Away, away once more I flee
To nothing half so warm!”
Our Sagaman.
Disco Island is one of the most notable localities in Greenland. There is a legend that a mighty sorcerer, or angeikut, dragged the island there from the south; and even to the present time they point out a remarkable hole in the rock, on its north side, through which the evil genius of the island rove his rope. The island is upwards of a hundred miles long, is everywhere very lofty, and presents the most superb lines of cliffs of trap rock that I have ever seen. On the south side of the island, in latitude 69°, there is a low and ragged spur of granite rock, near a mile in length, which incloses as perfect a little harbor as can anywhere be found, and this the Danes have expressed in the name Godhavn (Good-harbor), which they have given it. This rocky spur is a peninsula at low water; at high water an island. On the north side of it, facing the great tall trap cliffs which tower up two thousand feet above the harbor, stands the little town which takes its name from the harbor, though better known by the English whalers’ name of Lievely, which is probably a corruption of lively, for the town is the metropolis of North Greenland; and, having been a general rendezvous for whale and discovery ships almost from the beginning of the present century, its metropolitan gayety has become widely celebrated.
It was on a cold, gray, misty morning that we arrived at Godhavn. There had been heavy frosts and a light spurt of snow; and the little town being hidden from view in the gloomy atmosphere, it is not surprising that it should have impressed our sagaman, as it did all of us, rather unfavorably. But this feeling speedily wore off after we had landed and called at the inspector’s house—a house to me not new, for there I had in former years spent many pleasant days with the prior incumbent, Justitsraad Olrik, now director of the Greenland Company in Copenhagen.
The present inspector is Herr Krarup Smith, a young man of perhaps two-and-thirty, who possesses the same enthusiastic fondness for scientific discovery for which Mr. Olrik was distinguished, and the same cultivated appreciation of its importance; and being obliged every year to visit each of the districts and subordinate stations within his inspectorate, he has made many valuable observations, and collected many rare and curious specimens; among which are some fossil remains of the limestone, coal, and slate deposits of Disco Island, and other localities of Disco Bay. This bay appears to have been a great carboniferous basin, coal being found to crop out on almost every side of it.
The inspector’s wife seemed to be quite as well content with her Greenland home as the inspector was himself, and there never was a happier baby than the Greenland-born Elizabet, whose first birthday we were hospitably called upon to assist in celebrating immediately after our arrival.
The inspector’s house is not, by any means, an imposing edifice, being of the usual pitchy hue; but it is comfortable, and sufficiently capacious. The suite of rooms—comprising billiard-room, dining-room, and parlor—into which we were ushered by the same Sophy who had presided there as housekeeper these many years past, and who wore the inevitable silver seal-skin pantaloons and dainty snow-white boots as of old, had nothing to indicate that we were three degrees north of the Arctic Circle. Some prints of fruits and flowers were hanging on the dining-room walls, and the parlor was literally strewn with books and family souvenirs, and also music. A piano stood in one corner, and bore evidence of being well used. Bright flowers were blooming in the windows, and the faces of two bright young ladies, one the sister of the inspector, the other of his wife, were there, as if on purpose to make the picture quite complete and leave nothing to be wished for.
These young ladies were on a visit, having come out from Denmark the previous summer; and now, at the end of the year, they were about to return in the Hvalfisken, a brig which came into the harbor soon after our arrival. I asked how they liked this Greenland life? They had no fault to find with it at all, except the ending of it. They would stay another year, only for the homes across the sea, where they were sadly missed, as I could well imagine they must be.
Godhavn is not so lacking in life as most of the other towns. Here all the Danish ships are obliged to come to receive their orders from the inspector, both upon their arrival and departure from the Greenland waters; and of late years, during the search for Sir John Franklin, here is where all the searchers came to taste the first sweets of home, after a long imprisonment in the inhospitable regions around Beechy Island and elsewhere. And none left without carrying away the most lively recollections of the place and of the genial Justitsraad Olrik; nor did any body ever forget the Justitsraad’s housekeeper, the inimitable Sophy.