Such an experience would have set most boys swallowing a lump in their throat. The little Dane was too glad to get the water out of his throat and to set his feet on dry land for any such nonsense. For a year he worked with a shoemaker for his board, and incidentally picked up a knowledge of Spanish and Portuguese over the cobbler’s last. The most of young Danish noblemen gained such knowledge from tutors and travel. Then Munck became apprentice to a house painter. Not a yelp against fate did the plucky young castaway utter, and what is more marvel, he did not lose his head and let it sink to the place where a young gentleman’s feet ought to be—namely the pavement. Toiling for his daily bread among the riffraff and ruff-scuff of a foreign port, Munck kept his head up and his face to the future; and at last came his chance.
Munck was now about eighteen years old. Some Dutch vessels had come to Bahia without a license for trade. Munck overheard that the harbor authorities intended to confiscate both vessels. It was Munck’s opportunity to escape, and he seized it with both hands. Jostling among the sailors of the water-front, keeping his intentions to himself, Munck waited till it was dark. Then, he stripped, tied his clothes to his back, and swam out to warn the Dutch of their danger. The vessels escaped and carried Munck with them to Europe. Within five years he was sailing ships for himself to Iceland and Nova Zembla and Russia—keeping up that old trick of picking up odds and ends, knowledge of people and things and languages wherever he went. Before he was thirty he had joined the Danish navy and was appointed to conduct embassies to Spain, and Russia where his knowledge of foreign languages held good. When the traders of Copenhagen and King Christian looked for a commander to explore and colonize Hudson Bay, Munck was the man.
Sunday, May 16, 1619, the ships that were to add a second Russia to Denmark, sailed for Hudson Bay. Sailors the world over hate the Northern seas. Some of Munck’s crews must have been impressed men, for one fellow promptly jumped overboard and suicided rather than go on. Another died from natural causes, so Munck put into Norway for three extra men.
Greenland was sighted in twenty days—a quick run in those times and evidence that Munck was a swift sailor, who took all risks and pushed ahead at any cost, for the Hudson’s Bay fur trade captains considered seven weeks quick time from London to the Straits of Hudson Bay. A current sweeps south from Greenland. Lashing his ships abreast, Munck ran into the center of a great field of soft slob ice, that would keep the big bergs off and protect the hulls from rough seas. Then lowering all sails, he drifted with the ice drive. It came on to blow. Slob ice held the ships safe, but sleet iced the rigging and deck till they were like glass and life lines had to be stretched from side to side to give hand hold, every wave-wash sending the sailors slithering over the icy decks as if on skates. Icicles as long as a man’s arm would form on the cross-trees in a single night. The ropes became like bolts—cracking when they were bent, but when the heat of mid-day came, both ships were in a drip of thaw.
What with the slow pace of the ice drift and the heaviness of the ships from becoming ice-logged, it was the middle of July before they reached the Straits. Eskimos swarmed down to the islands of Ungava Bay, but seemed afraid to trade with Munck’s crew. It was on one of the islands here that the Eskimo two centuries later massacred an entire crew of Hudson’s Bay Company fur traders, who had been wrecked by the ice jam and escaped across the floes to the island. It was, perhaps, as well for Munck that the treacherous natives took themselves off, bounding over the waves in skin boats, so light they could be carried by one hand over the ice floes. The collision of the Atlantic tide with the eastward flowing current of the Straits created such a furious sea as Munck had never seen. It was no longer safe to keep The Lamprey lashed to the frigate, for one wave wash caused by an overturning iceberg lifted the little ship almost on the masts of The Unicorn.
The ships then began worming their way slowly through the ice drift. A grapnel would be thrown out on an ice floe. Up to this, the ships would haul by ropes. Both crews stood on guard at the deck rails with the long iron-shod ice poles in their hands, prodding and shoving off the huge masses when the ice threatened a crush. Six hours ebb and six hours flow was the rate of the tide, but where the Straits narrowed and the inflow beat against the ice jam, the incoming tide would sometimes last as long as nine hours. This was the time of greatest danger, for beaten between tide and ice, the Straits became a raging whirlpool. It was then the ships had to sheer away from the lashing undertow of the big bergs and stood out unsheltered to the crush and jam of the drive. Sometimes, a breeze and open passage gave them free way from the danger. At other times, the maelstrom of the advancing tide caught them in dead calm. Then the men had to leap out on the icepan and tow the ships away. Soaked to their armpits in ice water, toiling night and day, one day exposed to heat that was almost tropical, the next enveloped in a blizzard of sleet, the two crews began to show the effects of such terrible work. They were so completely worn out, Munck anchored on the north shore to let them rest. At Icy Cove off Baffin’s Land, one seaman—Andrew Staffreanger—died. Where he was buried, Munck remarked that the soil showed signs of mica and ore. To-day—it is interesting to note—those mica mines are being worked in Baffin’s Land.
One night toward the end of July, ice swept on the ships from both sides. Suddenly the crew were tumbled from their berths by the dull rumbling as of an earthquake. The boards of the cabin floors had sprung. Ice had heaped higher than the yardarms—the ships were like toys, the sport of grim Northern giants. When the ships were examined, a gash was found in the keel of The Lamprey from stem to stern as broad as one’s hand. Barely was this mended when the rudder was smashed from The Unicorn. A great icepan tossed up on end and shivered down in splinters that crashed over the decks like glass. A moment later a rolling sea swept the ships, sending the sailors sprawling, while the scuppers spouted a cataract of waters. Munck felt beaten. Again he ran to the north shore for shelter. While the sailors rested, the chaplain held services and made “offerings to God” beseeching His help. Munck, meanwhile, went ashore and set up the arms of the Danish King—a superfluous proceeding, as Baffin had already set up the arms of England here.
On the ebb of the tide the sea calmed, and Munck succeeded in passing the most dangerous part of the Straits—the Second Narrows. An east wind cleared the sea of ice. Sails full blown, Munck’s ships shot out on the open water of Hudson Bay in the first week of September. Munck was six weeks traversing the Straits. It should not have taken longer than one.