Down went the anchor with its usual rush and rattle, and immediately the rocks were alive with people, who, aroused from their peaceful slumbers by the strange noise, sallied forth as suddenly as the witches from Kirk Alloway. Looking forward to a closer scrutiny of them when the day had fully come, we sought our bunks, and, exhausted with the excitement of the night and the constant exposure of the past few days, we turned in to sleep the sleep of weariness.
CHAPTER III.
A HOPEFUL TOWN IN A HOPELESS PLACE.
This “Land of Desolation,” to which we had come, is the Greenland of history and of the present time. All the southern part of it, as far up as the sixty-first degree of latitude, is called the “District of Julianashaab,” and the town of Julianashaab is its capital. This town is one of the most flourishing in the whole country. It is, perhaps, the most pleasantly situated of all of them, and, standing in a region full of historic and legendary interest, it presents a good type of Greenland life, past and present, and it is well worth looking at. Being the residence of the Governor of the “District,” something of additional importance is attached to it on that account. Country squires who come up to London; backwoodsmen casting their curious eyes about them in Washington; children on a holiday excursion to a neighboring village, are not seized with greater wonder at what they behold, than is the hunter from some remote station of the Julianashaab District, when, after having braved the dangers of flood and field, he finds himself observing the latest fashions, and learning how the world moves generally in the town of Julianashaab. So much, therefore, for its social and political importance.
VIEW OF JULIANASHAAB.
They call it a colony, and its governor, or director, is the colonibestyrere, which is to say, the steerer of it. There are eleven other colonibestyreres in the country, one for each of the other eleven “Districts,” which extend northward one above the other from Julianashaab to the very confines of the habitable globe. The northernmost is Upernavik, beyond which there are no Christian people, or people of any kind living on the earth, except a few skin-clad savages. And, strange enough, this most northern place of Christian occupation bears a name which signifies “the summer place,” derived from Upernak, or, as it might be better spelt, Oopernak, the native Esquimaux word for summer.
Julianashaab, on the other hand, expresses a compliment to royalty. It was founded nearly a hundred years ago, at which time a king sat on the Danish throne who had a queen named Juliana. So, in honor of her majesty, they called this hopeful place the haab of Juliana, which is to say, in English, Julia’s Hope. I could but wonder if all the expectations that the name bespeaks were ever realized; for if so, the founders of it must have been extremely modest. I was especially impressed with this feeling when I landed next morning, on a visit to the governor’s house, and was greeted there by the principal part of the population.
Not a soul of them had, I believe, ever gone to bed after our arrival; but, on the contrary, had remained as they began—gazing at the Panther all the morning. When they first saw signs of activity on board, they expressed their delight in a very hilarious fashion; calling to each other, laughing, and running about from place to place, singly and in flocks, in a manner to indicate a very lively state of feeling. The little huts from which they emerged were scarcely distinguishable from the rocks themselves, and the people appeared to be coming out of the earth, and dropping into it again like prairie-dogs. Great was the rush when I got in my boat and started for the landing-place. Here they formed themselves in two lines, a hundred or more of them—men, women, and children—all talking or laughing, and all much delighted. Some pointed with their fingers; others remarked the singular performances of my tailor; others said, properly enough, what an odd-looking thing a round-topped hat was; and they all stood their ground while I marched between the two files, not one of them willing to forego for a moment the gratification of the passion of curiosity, which it is pleasant to know that arctic frosts can no more destroy than civilization unseat from its prying stool.
To see yourself gazed at by so many persons, even although they may be half-savage, is an embarrassing circumstance; and I should no doubt have felt bashful about running the gauntlet of their eyes had not another sense than that of sight claimed its legitimate right of precedence, and with such remarkable energy, too, that all minor emotions were impossible. Accordingly, I made my way through the crowd without any delay whatever, and, in fact, with a speed not at all calculated to give that opportunity for close examination which is always desirable to a traveller. The fact is, like the pilot we had picked up, they smelt fishy, and, had I not been most positively informed otherwise, I should have written the inhabitants of Julianashaab down as amphibious creatures of a fishy nature. And it would have been no very unnatural mistake either—not so bad, at least, as Sir John Mandeville’s imagining boles of cotton to be woolly hens.