Dr. Rudolph is a fine specimen of the best class of Danish gentlemen who accept appointments here, and who seem to take root and never desire to be transplanted elsewhere.
In early life he was an assistant surgeon in the Danish army. Later, he was largely engaged in private practice in the vicinity of Copenhagen. His health failing him, he went to Greenland as physician to the colony of Jacobshavn, and thereby saved his life; but his life once saved, he had no mind to renew the humdrum existence of powders and pills, and his old age now finds him both governor and physician of one of the most productive of the Greenland Districts, even although it is the most northern of all points of Christian occupation. His children are at school in Copenhagen, all except the two youngest, who are now with him; and there seems to be no end to his plans of doing for them out of his percentage of the Upernavik production, which furnishes him a moderate income.
Judging from the seeming shortness of the week I spent at Dr. Rudolph’s house, I should say a winter would not be tedious; but then it must be borne in mind that my week was a continual sunshine. I was used to it then, as I had been before, and did not observe or think of it; but now to look back over the time, and remember a week, and weeks, and months even, passing away without once lighting a lamp; to take a walk at midnight as an appetizer for sleep, just before going to bed, and do it in the daylight; to watch through day and night the shadows going round and round, is to recall a now strange experience. I have, indeed, never seen a person with the least sentiment who has ever been beyond the Arctic Circle, whose fancy did not cling lovingly to that long, lingering day and the never-setting sun.
But all things must have an end, and so at length I found myself once more back in my damp and smoke-begrimed quarters in the Panther’s cabin. On the same day the Constancia was ready to sail, and our captain offered Captain Bang a tow. He was going down the coast forty miles, to Proven, where he was to take in more cargo before returning home to Copenhagen. But, as ill luck would have it, a small iceberg had drifted into the middle of the harbor and grounded right in front of the two vessels, which lay almost side by side. It seemed at first as if we were both fast there, but the Constancia’s cable slipped out and freed the ship, while ours stubbornly refused to budge; so that we had the mortification of seeing the vessel we were going to tow move off without us under oars. It was a most aggravating situation. Doctor Rudolph was on board the Constancia, on his way to Proven. He cried to us that he would be back in three days, and we were quite welcome to the harbor. The captain of the brig offered us a tow if we would only pass along a line. The order of things was quite reversed. The steamer was helpless, while the sailer was off.
Our captain, vexed by the detention (and these taunts did not in the least soothe him), was evidently coming to a desperate determination. “Pay out chain,” he shouted from the bridge. Then he rang his bell to “back astern.” The vessel moved away from the berg as far as the chain would let her go, and then he rang again, “Ahead full speed.” Down the Panther came with a steady helm, and with her iron forefoot she took the iceberg fairly in the middle. The shock was terrific, and there was a great scattering of men on the deck and of plates in the pantry; but fortunately the iceberg at that point was sloping, and the Panther slid up about five feet out of the water, which partly broke the force of the blow. Then she slid back again, luckily with her masts all standing. The Constancia’s people cheered us, and we backed off again and went at the iceberg once more, with the same result—we did not budge or damage it in any way further than to splinter off innumerable fragments, which covered the sea all around us. But the berg was thin at the centre where we had struck; and the captain, growing more and more determined, backed off and butted away at the berg again and again, until, finally, the sixth effort proved successful. The berg split with a fearful sound. The two masses, each pivoted on the bottom, rolled over with a great swash; the Panther sheered ahead between the fragments, and then, picking up our anchor, to the universal astonishment we steamed out of the harbor in triumph, and kept our promise to the Constancia.
Dropping the Constancia off Proven, we continued south through the night, and on the following morning sighted the lofty mountains of Disco Island. Passing the Waigat, and the great stream of icebergs which emerges from it, we kept close to the bold and picturesque shores of Disco, and on the following day dropped anchor in Godhavn, close beside the town which takes its name from the little landlocked bay.
CHAPTER IX.
DISCO ISLAND.
“A rocky islet in the sea,
A lonely harbor on its lee,