unblanching acceptance of hardships in the white North, Mertuk accepted
the extraordinary experiences incident to temporary life in the great
emporium of American civilization--New York City--which she was the
first of her tribe to visit. Returning to Danish Greenland with her
children, she there passed the rest of her less eventful life, busy and
happy in the domestic duties pertaining to her family and to her Inuit
neighbors.
The incident of Mertuk's wifely heroism, herein told in detail, is drawn
from an unpublished diary of Mr. Henry W. Dodge, mate of the schooner
_United States_, then wintering under Dr. Hayes at Port Foulke.[30]
The sketch of the childhood of this heroic and interesting woman is
based on various passages of explorers and writers familiar with the
incidents of Etah life.
* * * * *
Among the forceful and friendly natives of Etah sixty years since, in
the days of Kane, was Shung-hu, famed equally for his qualities as a man
and for his daring as a mighty hunter. He especially displayed his skill
in the successful pursuit of the polar bear, whether on land along the
coast, on the fast ice under the frowning snow-cliffs of Humboldt
Glacier, or on the moving ice-floes of Smith Sound. Apart from his alert
action and dignified bearing, his person was notable through his ample
whiskers, on chin and on lips, which age and exposure had already
softened by their silvery coloring. Indeed, he was the only full-bearded
native in the nation, as is related by Hayes, whose distressed and
starving boat party was only able in the last extremity to reach the
_Advance_ through the aid of the Angekok Kalutunah and his comrade
Shung-hu.
Among the much-loved children of Shung-hu was a daughter, Mertuk, whose
mother's name is unknown, but she doubtless had that deep affection and
tender care for her daughter which are common traits of these iron women
of the Etah coast.
Nature and necessity had made the family lead a life of constant
wandering, and so the child shared the seasonal and oft irregular
journeys along the shut-in, narrow coast-land between the great Humboldt
Glacier and the sea-beaten cliffs of Cape York. It was always a journey
for food--birds and bears, deer and seals, walruses and narwhals, as
time and good-fortune dictated.
Carried by her mother, little Mertuk travelled in true native fashion,
thrust naked and feet foremost into the back part of the ample seal-skin
hood. There she rode in warmth and comfort, safely seated astride of a
soft, rounded walrus thong, which passed under the arms of the mother
and was made fast around her neck.
Mertuk thus grew and throve, happy and healthy, under conditions which
to boys and girls of our own country would have seemed impossible of
endurance. Sometimes the tiny child would be thrust out in a temperature
in which mercury would freeze solid, and with laughter felt the biting,
stimulating cold that only made the hood more welcome as a home-nest. It
was the way of the wild, which must be followed in this country of
sunless winters and of blinding blizzards, which every brave Inuit
loved.
To this Eskimo maiden the whole world was made up of a few score men,
women, and children of the igloos, of a dozen kinds of birds in the air,
and on the cliffs; of white hares, bluish foxes, and reddish deer on
land; of smooth seals, white whales, horned narwhals, and big-tusked
walruses in the sea; and last but by no means least the enormous
amphibious, sharp-clawed bear whose glistening, yellowish-white skin
furnished material for the furry garments in which her father Shung-hu
was always clothed.
At an early age Mertuk came to know the living creatures which were the
sources of food and the means of life. She could tell the seasonal time
in which came and went the wild fowl, of their breeding and of their
young. The haunts and habits of the swift-footed animals of the
glacier-enclosed land were all known to her, as well as the favorite
resorts of the monsters of the bordering icy ocean, which furnished the
hides and bones, the sinew and ivory, without which there would be
neither needles and thread for the igloo, nor lances and sledges for the
hunter.
It was a land of meat and flesh in which she lived, with no bread or
vegetables, and the taste of sugar and of tea, the flavor of salt and of
pepper, were absent from her food. She knew not books, matches,
fire-arms, boats, stoves, crockery, nor cloth whether of cotton or
fibre, of silk or wool. It was a land without wood, iron, medicines, or
stimulants, and equally without government, schools, churches,
hospitals, or even houses--unless one could so name the stone huts, the
skin tents, or the transient snow igloos.
Her mother early taught her all the kinds of women's work which could
make her useful to her tribe or to her family, and without doubt
instilled in her a sense of some of the feminine graces which have
softened the harshness of the world in all climes and in every country
throughout the ages. Here they were a part of the life of the stone age,
which the Etahs had inherited untainted by the outside world.
The daughter's supple fingers soon braided evenly and closely the sinews
of the narwhal into the tense and needful bow-strings, for Shung-hu
hunted reindeer with bow and arrows. Her strong hands tightly stretched
the drying seal-skin, through which later her bone-needles and
sinew-thread were so skilfully plied that the skin broke before the
seams gave way. With deft action and with an unwonted taste she so
shaped her bird-skin clothing and blue-fox hoods as to win praise for
her garments from men and women alike. Her skill with the lamp soon
became equal to that of the oldest expert of the tribe. Choosing and
drying the long moss best suited for wicks, she applied a bit of walrus
fat to the moss threads, and twisted them into a dense, even roll. While
other lamps gave forth volumes of smoke, Mertuk so skilfully trimmed the
lighted moss-wick that it gave an equal steady flame along the edge of
the _koodlik_ (pot-stone lamp). An adept in all woman's work, always in
health, gay, witty and even-tempered, Mertuk came also to be a comely
maiden--well-formed in figure, fair of face, though very tiny in
stature.
But even in this land of Eskimo plenty there come seasons of dire
distress, when famine stalks abroad and slow starvation strikes down the
weaklings of the tribe. In such a time of want and hunger Hans Hendrik
came to the Etah tribe, to aid the half-famished folk in the hunt of
the walrus, then needed to save from lingering death the sick men of
Kane's ship as well as the strong people with Kalutunah and Shung-hu.
Mertuk had watched from a distance this wonderful youth, who spoke
Inuit queerly, to the sly amusement of the listening Etahs. But he
carried a long, strange weapon--fire-flashing, ear-splitting, and
death-dealing--that killed a bear or a walrus at great and unheard-of
distances. In the brief intervals of the urgent hunt he came to
Shung-hu's igloo to sleep, to eat their scant fare, and to feed his
wolfish dogs, which were ever fighting with those of Shung-hu. The hunt
was fast and furious, and with such success that steaks and liver,
walrus-skin and rich blubber, were again in plenty.
Of the joyous feast after this particular hunt, in which Mertuk partook
with other famishing Etahs, Kane quotes Hans Hendrik, "an exact and
truthful man," as saying: "Even the children ate all night. You (Kane)
know the little two-year-old that Awiu (possibly the mother of Mertuk)
carried in her hood--the one that bit you when you tickled her. That
baby cut for herself, with a knife made out of an iron hoop and so heavy
that she could hardly lift it, cut and ate, ate and cut, as long as I
looked at her. She ate a _sipak_--the Eskimo name for the lump which is
cut off close to the lips [of the eater]--as large as her own head.
Three hours afterward, when I went to bed, the baby was cutting off
another lump and eating still."
The work of the hunt proved too strenuous for the Danish Greenlander,
and finally Hans was worn out by exposure and fatigue, while he fell
sick from cold and wet. In this condition he sought the breek[31] of
Shung-hu's igloo for rest until he gained strength to enable him to
return to Kane, to whom he had sent walrus meat.
The care of the strange Inuit fell on Mertuk. Prompt and gentle in her
ministrations and attentions, jovial in her speech, and witty in
conversation, she soon ensnared the heart of Hans. Indeed, from all
accounts, she had that peculiar winning bashfulness that is so
attractive among certain of the children of nature. Besides her tasteful
dress she had a sense of order and of cleanliness, not always found
among the Etahs. She not only kept her long, raven-black hair unmatted,
but had also gathered her tresses into a tuft on the top of her head,
where it was fastened by a finely embroidered seal-skin strap. This gave
her a semblance of size and height quite needed, for she was only a
trifle over four feet tall.
Hans soon took careful notice of his nurse, who talked with overflowing
mirth, while her busy fingers, in the intervals of personal service,
unceasingly plaited the tough sinew-thread with which arrow-heads are
secured or other hunting implements perfected. Deft and quick, busy with
work, careful of her little brothers, she seemed to be the maiden suited
to his taste, although the claims of other women were presented to him
during his stay. Before he was strong, he had asked that she should
become his wife. Most of her maiden comrades had sobbed and lamented
when the time came for them to change the care-free, petted, and joyous
child life for the onerous duties of an Etah matron. But Mertuk's heart
glowed with happy feelings, and she sang with joy when the great Eskimo
hunter, who had killed three of the five great walruses, asked that she
would be his wife.
Kane relates the story of the courtship as follows: "Hans, the kind son
and ardent lover of Fiskernaes,[32] has been missing for nearly two
months. I am loath to tell the tale as I believe it, for it may not be
the true one at all, and I would not intimate an unwarranted doubt of
the consistency of boyish love. Before my April hunt, Hans with long
face asked permission to visit Peteravik, as he had no boots and wanted
to lay in a stock of walrus hide for soles. I consented.
"He has not returned and the stories of him that come from Etah were the
theme of much conversation and surmise. He had given Nessark's wife an
order for a pair of boots, and then wended his way to Peteravik (the
halting-place), where Shung-hu and his pretty daughter had their home.
This explanation was given by the natives with many an explanatory
grin; for Hans was a favorite with all, and as a match one of the
greatest men of the country.
"The story was everywhere the same. Hans the faithful, yet I fear the
faithless, was last seen upon a native sledge, driving south from
Peteravik with a maiden at his side, and professedly bound for a new
principality at Uwarrow, high up Murchison Sound. Alas! for Hans the
married man. Lover as he was, and _nalegak_ (chief) by the all-hail
hereafter, joy go with him, for he was a right good fellow."
Though Hans said that his mother-in-law "had always behaved to me like a
tender mother," and that "the amiability of these unbaptized people is
to be wondered at," yet life went hard with the married couple among
"the unchristened natives of the North."
Touching at Cape York in 1860, Dr. Hayes found Hans and his wife living
there. Of their quarters, Dodge, in his unpublished journal says: "Their
shelter was a seal-skin tent, six by eight feet in size and six feet
high, in which lived Hans, Mertuk, the baby, and the mother-in-law. The
_breek_ of large stones took up, with the bedding, two-thirds of the
space, leaving scant room for the cooking utensils; a small stone pot
hung above the blubber-fed stone lamp."
He continues: "Mertuk was with him, having at her back a baby not a year
old. I must admit that Hans would not have been inexcusable for being
allured by a pair of black eyes to cast in his lot with the roving
tribes of the North. She is by far the handsomest native woman that we
have yet seen, being much prettier than any woman of the mixed races of
Danish Greenland. She is very small but is finely featured, and has
hands and feet as delicate as a child's. Notwithstanding the general
harshness of the Etah language, her voice is quite musical, and she has
the most gleeful, ringing, bell-like laugh that I have ever heard."
Taking his wife and babe along, Hans joined the expedition of Dr. Hayes
as hunter. In midwinter, as elsewhere related in "Sonntag's Fatal Sledge
Journey," Hans went south as dog driver, with the astronomer, to buy
dogs for the sledge journeys of the coming spring. After a month Dr.
Hayes, becoming greatly alarmed at their protracted absence, decided to
send Dodge, the mate, south to trace the missing men. But deep as may
have been the anxiety of Hayes for Sonntag, it did not equal the anguish
of Mertuk's soul as to the fate of her loved Hans.
The theory that the people of the stone age are purely animals,
struggling only for food, for clothing, and for shelter, finds no
support in the conduct of this tiny, ignorant, heathen woman, whose
heart was filled with ideals of love and of duty.
Living under conditions of ease and luxury far surpassing anything of
which Mertuk's mind had before been capable of imagining, this tiny,
uncivilized woman resolved to quit her abode of warmth and light for
piercing cold and utter darkness, to abandon her abundant food and
comfortable berth for a chance bit of frozen seal meat and a snow igloo.
And for what reason? To find a missing husband, in search of whom a
party was to take the field. To non-polar people no words can convey an
adequate idea of the dangers to be met, of the privations to be endured.
It was a period of sunless days (the sun had been gone for more than a
month), in the excessive cold of midwinter, at the season of fearful
blizzards, along an uninhabited stretch of coast of utter desolation, in
following which one must pass the dreaded Cape Alexander either on the
outer moving ice-pack or along the treacherous ice-foot at the base of
its precipitous cliffs. And no one knew better than Mertuk the misery
and hardships, the sufferings and perils which must be faced on such a
journey.
The tale of this woman's heroic resolution is thus told in his journal
by Dodge, whom Hayes sent south to trace Sonntag's trail:
"Here let me introduce a little episode which might be useful to poets
and novelists as an example of woman's constancy and devotion, showing
perhaps that the true woman's heart beats the same in all ages,
countries, and climes. It reveals itself equally strong in a Gertrude
watching the livelong night beneath a scaffold, and in a simple,
untutored savage, going out alone under the shadow of an arctic night,
carrying a child upon her back and looking for a lost husband.
"Mrs. Hans [Mertuk] had discovered by some means that a searching party
was being organized to discover the fate of the missing men. Being
fearful that she would be detained if her intentions were known, she
left the vessel an hour in advance of us, hoping that she would be
allowed to keep on when she should be overtaken.
"This information was not pleasant for me, as those best acquainted with
Eskimo character felt sure that she would not turn back, unless forcibly
compelled to do so.
"Her intention was not suspected, however, and it was not until I was on
the point of starting that one of the Eskimo told Jansen, the Dane, that
Mertuk had gone in search of her husband.
"When we were on our way, two and a half miles from the ship, I
discovered some distance ahead a little form, plodding through the snow,
which I knew must be Mrs. Hans. In half an hour more we had overtaken
her, and I must admit that it was an affecting sight to look upon this
little woman, barely four feet tall.
"With her child only a year old on her back, Mertuk plodded bravely
along through the snow, into which she sank knee-deep at almost every
step, impressed with the idea that the dearest one on earth to her was
somewhere in the vast desolation before her, and fired with the feeling
that she must find him or perish too.
"As my companion, Christian Petersen the Dane, could make her understand
him, I told him to tell her that she could not go on but must go back,
while we would go on and look for Hans, explaining the reasons for her
return. But to all his arguments Mertuk simply said that she must find
Hans or die--and resolutely she set her face toward the south.
"While Christian talked to her I stood by, leaning on my rifle, awaiting
anxiously the result of a discussion that I could not understand, except
as I read the woman's face. We could not spare the time to go back with
her. She could not accompany us, for our pace was too rapid for her and
besides we must not be delayed in our mission. If she followed us she
would be soon worn out with fatigue, carrying her child through the
soft, deep snow; and if she sat down to rest, her fate was certain when
overcome by sleep or through exhaustion."
When Petersen said that he could do nothing with her, as she obstinately
declared that she was going on for her husband, Dodge, greatly
disturbed, was perplexed as to what action he should take. Fortunately
there came to his mind a thought, kindred to that so forcefully and
beautifully expressed by Tennyson in his lines, "Home they brought her
warrior dead," and he continues:
"Finding that Christian's arguments were likely to prove unavailing, I
stepped up to Mertuk, lifted up a corner of the reindeer skin that she
had thrown over her seal-skin hood, and pointed to the tiny baby who was
sleeping quietly, and said [in English]: '_If you go on the child will
die._' She could not understand my words, which the Dane did not
translate, but something in her heart must have disclosed their meaning.
For the first time she showed signs of irresolution, and her eyes filled
with tears. Carefully covering the child's face, I brushed from the
mother's hair and eyebrows the frost-feathers that had already formed
through the awful cold. Looking steadily into her eyes, and talking in a
low, firm voice, I told her that I would look faithfully for Hans, and
bring him back to her if he could be found.
"I shall never forget the expression of her countenance, the moonbeams
streaming down on her eager, upturned face. Her lips were slightly
parted, and her whole soul seemed to be shining through her expressive
eyes, which were fastened fixedly on mine.
"When I ceased speaking, she answered, talking in an eager, impassioned
strain, which made her meaning plain enough, though her speech was in an
unknown tongue. Finally she pointed to the south and said that she
_would_ go on, but the trembling tones of her voice did not show the
same firmness as it had done before. Christian would have interpreted,
but it was unnecessary; the woman and I understood one another, and I
felt that the victory was won.
"Again I spoke to her in the same tone as before, and as she listened
her eyes were once more dimmed by tears. I was sure that her
determination was wavering. Now pointing first to the child, and
then in the direction of the ship, I told her that she _must_ go back.
Though she felt my meaning she stood for a moment, most resolute in her
attitude, gazing intently into my eyes, until she must have seen
something forbidding in my unrelenting face."
Dodge later writes: "To fully appreciate the impressive effect of this
most dramatic incident, the conditions under which it occurred should
be remembered. We were far out of sight of the ship, were some distance
off shore on the main ice-pack of Smith Sound, the moon was shedding a
dim, ghost-like glare upon us, and it was the coldest day of the winter,
the thermometer indicating seventy-five degrees below the freezing
point."
He humorously adds regarding his forceful language in ordering Mertuk
back to the ship: "I will not swear that the vigorous words froze as
they came from my mouth, but after I finished there were pendant icicles
an inch long to my whiskers and mustache."
As to Mertuk, orders, arguments, and requests, whether in pantomime
English or in Danish-Eskimo dialect, would have utterly failed of
effect, had she not been stirred by frequent allusions to her
baby--Hans's child, who must be saved from danger of death. To the
mother, cold, hunger, and privations were as naught.
Long and bitter was the conflict in Mertuk's heart between her motherly
affection and her wifely devotion. Should she do alone her duty to her
infant, or should she put the child's life aside in her arctic quest for
her missing hunter husband? To the last her heart was undecided. Now she
turned to the north, taking a few steps toward the ship, then she flew
back on the trail after the searching party, which had now moved onward.
Finally, with a gesture as of despair at adverse and inexorable fate,
she slowly took up her lonely march back to the ship--where food,
warmth, and shelter awaited at least the child of Hans.
On shipboard Mertuk did not cease to bewail her weakness in returning
from the search until the very day when Hans, who by no means hastened
his return, came back to fill her heart with that sweet content which
was absolutely insured by his presence alone.
By modern standards this woman of the stone age was low in the scale of
humanity--uncouth, ignorant, a heathen, and even brutish in a way.
This tale of an Inuit girl is, however, but a loose leaf from the
history of woman, which indicates that the spirit of altruistic devotion
is an attribute implanted by God in the primitive races, and not, as
some would fain have us believe, the golden fruit of developed humanity.
A century since an American poet paid due homage to a beautiful belle,
who later became his wife, in verse that aptly depicts the lovable
traits of Mertuk, the daughter of Shung-hu.
"Affections are as thoughts to her,
The measures of her hours;
Her feelings have the fragrancy,
The freshness of the flowers."
FOOTNOTES:
[30] See map on page 95.
[31] The raised bench or platform of stone, earth, or snow, in the back
part of the igloo, on which the furs and skins are arranged for bedding.
[32] Kane says of him: "I obtained an Eskimo hunter at Fiskernaes, one
Hans Christian (known elsewhere as Hans Hendrik), a boy of eighteen, an
expert with the kayak and javelin. After Hans had given me a touch of
his quality by spearing a bird on the wing, I engaged him. He was fat,
good-natured, and except under the excitements of the hunt as stolid and
unimpressive as one of our Indians."
THE SCRIBNER SERIES FOR YOUNG PEOPLE
EACH WITH ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOR
BOOKS FOR BOYS
THE MODERN VIKINGS By H. H. Boyesen
WILL SHAKESPEARE'S LITTLE LAD By Imogen Clark
THE BOY SCOUT and Other Stories for Boys
STORIES FOR BOYS By Richard Harding Davis
HANS BRINKER, or, The Silver Skates By Mary Mapes Dodge
THE HOOSIER SCHOOL-BOY By Edward Eggleston
TRUE TALES OF ARCTIC HEROISM IN THE NEW WORLD By Adolphus W. Greely
THE COURT OF KING ARTHUR By William Henry Frost
BY PIKE AND DYKE
WITH LEE IN VIRGINIA
WITH WOLFE IN CANADA
REDSKIN AND COWBOY By G. A. Henty
AT WAR WITH PONTIAC By Kirk Munroe
TOMMY TROT'S VISIT TO SANTA CLAUS and
A CAPTURED SANTA CLAUS By Thomas Nelson Page
BOYS OF ST. TIMOTHY'S By Arthur Stanwood Pier
DAVID BALFOUR
KIDNAPPED
TREASURE ISLAND
BLACK ARROW By Robert Louis Stevenson
AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY DAYS
A JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH
FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON
TWENTY THOUSAND LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA By Jules Verne
ON THE OLD KEARSARGE
IN THE WASP'S NEST By Cyrus Townsend Brady
THE BOY SETTLERS
THE BOYS OF FAIRPORT By Noah Brooks
THE CONSCRIPT OF 1813 By Erckmann-Chatrian
THE STEAM-SHOVEL MAN By Ralph D. Paine
THE MOUNTAIN DIVIDE By Frank H. Spearman
THE STRANGE GRAY CANOE By Paul G. Tomlinson
THE ADVENTURES OF A FRESHMAN By J. L. Williams
JACK HALL, or, The School Days of
an American Boy By Robert Grant
BOOKS FOR GIRLS
THE JANUARY GIRL By Joslyn Gray
SMITH COLLEGE STORIES By Josephine Daskam
THE HALLOWELL PARTNERSHIP By Katharine Holland Brown
MY WONDERFUL VISIT By Elizabeth Hill
SARAH CREWE, or, What Happened
at Miss Minchin's By Frances Hodgson Burnett
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
* * * * *
Transcriber's Notes
Italics in the original text are represented by underscores (e.g. "H. M.
Ships _Erebus_ and _Terror_").
Duplicate chapter headings have been removed. A list of books from the
same publisher has been moved from the beginning to the end of the text.