it entailed, even we in our day that have heard so much of Arctic
exploration can have but a faint conception. Shut in on the coast
of eternal ice and silence,—silence, save when in summer the
Arctic rivers were alive, and crash after crash announced that the
glaciers coming down from the inland mountains were “casting their
calves,” the great icebergs, upon the ocean,—the colonists counted
the days from the one when that year’s ship was lost to sight till
the returning spring brought the next one, their only communication
with their far-off home. In summer the days were sometimes burning
hot, but the nights always bitterly cold. In winter, says Egede,
hot water spilled on the table froze as it ran, and the meat they
cooked was often frozen at the bone when set on the table. Summer
and winter Egede was on his travels between Sundays, sometimes in
the trader’s boat, more often the only white man with one or two
Eskimo companions, seeking out the people. When night surprised
him with no native hut in sight, he pulled the boat on some desert
shore and, commending his soul to God, slept under it. Once he and
his son found an empty hut, and slept there in the darkness. Not
until day came again did they know that they had made their bed on
the frozen bodies of dead men who had once been the occupants of
the house, and had died they never knew how. Peril was everywhere.
Again and again his little craft was wrecked. Once the house blew
down over their heads in one of the dreadful winter storms that
ravage those high latitudes. Often he had to sit on the rail of his
boat, and let his numbed feet hang into the sea to restore feeling
in them. On land he sometimes waded waist-deep in snow, climbed
mountains and slid down into valleys, having but the haziest notion
of where he would land. At home his brave wife sat alone, praying
for his safety and listening to every sound that might herald his
return. Tremble and doubt they did, Egede owns, but they never
flinched. Their work was before them, and neither thought of
turning back.
The Eskimos soon came to know that Egede was their friend. When
his boat entered a fjord where they were fishing, and his rowers
shouted out that the good priest had come who had news of God, they
dropped their work and flocked out to meet him. Then he spoke to
a floating congregation, simply as if they were children, and, as
with Him whose message he bore, “the people heard him gladly.” They
took him to their sick, and asked him to breathe upon them, which
he did to humor them, until he found out that it was an Angekok
practice, whereupon he refused. Once, after he had spoken of the
raising of Lazarus from the dead, they took him to a new-made grave
and asked him, too, to bring back their dead. They brought him a
blind man to be healed. Egede looked upon them in sorrowful pity.
“I can do nothing,” he said; “but if he believes in Jesus, He has
the power and can do it.”
“I do believe,” shouted the blind man: “let Him heal me.” It
occurred to Egede, perhaps as a mere effort at cleanliness, to wash
his eyes in cognac, and he sent him away with words of comfort. He
did not see his patient again for thirteen years. Then he was in a
crowd of Eskimos who came to Godthaab. The man saw as well as Egede.
“Do you remember?” he said, “you washed my eyes with sharp water,
and the Son of God in whom I believed, He made me to see.”
Children the Eskimos were in their idolatry, and children they
remained as Christians. By Egede’s prayers they set great store.
“You ask for us,” they told him. “God does not hear us; He does
not understand Eskimo.” Of God they spoke as “Him up there.” They
believed that the souls of the dead went up on the rainbow, and,
reaching the moon that night, rested there in the moon’s house,
on a bench covered with the white skins of young polar bears.
There they danced and played games, and the northern lights were
the young people playing ball. Afterward they lived in houses on
the shore of a big lake overshadowed by a snow mountain. When the
waters ran over the edge of the lake, it rained on earth. When the
“moon was dark,” it was down on earth catching seal for a living.
Thunder was caused by two old women shaking a dried sealskin
between them; the lightning came when they turned the white side
out. The “Big Nail” we have heard of as the Eskimos’ Pole, was a
high-pointed mountain in the Farthest North on which the sky rested
and turned around with the sun, moon, and stars. Up there the stars
were much bigger. Orion’s Belt was so near that you had to carry a
whip to drive him away.
The women were slaves. An Eskimo might have as many wives as he
saw fit; they were his, and it was nobody’s business. But adultery
was unknown. The seventh commandment in Egede’s translation came
to read, “One wife alone you shall have and love.” The birth of
a girl was greeted with wailing. When grown, she was often wooed
by violence. If she fled from her admirer, he cut her feet when
he overtook her, so that she could run no more. The old women
were denounced as witches who drove the seals away, and were
murdered. An Eskimo who was going on a reindeer hunt, and found
his aged mother a burden, took her away and laid her in an open
grave. Returning on the third day, he heard her groaning yet, and
smothered her with a big stone. He tried to justify himself to
Egede by saying that “she died hard, and it was a pity not to speed
her.” Yet they buried a dog’s head with a child, so that the dog,
being clever, could run ahead and guide the little one’s steps to
heaven.
They could count no further than five; at a stretch they might
get to twenty, on their fingers and toes, but there they stopped.
However, they were not without resources. It was the day of long
Sunday services, and the Eskimos were a restless people. When the
sermon dragged, they would go up to Egede and make him measure
on their arms how much longer the talk was going to be. Then
they tramped back to their seats and sat listening with great
attention, all the time moving one hand down the arm, checking off
the preacher’s progress. If they got to the finger-tips before he
stopped, they would shake their heads sourly and go back for a
remeasurement. No wonder Egede put his chief hope in the children,
whom he gathered about him in flocks.
For all that, the natives loved him. There came a day that brought
this message from the North: “Say to the speaker to come to us to
live, for the other strangers who come here can only talk to us
of blubber, blubber, blubber, and we also would hear of the great
Creator.” Egede went as far as he could, but was compelled by ice
and storms to turn back after weeks of incredible hardships. The
disappointment was the more severe to him because he had never
quite given up his hope of finding remnants of the ancient Norse
settlements. The fact that the old records spoke of a West Bygd
(settlement) and an East Bygd had misled many into believing
that the desolate east coast had once been colonized. Not until
our own day was this shown to be an error, when Danish explorers
searched that coast for a hundred miles and found no other trace
of civilization than a beer bottle left behind by the explorer
Nordenskjold.
Egede’s hope had been that Greenland might be once more colonized
by Christian people. When the Danish Government, after some years,
sent up a handful of soldiers, with a major who took the title of
governor, to give the settlement official character as a trading
station, they sent with them twenty unofficial “Christians,” ten
men out of the penitentiary and as many lewd and drunken women
from the treadmill, who were married by lot before setting sail,
to give the thing a half-way decent look. They were good enough
for the Eskimos, they seem to have thought at Copenhagen. There
followed a terrible winter, during which mutiny and murder were
threatened. “It is a pity,” writes the missionary, “that while we
sleep secure among the heathen savages, with so-called Christian
people our lives are not safe.” As a matter of fact they were not,
for the soldiers joined in the mutiny against Egede as the cause
of their having to live in such a place, and had not sickness and
death smitten the malcontents, neither he nor the governor would
have come safe through the winter. On the Eskimos this view of the
supposed fruits of Christian teaching made its own impression.
After seeing a woman scourged on shipboard for misbehavior, they
came innocently enough to Egede and suggested that some of their
best Angekoks be sent down to Denmark to teach the people to be
sober and decent.
There came a breathing spell after ten years of labor in what
had often enough seemed to him the spiritual as well as physical
ice-barrens of the North, when Egede surveyed a prosperous mission,
with trade established, a hundred and fifty children christened and
schooled, and many of their elders asking to be baptized. In the
midst of his rejoicing the summer’s ship brought word from Denmark
that the King was dead, and orders from his successor to abandon
the station. Egede might stay with provisions for one year, if
there was enough left over after fitting out the ship; but after
that he would receive no further help.
When the Eskimos heard the news, they brought their little children
to the mission. “These will not let you go,” they said; and he
stayed. His wife, whom hardship and privation and the lonely
waiting for her husband in the long winter nights had at last
broken down, refused to leave him, though she sadly needed the
care of a physician. A few of the sailors were persuaded to stay
another year. “So now,” Egede wrote in his diary when, on July 31,
1731, he had seen the ship sail away with all his hopes, “I am
left alone with my wife and three children, ten sailors and eight
Eskimos, girls and boys who have been with us from the start. God
let me live to see the blessed day that brings good news once more
from home.” His prayer was heard. The next summer brought word that
the mission was to be continued, partly because Egede had strained
every nerve to send home much blubber and many skins. But it was as
a glimpse of the sun from behind dark clouds. His greatest trials
trod hard upon the good news.
To rouse interest in the mission Egede had sent home young Eskimos
from time to time. Three of these died of smallpox in Denmark. The
fourth came home and brought the contagion, all unknown, to his
people. It was the summer fishing season, when the natives travel
much and far, and wherever he went they flocked about him to hear
of the “Great Lord’s land,” where the houses were so tall that
one could not shoot an arrow over them, and to ask a multitude of
questions: Was the King very big? Had he caught many whales? Was
he strong and a great Angekok? and much more of the same kind. In
a week the disease broke out among the children at the mission,
and soon word came from islands and fjords where the Eskimos were
fishing, of death and misery unspeakable. It was virgin soil for
the plague, and it was terribly virulent, striking down young
and old in every tent and hut. More than two thousand natives,
one-fourth of the whole population, died that summer. Of two
hundred families near the mission only thirty were left alive. A
cry of terror and anguish rose throughout the settlements. No one
knew what to do. In vain did Egede implore them to keep their sick
apart. In fever delirium they ran out in the ice-fields or threw
themselves into the sea. A wild panic seized the survivors, and
they fled to the farthest tribes, carrying the seeds of death with
them wherever they went. Whole villages perished, and their dead lay
unburied. Utter desolation settled like a pall over the unhappy land.
Through it all a single ray of hope shone. The faith that Egede
had preached all those years, and the life he had lived with them,
bore their fruit. They had struck deeper than he thought. They
crowded to him, all that could, as their one friend. Dying mothers
held their suckling babes up to him and died content. In a deserted
island camp a half-grown girl was found alone with three little
children. Their father was dead. When he knew that for him and the
baby there was no help, he went to a cave and, covering himself and
the child with skins, lay down to die. His parting words to his
daughter were, “Before you have eaten the two seals and the fish I
have laid away for you, Pelesse will come, no doubt, and take you
home. For he loves you and will take care of you.” At the mission
every nook and cranny was filled with the sick and the dying. Egede
and his wife nursed them day and night. Childlike, when death
approached, they tried to put on their best clothes, or even to
have new ones made, that they might please God by coming into His
presence looking fine. When Egede had closed their eyes, he carried
the dead in his arms to the vestibule, where in the morning the men
who dug the graves found them. At the sight of his suffering the
scoffers were dumb. What his preaching had not done to win them
over, his sorrows did. They were at last one.
That dreadful year left Egede a broken man. In his dark moments
he reproached himself with having brought only misery to those he
had come to help and serve. One thorn which one would think he
might have been spared rankled deep in it all. Some missionaries
of a dissenting sect—Egede was Lutheran—had come with the smallpox
ship to set up an establishment of their own. At their head was
a man full of misdirected zeal and quite devoid of common-sense,
who engaged Egede in a wordy dispute about justification by faith
and condemned him and his work unsparingly. He had grave doubts
whether he was in truth a “converted man.” It came to an end when
they themselves fell ill, and Egede and his wife had the last word,
after their own fashion. They nursed the warlike brethren through
their illness with loving ministrations and gave them back to life,
let us hope, wiser and better men.
At Christmas, 1735, Egede’s faithful wife, Gertrude, closed her
eyes. She had gone out with him from home and kin to a hard and
heathen land, and she had been his loyal helpmeet in all his
trials. Now it was all over. That winter scurvy laid him upon a bed
of pain and, lying there, his heart turned to the old home. His
son had come from Copenhagen to help, happily yet while his mother
lived. To him he would give over the work. In Denmark he could do
more for it than in Greenland, now he was alone. On July 29, 1736,
he preached for the last time to his people and baptized a little
Eskimo to whom they gave his name, Hans. The following week he
sailed for home, carrying, as all his earthly wealth, his beloved
dead and his motherless children.
The Eskimos gathered on the shore and wept as the ship bore their
friend away. They never saw him again. He lived in Denmark eighteen
years, training young men to teach the Eskimos. They gave him the
title of bishop, but so little to live on that he was forced in
his last days to move from Copenhagen to a country town, to make
both ends meet. His grave was forgotten by the generation that came
after him. No one knows now where it is; but in ice-girt Greenland,
where the northern lights on wintry nights flash to the natives
their message from the souls that have gone home, his memory will
live when that of the North Pole seeker whom the world applauds is
long forgotten. Hans Egede was their great man, their hero. He was
more,—he was their friend.
GUSTAV VASA, THE FATHER OF SWEDEN
A great and wise woman had, after ages of war and bloodshed, united
the crowns of the three Scandinavian kingdoms upon one head. In the
strong city of Kalmar, around which the tide of battle had ever
raged hottest, the union was declared in the closing days of the
Thirteenth Century. Norwegian, Swede, and Dane were thenceforth
to stand together, to the end of time; so they resolved. It was
all a vain dream. Queen Margaret was not cold in her grave before
the kingdoms fell apart. Norway clung to Denmark, but Sweden went
her own way. In the wars of two generations the Danish kings won
back the Swedish crown and lost it, again and again, until in 1520
King Christian II clutched it for the last time, at the head of a
conquering army. He celebrated his victory with a general amnesty,
and bade the Swedish nobles to a great feast, held at the capital
in November.
Christian is one of the unsolved riddles of history. Ablest but
unhappiest of all his house, he was an instinctive democrat,
sincerely solicitous for the welfare of the plain people, but
incredibly cruel and faithless when the dark mood seized him.
The coronation feast ended with the wholesale butchery of the
unsuspecting nobles. Hundreds were beheaded in the public square;
for days it was filled with the slain. It is small comfort that
the wicked priest who egged the King on to the dreadful deed was
himself burned at the stake by the master he had betrayed. The
Stockholm Massacre drowned the Kalmar Union in its torrents of
blood. Retribution came swiftly. Above the peal of the Christmas
bells rose the clash and clangor of armed hosts pouring forth from
the mountain fastnesses to avenge the foul treachery. They were led
by Gustav[2] Eriksson Vasa, a young noble upon whose head Christian
had set a price.
The Vasas were among the oldest and best of the great Swedish
families. It was said of them that they ever loved a friend,
hated a foe, and never forgot. Gustav was born in the castle of
Lindholmen, when the news that the world had grown suddenly big by
the discovery of lands beyond the unknown seas was still ringing
through Europe, on May 12, 1496. He was brought up in the home
of his kinsman, the Swedish patriot Sten Sture, and early showed
the fruits of his training. “See what I will do,” he boasted in
school when he was thirteen, “I will go to Dalecarlia, rouse the
people, and give the Jutes (Danes) a black eye.” Master Ivar, his
Danish teacher, gave him a whaling for that. White with anger,
the boy drove his dirk through the book, nailing it to the desk,
and stalked out of the room. Master Ivar’s eyes followed the slim
figure in the scarlet cloak, and he sighed wearily “_nobilium nati
nolunt aliquid pati_,—the children of the great will put up with
nothing.”
Hardly yet of age, he served under the banner of Sten Sture against
King Christian, and was one of six hostages sent to the King when
he asked an interview of the Swedish leader. But Christian stayed
away from the meeting and carried the hostages off to Denmark
against his plighted faith. There Gustav was held prisoner a year.
All that winter rumors of great armaments against Sweden filled the
land. He heard the young bloods from the court prate about bending
the stiff necks in the country across the Sound, and watched them
throw dice for Swedish castles and Swedish women,—part of the loot
when his fatherland should be laid under the yoke. Ready to burst
with anger and grief, he sat silent at their boasts. In the spring
he escaped, disguised as a cattle-herder, and made his way to
Luebeck, where he found refuge in the house of the wealthy merchant
Kort König.
They soon heard in Denmark where he was, and the King sent letters
demanding his surrender; but the burghers of the Hanse town hated
Christian with cause, and would not give him up. Then came Gustav’s
warder who had gone bail for him in sixteen hundred gulden, and
pleaded for his prisoner.
“I am not a prisoner,” was Gustav’s retort, “I am a hostage, for
whom the Danish king pledged his oath and faith. If any one can
prove that I was taken captive in a fight or for just cause, let
him stand forth. Ambushed was I, and betrayed.” The Lübeck men
thought of the plots King Christian was forever hatching against
them. Now, if he succeeded in getting Sweden under his heel, their
turn would come next. Better, they said, send this Gustav home to
his own country, perchance he might keep the King busy there; by
which they showed their good sense. His ex-keeper was packed off
back home, and Gustav reached Sweden, sole passenger on a little
coast-trader, on May 31, 1520. A stone marks the spot where he
landed, near Kalmar; for then struck the hour of Sweden’s freedom.
But not yet for many weary months did the people hear its summons.
Swedish manhood was at its lowest ebb. Stockholm was held by the
widow of Sten Sture with a half-famished garrison. In Kalmar
another woman, Anna Bjelke, commanded, but her men murmured, and
the fall of the fortress was imminent. When Gustav Vasa, who had
slipped in unseen, exhorted them to stand fast, they would have
mobbed him. He left as he had come, the day before the surrender.
Travelling by night, he made his way inland, finding everywhere
fear and distrust. The King had promised that if they would obey
him “they should never want for herring and salt,” so they told
Gustav, and when he tried to put heart into them and rouse their
patriotism, they took up bows and arrows and bade him be gone.
Indeed, there were not wanting those who shot at him. Like a hunted
deer he fled from hamlet to hamlet. Such friends as he had left
advised him to throw himself upon the King’s mercy; told him of the
amnesty proclaimed. But Gustav’s thoughts dwelt grimly among the
Northern mountaineers whom as a boy he had bragged he would set
against the tyrant. Insensibly he shaped his course toward their
country.
He was with his brother-in-law, Joachim Brahe, when the King’s
message bidding him to the coronation came. Gustav begged him not
to go, but Brahe’s wife and children were within Christian’s reach,
and he did not dare stay away. When he left, the fugitive hid in
his ancestral home at Räfsnäs on lake Mälar. There one of Brahe’s
men brought him news of the massacre in which his master and
Gustav’s father had perished. His mother, grandmother, and sisters
were dragged away to perish in Danish dungeons. On Gustav’s head
the King had set a price, and spies were even then on his track.
Gustav’s mind was made up. What was there now to wait for? Clad as
a peasant, he started for Dalecarlia with a single servant to keep
him company, but before he reached the mines the man stole all his
money and ran away. He had to work now to live, and hired out to
Anders Persson, the farmer of Rankhyttan. He had not been there
many days when one of the women saw an embroidered sleeve stick out
under his coat and told her master that the new hand was not what
he pretended to be. The farmer called him aside, and Gustav told
him frankly who he was. Anders Persson kept his secret, but advised
him not to stay long in any one place lest his enemies get wind of
him. He slipped away as soon as it was dark, nearly lost his life
by breaking through the ice, but reached Ornäs on the other side of
Lake Runn, half dead with cold and exposure. He knew that another
Persson who had been with him in the war lived there, and found
his house. Arendt Persson was a rascal. He received him kindly,
but when he slept harnessed his horse and went to Måns Nilsson, a
neighbor, with the news: the King’s reward would make them both
rich, if he would help him seize the outlawed man.
Måns Nilsson held with the Danes, but he was no traitor, and he
showed the fellow the door. He went next to the King’s sheriff;
he would be bound to help. To be sure, he would claim the lion’s
share of the blood-money, but something was better than nothing.
The sheriff came soon enough with a score of armed men. But Arendt
Persson had not reckoned with his honest wife. She guessed his
errand and let Gustav down from the window to the rear gate, where
she had a sleigh and team in waiting. When the sheriff’s posse
surrounded the house, Gustav was well on his way to Master Jon, the
parson of Svärdsjö, who was his friend. Tradition has it that while
Christian was King, the brave little woman never dared show her
face in the house again.