And the life of her husband is a very hard and, as it seems to me, a very thankless one. Strange as it may seem, Jensen came here to seek his fortune. The little money that he had saved up from my expedition of 1860-’61, enabled him to return to Denmark, and there to marry, and come back to Greenland and set up for himself. He had been promised the charge of this remote settlement of Tessuisak, which is fifty miles above Upernavik, and on the very confines of the great ice-barrier. He was always a fine shot, an active man, and an expert hunter; and he thought by coming here he would in a few years accumulate a competency, which he would carry back to Denmark. But I fancy it must have been something of his restless nature besides that impelled him to this life. He had lived several years in Greenland before I knew him, and, like all other men who have returned to the primitive life of the hunter, he never again took kindly to other ways, but clung lovingly to independence. It is not, however, so with women, and hence to them the greater hardship and privation. Without the same motives to action, they can not find society in the animals of the chase.
JENSEN AND HIS FAMILY.
Unhappily, Jensen had overestimated his skill and the resources of Tessuisak, and in spite of all he was disappointed. The whole productions of the place per annum do not exceed five thousand dollars, chiefly made up from seal-oil, eider-down, and bear and fox skins. On this Jensen receives but five per cent., a salary besides of five-and-twenty dollars, and one Government ration. There is no provision for his wife and children. Clearly the Royal Greenland Fishing Company never contemplated such a thing as a wife going to so distant and woe-begone a place.
But if the fact of Christian people selecting this remote, forlorn, and frigid corner of the world, voluntarily, for a residence is incomprehensible to the ordinary understanding, the pluck of the thing will be appreciated by all. I know of nothing that would require a greater degree of moral courage than to face life in such a situation. Yet Jensen gloried in the work he did, and grew very animated when he recited his bear and reindeer hunts, the skill and success he had in the seal and white whale fisheries, and boasted of his good-luck in making the natives be to him, what no other Dane had succeeded in doing, “hewers of wood and drawers of water;” or rather, to speak practically, as we must of a region where there is no wood to hew, and where all the water used is made from snow, the butchers of his game, and the drawers of his blubber. In a small way he is a sort of feudal lord, with natural rights and privileges which I doubt if he would exchange for the benefits of an inferior station in some inferior latitude.
The population which he thus rules comprises sixty-two savage souls, scattered about in huts and tents upon the rocky hill-side. The dogs, which in the winter-time are used to drag the sledges, are beyond counting; and the stench that arose from the carcasses of decomposing fish and seals, and other offensive sources, exceeds belief. I pitied the wife, and mentioned it to Jensen. “Oh, she’s got used to it, and don’t mind!” One of the native families had, with peculiar impudence, pitched a tent close beside Jensen’s door, and he told me that it could not be removed without giving offense to the whole village. Barren though the land, the Esquimaux, with laughable gravity, proclaim themselves the true proprietors of the soil, and they do not hesitate to tell the Danes—though not in hostile fashion, calling them foreigners—that they are intruders.
What made the presence of this tent the more obnoxious was that the wife was supposed to be a witch, and often made night hideous with her devilish incantations. Although nominally a Christian now, she can not yet refrain from her old practices. And surely if ill looks had ever any thing to do, as they always seem to have had, with the general make-up of a witch, she was entitled to be looked upon as the mother of them all, for a more frightful-looking being surely never walked in darkness and conspired with the evil one. Yet this monster had a child, and its innocent baby face did not exhibit any evidence that it was conscious of its dangerous parentage, but it sucked its fist as contentedly as any other baby that had been born all right and in the mortal fashion. Her original name was Annorasuak, which is something equivalent to “Mother of the Winds.” Her history, as I had it afterwards from Jensen, is not without romantic interest, and will be again referred to.
AN ARCTIC WITCH.
I could not part from this little family of Jensen without emotion. For seven long years the wife had seen no living soul from the great world from which her love had called her, and the children looked upon us with amazement. They had never seen a ship in all their little lives before, and the smoking, snorting Panther was a wonder in their eyes. We made them up a store of such good things as we had on board, including every thing of an antiscorbutic character that we could lay our hands upon, added a couple of tons or so of coals, and then, with Jensen on board to pilot us through the intricate passages between the islands, we bore away from this most northern house of all the world, and shaped our course for Upernavik.