David goes to Greenland

by David Binney Putnam

There is a little coal mine near Godhavn. Getting the coal, and fishing, is about all they do, with some hunting especially in the winter. The women do most of the work and the men go fishing and hunting. When we went [[44]]ashore we saw the women with big baskets of coal unloading a small boat and taking the coal to be weighed and stored away in a big storehouse.

Carl, Mr. Streeter, Art Young and I went shark fishing with two Eskimos out in the mouth of the bay. We fished from about one until four o’clock but didn’t catch a thing. Later we traded some very nice little toy kayaks, all equipped, and also some little sledges with whips and rifles tied down with thongs.

At Godhavn we went all around with the Governor, Carl acting as our interpreter. It is fine having him along as he speaks pretty good Danish. He is an American, but his people are both Norwegian and in his home out in Minnesota they talked Norwegian a lot, and it is pretty much the same as Danish.

We went into the printing office where the only paper in Greenland is published. It is a monthly paper, and the printing house is a [[45]]small red building with one little press. About three thousand papers in the Eskimo language go out free to practically all the people in Greenland. The Governor gave us a bound copy for our collection. Most of the stuff in the paper is written by Eskimos up and down the coast, who send it in.

The next morning about six-thirty we heaved anchor and left Godhavn. When the anchor comes up all hands are called to the windlass which works with iron bars like pump handles. If there is a lot of chain out it takes a long time and is really hard work.

In the afternoon Dad asked me to fill a little bag with trading stuff because we were going to stop at a village called Proven. We reached there about seven. It was a very small harbor so the Morrissey could not go in, and we used our launch and were greeted by the whole town at the little wharf.

At the end of the dock were about eight sharks down in the water tied up with ropes [[46]]and still alive. Later Harry Raven got one for a specimen that was ten feet long. Later he found the liver measured nearly six feet.

While Dad and the others had tea with the Governor (all these little hamlets in the south have a Dane in charge whom we call a Governor, even though the average population may be only forty people) I went out to trade for some kamaks or skin boot. These are a sort of double high shoe or boot made of seal skin with the hair turned in and with a hairy inner boot beneath which is put in grass to make it soft and warmer.

The Greenland hair seal is entirely different from the Alaskan fur seal. It has no fur but just coarse hair and has no value except for oil and its hide. I had a chance to get several pairs of kamaks but they were all only about half the size of my foot. The Eskimos are very small people and mostly the tallest only come up to about my shoulder. And naturally they have very small feet. [[47]]

At Proven I got two pairs of seal skin pants, one for a jacket and the other in exchange for a box of candy and a sweater. I also got a kind of necklace which is worn by the women for “dress up,” for a piece of soap, a bar of chocolate and an army mirror, which was a good bargain, because the necklaces are hard to make and hard to get.