HANS AND HIS FAMILY.
The untutored savage is not a peculiarly delicious creature under the best of circumstances. He is apt to have very crude notions about meum and tuum, and the truth is not in him. Truth, indeed, seems to be, like gallantry, a fine art, and men have to be cultivated to the understanding of it. But Hans was not altogether an untutored savage, for the missionaries had control of him before Dr. Kane took him in charge, and had taught him to read the Testament and Thomas à Kempis, and to sign his name. The story of his proficiency in these respects having got abroad, in connection with supposed services rendered to Dr. Kane’s party in Christian charity, Hans has been made much of in a Sunday-school book that I have seen somewhere within a year or so, as a striking example of the power of Christian labor among the heathen—just as if he did not use what he had acquired for a cloak to hide his true character, something after the manner of Uriah Heep when playing a part before the pious Creakle and the zealous board of visitors.
I do not mean to be understood to give this as by any means a fair sample of the influence of Christian civilization upon the Greenlanders, for I have had frequent occasion to testify to the excellence of the native character in many conspicuous instances. Hans is nothing more than one of that very numerous class common to all peoples. Even the pastor of the little church at Upernavik can do nothing to help the mischief-making sinner; for the reader must know that Upernavik has a church. It was here that Mr. Anthon, now at Julianashaab, performed his first missionary labors. The pastor of this Upernavik flock surely fills Cowper’s description of the Moravian brethren, going forth,
“Fired with a zeal peculiar to defy
The rage and rigor of a Polar sky;
And plant successfully sweet Saviour’s rose
On icy plains, and in eternal snows.”
A new pastor, accompanied by his wife, came out in the Constancia to take charge of the mission. They were a young couple. Certainly no one would charge them with undue regard to things earthly when they subject themselves to such banishment.
Yet one might, after all, be worse off than here in Greenland and, for a certain length of time, I think the banishment might be bearable enough. One of the happiest, best contented, and most cultivated men that I have ever met, did not live much south of this, and he has declared to me that he would not exchange his Greenland lodge for the most comfortable quarters in his own fine city of Copenhagen. And it does seem strange that such a large number of superior men—superior in education and refinement—find their way to this inhospitable region, as governors, missionaries, and physicians. It is either because the home Government is particularly careful of its agents, or that the region possesses some peculiar attraction for thoughtful and reflective minds. “It is,” said my friend before alluded to, “the best place in the world to read books in,” and great readers most of these Danes in Greenland are.