Among the striking features of the beautiful city of Copenhagen are statuary by the famous Thorwaldsen and other great sculptors, which proclaim the fame and preserve the memory of kings and statesmen, of authors and admirals—men great in war and in peace, in civic worth and in learning. It is to the honor of the city that lately there has arisen a unique and striking memorial to commemorate worth and fidelity in fields far beyond the sunset, remote from commercialism and from civilization. Thus Denmark keeps fresh in the hearts and in the minds of her people the heroic struggle unto death of Mylius-Erichsen and of Hagen, and of the Danish Eskimo Brönlund. Such steadfast sense of duty and heroic powers of accomplishment are not the heritage of Denmark alone, but of the nobler men of the wide world.
THE WIFELY HEROISM OF MERTUK, THE DAUGHTER OF SHUNG-HU
"Deeper devotion
Nowhere hath knelt;
Fuller emotion
Heart never felt."
—Goethe (Dwight's translation).
Rarely, if ever, has there been recorded in history a more varied and adventurous life than that of Mertuk, wife of Hans Hendrik, who came into literature through the magical pen of Elisha Kent Kane as the "pretty daughter" of Shung-hu, an Etah Eskimo. She was born (and reared) as a veritable Child of the Ice, being one of the members of the northernmost tribe of the world,—a people, in the last century, of absorbing interest as a surviving offshoot of the Stone Age.
Mertuk married Hans Hendrik, an Eskimo of Moravian faith from Danish West Greenland, who was practically a deserter from Kane. This northern idyl was the reverse of Ruth of the Bible, since for the sake of Mertuk, Hans abandoned his family and his country, willingly separating himself from the comforts and certainties of civilized life for the vicissitudes and inconveniences of an archaic environment. Despite a lovely wife, Hans soon discovered the wretched discomforts and unwelcome methods of life on the Etah coast, where hunger and physical sufferings were not infrequent attendants on even the most skilful and active hunter.
When the polar expedition of Dr. Isaac I. Hayes touched in 1860 at Cape York, Hans joined the doctor's forces taking his wife and child with him; next year they emigrated to Danish Greenland when Hayes sailed south.
Ten years later Hans, with Mertuk and three children, joined Hall's north-polar expedition, which made a ship's record for the world. At Thank-God Harbor was born Mertuk's youngest child, Charles Polaris, nearer the pole than any other known infant. With undaunted courage and uncomplaining fortitude she endured, with her four children (one a babe of three months), the fearful vicissitudes of the Polaris drift, set forth in another sketch, "The Marvellous Ice-Drift of Captain Tyson," carrying her babe in her seal-skin hood while dragging a heavy sledge over rough ice.
With quiet dignity, in keeping with her cool equanimity and her 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.