The town of Upernavik is situated on the summit of a mossy hill which slopes to the head of a small but sheltered harbour. It contains a government-house, plastered with pitch and tar; a shop or two; lodging-houses for the Danish officials; some timber huts, inhabited by Danes; and a number of huts of stone and turf, intermingled with seal-skin tents, which accommodate the natives. Its principal evidences of civilization are its neat little church and parsonage.
The inhabitants are chiefly occupied in fishing and hunting, and in the manufacture of suitable clothing for the protection of the human frame against the winter cold. Reindeer, seal, and dog skins are deftly converted into hoods, jackets, trousers, and boots. The last-named are triumphs of ingenuity. They are made of seal-skin, which has been tanned by alternate freezing and thawing; are sewed with sinew, and “crimped” and fitted to the foot with equal taste and skill. Dr. Hayes informs us that the Greenland women, not exempt from the love of finery characteristic of their sex, trim their own boots in a perfectly bewitching manner, and adopt the gayest of colours. Red boots, or white, trimmed with red, he says, seemed most generally worn, though there was no more limit to the variety than to the capriciousness of the fancy which suggested it. And it would be difficult to imagine a more grotesque spectacle than is presented by the crowd of red, and yellow, and white, and purple, and blue-legged women who crowd the beach whenever a strange ship enters the harbour.
The population of Upernavik numbers now about two hundred and fifty souls; comprising some forty or fifty Danes, a larger number of half-breeds, the remainder being native Greenlanders,—that is, Eskimos.
DISKO ISLAND, GREENLAND.
In describing one Danish settlement we describe all, for they present exactly the same characteristics, the difference between them being only a question of population.
GODHAV’N, DISKO ISLAND, GREENLAND.
Jacobshav’n and Godhav’n are situated on the island of Disko, which is separated from the west coast of Greenland by Weygat Strait, and has been described as one of the most remarkable localities in the Arctic World. The tradition runs that it was translated from a southern region to its present position by a potent sorcerer; and an enormous hole in the rock is pointed out as the gully through which he passed his rope. It is a lofty island, and its coast is belted round by high trap cliffs, of the most imposing aspect. Near its south-west extremity, in lat. 69° S., a low rugged spur or tongue of granite projects into the sea for about a mile and a half,—a peninsula at low water, and an island at high water,—and forms the snug little recess of Godhav’n, or Good Harbour. To the north of the bay, in face of rocky cliffs, which rise perpendicularly from the sea to a height of 2000 feet, lies the town of the same name, which our English whalers know as Lievely, probably a corruption of the adjective lively; for the tiny colony is the metropolis of Northern Greenland; and since the beginning of the present century has been the favourite rendezvous of the fishing fleets and expeditions of discovery.