, now at Julianashaab, performed his first missionary labors. The pastor of this Upernavik flock surely fills Cowper’s description of the Moravian brethren, going forth,
“Fired with a zeal peculiar to defyThe rage and rigor of a Polar sky;And plant successfully sweet Saviour’s roseOn icy plains, and in eternal snows.”
“Fired with a zeal peculiar to defyThe rage and rigor of a Polar sky;And plant successfully sweet Saviour’s roseOn icy plains, and in eternal snows.”
“Fired with a zeal peculiar to defyThe rage and rigor of a Polar sky;And plant successfully sweet Saviour’s roseOn icy plains, and in eternal snows.”
“Fired with a zeal peculiar to defy
The rage and rigor of a Polar sky;
And plant successfully sweet Saviour’s rose
On icy plains, and in eternal snows.”
A new pastor, accompanied by his wife, came out in theConstanciato take charge of the mission. They were a young couple. Certainly no one would charge them withundue regard to things earthly when they subject themselves to such banishment.
Yet one might, after all, be worse off than here in Greenland and, for a certain length of time, I think the banishment might be bearable enough. One of the happiest, best contented, and most cultivated men that I have ever met, did not live much south of this, and he has declared to me that he would not exchange his Greenland lodge for the most comfortable quarters in his own fine city of Copenhagen. And it does seem strange that such a large number of superior men—superior in education and refinement—find their way to this inhospitable region, as governors, missionaries, and physicians. It is either because the home Government is particularly careful of its agents, or that the region possesses some peculiar attraction for thoughtful and reflective minds. “It is,” said my friend before alluded to, “the best place in the world to read books in,” and great readers most of these Danes in Greenland are.
Dr. Rudolph is a fine specimen of the best class of Danish gentlemen who accept appointments here, and who seem to take root and never desire to be transplanted elsewhere.
In early life he was an assistant surgeon in the Danish army. Later, he was largely engaged in private practice in the vicinity of Copenhagen. His health failing him, he went to Greenland as physician to the colony of Jacobshavn, and thereby saved his life; but his life once saved, he had no mind to renew the humdrum existence of powders and pills, and his old age now finds him both governor and physician of one of the most productive of the Greenland Districts, even although it is the most northern of all points of Christian occupation. His children are at school in Copenhagen, all except the two youngest,who are now with him; and there seems to be no end to his plans of doing for them out of his percentage of the Upernavik production, which furnishes him a moderate income.
Judging from the seeming shortness of the week I spent at Dr. Rudolph’s house, I should say a winter would not be tedious; but then it must be borne in mind that my week was a continual sunshine. I was used to it then, as I had been before, and did not observe or think of it; but now to look back over the time, and remember a week, and weeks, and months even, passing away without once lighting a lamp; to take a walk at midnight as an appetizer for sleep, just before going to bed, and do it in the daylight; to watch through day and night the shadows going round and round, is to recall a now strange experience. I have, indeed, never seen a person with the least sentiment who has ever been beyond the Arctic Circle, whose fancy did not cling lovingly to that long, lingering day and the never-setting sun.
But all things must have an end, and so at length I found myself once more back in my damp and smoke-begrimed quarters in thePanther’scabin. On the same day theConstanciawas ready to sail, and our captain offered Captain Bang a tow. He was going down the coast forty miles, to Proven, where he was to take in more cargo before returning home to Copenhagen. But, as ill luck would have it, a small iceberg had drifted into the middle of the harbor and grounded right in front of the two vessels, which lay almost side by side. It seemed at first as if we were both fast there, but theConstancia’scable slipped out and freed the ship, while ours stubbornly refused to budge; so that we had the mortification of seeing the vessel we were going to tow move off without us under oars. It was a most aggravating situation. DoctorRudolph was on board theConstancia, on his way to Proven. He cried to us that he would be back in three days, and we were quite welcome to the harbor. The captain of the brig offered us a tow if we would only pass along a line. The order of things was quite reversed. The steamer was helpless, while the sailer was off.
Our captain, vexed by the detention (and these taunts did not in the least soothe him), was evidently coming to a desperate determination. “Pay out chain,” he shouted from the bridge. Then he rang his bell to “back astern.” The vessel moved away from the berg as far as the chain would let her go, and then he rang again, “Ahead full speed.” Down thePanthercame with a steady helm, and with her iron forefoot she took the iceberg fairly in the middle. The shock was terrific, and there was a great scattering of men on the deck and of plates in the pantry; but fortunately the iceberg at that point was sloping, and thePantherslid up about five feet out of the water, which partly broke the force of the blow. Then she slid back again, luckily with her masts all standing. TheConstancia’speople cheered us, and we backed off again and went at the iceberg once more, with the same result—we did not budge or damage it in any way further than to splinter off innumerable fragments, which covered the sea all around us. But the berg was thin at the centre where we had struck; and the captain, growing more and more determined, backed off and butted away at the berg again and again, until, finally, the sixth effort proved successful. The berg split with a fearful sound. The two masses, each pivoted on the bottom, rolled over with a great swash; thePanthersheered ahead between the fragments, and then, picking up our anchor, to the universal astonishment we steamed out of the harbor in triumph, and kept our promise to theConstancia.
Dropping theConstanciaoff Proven, we continued south through the night, and on the following morning sighted the lofty mountains of Disco Island. Passing the Waigat, and the great stream of icebergs which emerges from it, we kept close to the bold and picturesque shores of Disco, and on the following day dropped anchor in Godhavn, close beside the town which takes its name from the little landlocked bay.