DISCO.
At Disco they were again warmly welcomed by the Danes; and if MacGahan has not been carried away by the enthusiasm of the moment, the young ladies must indeed be something delightful. He avers that their small hands and feet would make an English or American girl die with envy, and that they dance like sylphs. Of one he says, gushingly, “It was a pure delight to watch her little feet flitting over the ground like butterflies, or humming-birds, or rosebuds, or anything else that is delicate and sweet and delightful. It was not dancing at all: it was flying; it was floating through the air on a wave of rhythm, without even so much as touching ground.” What more could be said after this? He states, however, that they were all very well behaved. They allowed the men not even [pg 96]a kiss or a squeeze of the hand, and knew as well how to maintain their dignity and keep people at a proper distance as any other young ladies. They are all good Christians and church-going people, belonging, as do all the Esquimaux of Greenland, to some form of the Lutheran faith, to which they have been converted by the mild and beneficent influence of the kindly Danes.
ENTRANCE TO THE MUSIC HALL, DISCO.
The ball-room in which their first entertainment was given was rather small for forty or fifty people to dance in, being only twelve feet by fifteen. It was also, perhaps, a little dark, being lighted by only one small window, for as it was broad daylight at ten o’clock in the evening at that period it was not thought worth while to bring in candles. The ceiling was barely six feet high, and in fact the festive hall was no other than the workshop of Disco’s lonely carpenter, which had been cleaned out for the occasion. Over its “dore” the inscription shown in the above illustration was found, intimating that it would “opn” at 8 o’clock.
EXPLORERS CROSSING “HUMMOCKS.”
At Upernavik, the last Danish station at which the Pandora stopped, and that only long enough to obtain some dogs, they learned that the English expedition had sailed thence on the 22nd of July. In north latitude 74° they had a glimpse of the grandest of Greenland’s glaciers, which is described as a great inclined plane, seventy or eighty miles long, extending back to the interior in one vast icy slope. Immense as was this field of ice, they knew that it was nothing but a small corner of the great, lone, silent, dreary world beyond. Now they entered the dreaded Melville Bay, which is in some years never free from ice. It is often only towards the end of August that ships can get through it. Here, in the middle of that month, the little steam yacht Fox, of McClintock’s memorable expedition, was caught in the ice, carried down Baffin’s Bay and Davis Straits, only to be freed 242 days afterwards by a miracle. The fact of a bear swimming in the sea betokened that ice was not far off, and so it proved. It was not, however, at first very formidable, consisting only of thin, loose floes, that offered little resistance to the sharp prow of the Pandora. On the evening of the 19th of August they were at the Carey Islands, where a bootless search was made for a cairn of stones believed to have been erected by Captain Nares. They found, however, two cairns erected by a whaler in 1867, in one of which he had left half a bottle of rum, which, having undergone eight successive freezings, had become as mild as fine old Rhine wine. It is needless to say that the whaling captain’s health [pg 98]was drunk therewith and forthwith. Two barrels of letters for the Alert and Discovery were left there.
THE MONUMENT TO BELLOT.