“When the long, dark winter comes, he exchanges books with his friend the priest of Uppernavik. ‘The Dantz Penning Magazin,’ and ‘The History of the Unitas Fratrum,’ take the place of certain well-thumbed, ancient, sentimental novels; and sometimes the priest comes in person to tenant the ‘spare room,’ which makes it very pleasant, ‘for we talk Danish.’
“Except this spare room, which elsewhere would be called the loft of the house, its only apartment is the one in which I am. And here eat, and drink, and cook, and sleep, and live, not only Cristiansen and all his descendants, but his wife’s mother, and her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren who are growing up about her. It is fifteen feet broad by sixteen long, with just height enough for a grenadier, without his cap, to stand erect, and not touch the beams. The frame of the house is of Norway pine coated with tar, with its interspaces caulked with moss and small window-panes inserted in a deep casing of wood.
“The most striking decorative feature is a ledge or shelf of pine plank, of varying width, which runs round three of its sides. Its capacity is wonderful. It is the sofa and bed, on which the entire united family find room to loll and sleep; and upon it now are huddled, besides a navy doctor and his writing board, one ink bottle, sundry articles of food and refreshment, one sleeping child, one lot of babies not in the least asleep, one canary-bird cage with its exotic and most sorrowful little prisoner, and an infinite variety of other articles too tedious to mention, comprising seal-skins, boots, bottles, jumpers, glasses, crockery both of kitchen and nursery, coffee-pots, dog-skin socks, canvas pillows, an eider-down comforter, and a sick bitch with a youthful family of whining puppies.
“Una, the second daughter, has been sick and under treatment; and she is now hard at work with her sisters, Anna, Sara, and Cristina, on a tribute of gratitude to her doctor. They have been busy all the morning whipping and stitching the seal-skins with reindeer tendon thread. My present is to be a complete suit of ladies' apparel, made of the richest seal-skin, according to the standard mode of Pröven, which may always be presumed to be the ‘latest winter fashion.’ It is a really elegant dress. To some the unmentionables might savor of mascularity; but having seen something of a more polite society, my feminine associations are not restricted to petticoats. Extremes meet in the Esquimaux of Greenland and Amazons of Paris.
“The large family is a happy one: so small a home could not tolerate a quarrelsome mess. The sons, the men Cristiansens, brave and stalwart fellows, practiced in the kayack, and the sledge, and the whale-net, adroit with the harpoon and expert with the rifle, are constant at the chase, and bring home their spoil, with the honest pride becoming good providers of their household. And the women, in their nursing, cooking, tailoring, and housekeeping, are, I suppose, faithful enough. But what favorable impression that the mind gets through other channels can contend against the information of the nose! Organ of the aristocracy, critic and magister morum of all civilization, censor that heeds neither argument nor remonstrance—the nose, alas! it bids me record, that to all their possible godliness cleanliness is not superadded.
“During the short summer of daylight—it is one of the many apparent vestiges, among this people, of ancient nomadic habits—the whole family gather joyously in the summer’s lodge, a tent of seal or reindeer skin, pitched out of doors. Then the room has its annual ventilation, and its cooking and chamber furniture are less liable to be confounded. For the winter the arrangement is this: on three sides of the room, close by the ledge I have spoken of, stand as many large pans of porous steatite or serpentine, elevated on slight wooden tripods. These, filled with seal-blubber, and garnished with moss round the edge to serve as a wick, unite the functions of chandelier and stove. They who quarrel with an ill-trimmed lamp at home should be disciplined by one of them. Each boils its half-gallon kettle of coffee in twenty minutes, and smokes—like a small chimney on fire; and the three burn together. There is no flue, or fire-place, or opening of escape.
“On the remaining side of the room stand a valued table and three chairs; and with these, like a buhl cabinet or fancy étagère, conspicuous in its modest corner, a tub. It is the steeping-tub for curing skins. Its contents require active fermentation to fit them for their office; and, to judge from the odor, the process had been going on successfully."
We warped out to sea again on the afternoon of the third, with our friend the cooper for pilot; the entire settlement turning out upon the rocks to wish us good-by, and remaining there till they looked in the distance like a herd of seal. But we found no opening in the pack, and came back again to Pröven on the fourth, not sorry, as the weather was thickening, to pass our festival inside the little port.