On the 18th of June, they were able to walk out at ebb tide to the ships on the flats. By the 26th they could take broth made of fish and fresh partridge. “In the name of Jesus after prayer and supplication to God, we set to work to rig The Lamprey,” records Munck. The dead were thrown overboard. So were all ballast and cargo. Consequently, when the tide came in, the sloop was so light it floated free above the ice-break of rocks and logs constructed the year before. Munck then had holes drilled in the hull of The Unicorn to sink her till he could come back for the frigate with an adequate crew. “On the 16th of July,” writes Munck, just a year from the time they had entered Hudson Straits, “Sunday in the afternoon, we set sail from there in the name of God.” Neither a kingdom nor a Northwest Passage had they found for King Christian of Denmark, but only hardships unspeakable, the inevitable fate of every pioneer of the New World, as though Nature would test their mettle before she began rearing a new race of men, pioneers of a new era in the world’s long history.
If it had been difficult for crews of sixty-five to navigate the ice floes, what was it for an emaciated crew of three? Forty miles out from Churchill, a polar bear strayed across the ice sniffing at The Lamprey when the ship’s dog sprang over in pursuit with the bold spirit of the true Great Dane. Just then the ice floe parted from the sloop, and for two days they could hear the faithful dog howling behind in dismay. A gale came banging the ship against the ice and smashed the rudder, but Munck out with his grapnel, fastened The Lamprey to the ice and drifted with the floe almost as far as the Straits. A month it took to cross the bay to Digges Island at the west end of the Straits. For a second time, the brave mariner worked his way through the Straits by the old trick of throwing out the grapnel and hauling himself along the floes. This time he was drifting with the ice, not against it, and the passage was easier. Once out of the Straits, such a gale was raging “as would blow a man off his legs,” records Munck, but the wind carried him forward. Off Shetland a ship was signaled for help, but the high seas prevented its approach and the little Lamprey literally shot into a harbor of Norway, on September 20th. Not a soul was visible but a peasant, and Munck had to threaten to blow the fellow’s brains out before he would help to moor the ship. With the soil of Europe once more firmly under their feet, the poor Danes could no longer restrain their tears. They fell on their knees thanking God for the deliverance from “the icebergs and dreadful storms and foaming seas.”
Le Moyne d’Iberville’s French Rangers and Canadian Wood-runners Besieging Fort Nelson—photographed from the copy of La Potherie in Archives, Ottawa, Canada.
As Munck did not record the latitude of his wintering harbor—presumably to keep his ship in hiding till he could go for it—doubt arose about the port being Churchill. This doubt was increased by an erroneous account of his voyage published in France, but the identity of Munck’s Cove with Churchill has been trebly proved. The drawing which Munck made of the harbor is an exact outline of Churchill. Besides, eighty years afterward when the Hudson’s Bay Fur Company established their fort at Churchill, brass cannon were dug from the river flats stamped with the letter C 4—Christian IV. Strongest confirmation of all were the Indian legends. The savages called the river, River of Strangers, because when they came down to the shore in the summer of 1620, they found clothing and the corpses of a race they had never seen before. When they beheld the ship at ebb tide, they could hardly believe their senses, and when they found it full of plunder, their wonder was unspeakable. But the joy was short-lived. Drying the cargo above their fires, kegs of gunpowder came in contact with a spark. Plunder and plunderers and ship were blown to atoms. Henceforth, Churchill became ill omened as the River-of-the-Strangers.
The same erroneous French account records that Munck suicided from chagrin over his failure. This is a confusion with Munck’s father. The Dane had seen enough to know while there was no Northwest Passage, there was an unclaimed kingdom for Denmark, and he had planned to come back to Churchill with colonists when war broke out in Europe. Munck went back to the navy and was in active service to within a few hours of his death on June 3, 1628.
Many nameless soldiers go down to death in every victory. The exploration of America was one long-fought battle of three hundred years in which countless heroes went down to nameless graves in what appeared to be failure. But it was not failure. Their little company, their scouts, the flanking movement—met defeat, but the main body moved on to victory. The honor was not the less because their division was the one to be mowed down in death. So it was with Jens Munck. His crews did their own little part in their own little unknown corner, and they perished miserably doing it. They could not foresee the winning of a continent from realms as darkly unknown as Hades behind its portals. Not the less is the honor theirs.
By what chances does Destiny or Providence direct the affairs of nations and men? If Munck had not been called back to the navy and had succeeded in bringing the colonists as he planned back to Hudson Bay, Radisson would not have captured that region for the Hudson’s Bay Company. Though Hudson, an Englishman, had discovered the bay, one might almost say if Munck had succeeded, as far as the Northwest is concerned, there would have been no British North America.
NOTES ON MUNCK