“Two days after this a mist had settled down upon the islands which embayed us, and when it lifted we found ourselves rowing in lazy time, under the shadow of Karkamoot. Just then a familiar sound came to us over the water. We had often listened to the screeching of the gulls or the bark of the fox, and mistaken it for the ‘Huk’ of the Esquimaux; but this had about it an inflection not to be mistaken, for it died away in the familiar cadence of a ‘halloo.’
“ ‘Listen, Petersen! oars, men!’ ‘What is it?’—and he listened quietly at first, and then, trembling, said, in a half whisper, ‘Dannemarkers!’
“I remember this the first tone of Christian voice which had greeted our return to the world. How we all stood up and peered into the distant nook; and how the cry came to us again, just as, having seen nothing, we were doubting whether the whole was not a dream; and then how, with long sweeps, the white ash cracking under the spring of the rowers, we stood for the cape that the sound proceeded from, and how nervously we scanned the green spots, which our experience, grown now into instinct, told us would be the likely camping-ground of wayfarers!
“By-and-by—for we must have been pulling for a good half-hour—the single mast of a small shallop showed itself; and Petersen, who had been very quiet and grave, burst out into an incoherent fit of crying, only relieved by broken exclamations of mingled Danish and English. ‘’Tis the Upernavik oil-boat, the Fraulein Flaischer! Carlie Mossyn, the assistant cooper, must be on his road to Kingatok for blubber. The Mariane (the one annual ship) has come, and Carlie Mossyn’—and here he did it all over again, gulping down his words and wringing his hands.
“It was Carlie Mossyn, sure enough. The quiet routine of a Danish settlement is the same year after year, and Petersen had hit upon the exact state of things. The Mariane was at Proven, and Carlie Mossyn had come up in the Fraulein Flaischer to get the year’s supply of blubber from Kingatok.
“Here we first got our cloudy vague idea of what had passed in the world during our absence. The friction of its fierce rotation has not much disturbed this little outpost of civilisation, and we thought it a sort of blunder as he told us that France and England were leagued with the Mussulman against the Greek Church. He was a good Lutheran, this assistant cooper, and all news with him had a theological complexion.
“ ‘What of America? eh, Petersen?’—and we all looked, waiting for him to interpret the answer.
“ ‘America?’ said Carlie; ‘we don’t know much of that country here, for they have no whalers on the coast; but a steamer and a barque passed up a fortnight ago, and have gone out into the ice to seek your party.’
“How gently all the lore of this man oozed out of him! he seemed an oracle, as, with hot tingling fingers pressed against the gunwale of the boat, we listened to his words. ‘Sebastopol aint taken.’ Where and what was Sebastopol?
“But ‘Sir John Franklin?’ There we were at home again—our own delusive little speciality rose uppermost. Franklin’s party, or traces of the dead which represented it, had been found nearly a thousand miles to the south of where we had been searching for them. He knew it; for the priest (Pastor Kraag) had a German newspaper which told all about it. And so we ‘out oars’ again, and rowed into the fogs.