If the church had not been black, it would have been in all respects neat and tidy. Black though it was, it was a pleasant sight to see this house of God here in the desert, and by its very appearance giving proof unmistakable of good, earnest, Christian work. “Cleanliness before godliness,” was meant for men, but it will do for a church as well.
The same neatness was observable at the pastor’s house. The little building was surrounded with a yard and garden, which was inclosed with a white fence; and in every window of the house plants were growing in brightly-painted pots, filling the rooms with their delicious perfume.
In the pastor I met with a great surprise. I had seen him before in 1860–61 at Upernavik, away up among the polar frosts, almost a thousand miles beyond his present residence. It seemed as if he could not quit Greenland; as if his heart and soul were in his missionary work, and he would not give it up. He had been compelled to ask for change of residence, for the Upernavik winters had been too much for him. I had scarcely crossed the threshold, when I distinguished a pleasant smile and gentle voice that had welcomed me before. “Can this be Mr. Anthon?” I asked.
“Yes;” and the good pastor opened wide his eyes, greatly astonished to see me there; but, recovering himself presently, he addressed me by name, and then called his wife and sister, and I could almost think myself back again in the same neat parsonage where I had first met this interesting family years before. A lovely girl and a bright-eyed boy had been added to the group since then; but now, as then, there was soon a bottle of wine upon the table, fragrant coffee in the urn, some Danish fare soon followed; and there was plenty of Danish heartiness all round. In the afternoon we strolled up the bank of a little stream that runs beside the church and parsonage, and came upon a broad valley, in the centre of which there is a lake. Around the lake there were extensive pasture-grounds, upon which were browsing a herd of cows and a flock of goats. At this I was not a little surprised, for although I knew that in former times cattle had been reared here in great numbers, I had received the impression that at the present time they would not thrive. Mr. Anthon informed me that there was no difficulty in raising them, except the very important one of forage for the winter, for at Julianashaab the grass never grows high enough for hay. Farther up the fiord, however, it is abundant; but since the hay must all be brought in boats, it was both a tedious and expensive operation to gather it. Yet he managed to keep three cows; the governor had an equal number; the doctor had two; others had each one; and, indeed, all the well-to-do people in the village—Danes, half-breeds, and the better class of Greenlanders—had a daily supply of milk the year round.
The lake abounds in trout, a few of which were caught, and, when we returned for dinner, Mrs. Anthon had them for us on the table. She had, besides, some Greenland beef, and Greenland milk and butter; some smoked Greenland salmon too, and some Greenland venison; also some radishes and lettuce from her garden: and now, when these were, after a while, comfortably settled in their proper places with a glass of good old Santa Cruz punch, and an old Dutch pipe was brought to keep it company, and the governor and his assistant, and the doctor and Motzfeldt had come in to join us, we fell into a lively talk of Greenland and its legends; and it was not until a new day was breaking above the solemn hills around that I found my way back to the Panther. For fear, however, the reader should think we “made a night of it” at the parsonage, I will remind him that the “break of day” there, in the early part of July, is about two o’clock.
I have rarely passed a more pleasant evening or one more profitable. Our conversation ran mostly upon events of the past rather than of the present; for Julianashaab, although not without interest in itself, is doubly interesting from its locality. It stands on historic ground. Here was the spot that we were seeking when the Panther drove in among the “hills and fields of ice” upon the Land of Desolation; a spot which history had made famous, and legend and tradition had been busy with; where brave old Eric the Red had come nearly nine centuries ago, and, with his followers, founded a sort of independent state.
The fiord on the banks of which stands this modern town of Julianashaab extends some forty miles beyond; but, while the modern town stands alone, in ancient days hamlets were dotted beside it everywhere; thousands of cattle once browsed where there are now but a few cows; and peace and plenty reigned here once among a Christian people, who, after maintaining themselves through nearly five hundred years, undisturbed by the elements of discord that afflicted the world elsewhere, became at length extinct, and, while they passed away, left only a few meagre records of their growth and progress, and ruins of their decay. These ruins, I had learned, were still to be seen at many points of the fiord, the walls of some of the buildings being, even at this late period, in a tolerable state of preservation.
To visit these ruins was, in fact, our principal object in putting into Julianashaab. Around them, indeed, centred the principal interest of the voyage—at least, so far as concerned myself; and I did not quit, therefore, the house of the good pastor until we had planned an expedition to the place where the founder of this ancient people dwelt, and the church wherein he worshipped, in those latter days of his life when he had abandoned his war-god, Odin, for the Prince of Peace.
I had hoped Peter Motzfeldt would offer to accompany us, as he had visited some of the ruins forty years before with Captain Graah; but other engagements preventing him, Mr. Anthon was good enough to undertake to be our guide.