Mr. Hansen communicated to me many interesting facts, and through his instrumentality and that of the inspector I was enabled to visit the coal-fields, which are here very extensive.
I found Mr. Hansen to be an enthusiastic naturalist. Among other valuable specimens which I owed to his kindness was a large collection of birds’ eggs and skins, and some fossils. To the study of the birds of the region and their habits he has devoted much attention. The great auk, long since supposed to be entirely extinct, he told me had been recently seen on one of the Whale-fish islands. Two years before one had been actually captured by a native, who, being very hungry, and wholly ignorant of the great value of the prize he had secured, proceeded at once to eat it, much to the disgust of Mr. Hansen, who did not learn of it until too late to come to the rescue. How little the poor savage thought of the great fortune he had just missed by hastily indulging his appetite!
THE GREAT AUK.
The great auk is not the only mysterious creature in Greenland that seems likely soon to become entirely extinct, for there is, besides, the fierce and powerful amarok, which has been in latter times rarely seen, and is much dreaded. It is the national terror of the nursery and children are frightened to sleep or kept at home with threats of calling the awful monster, whose rapacity is so great that he can take off any number of Esquimaux babies that you choose to name. This animal, which is an enormous wolf, is not, however, quite as fabulous as the old wives’ stories would incline you to believe, one having actually appeared in the country within a few years, and, after committing the most fearful ravages among the dogs, and terrifying the people, was finally shot. His skin now adorns the Copenhagen Museum. The story has spread everywhere, and is related by every body with the same zest that a frontiersman would tell of an Indian raid.
Disco Bay, which separates the island from the main-land, is sixty miles wide, and is a splendid sheet of water. Several glaciers pour their frozen floods into it, and grand processions of icebergs stretch over it towards the outlets above and below the island. One of these glaciers is exceptionally fine. It is known as the Jacobshavn Glacier, or, as the Danes call it, Jacobshavn’s Eis-strom; and this, since we could not at present climb the hills of Disco Island, we resolved to visit. Its name is derived from a little town near by, and for this little town we steamed away in the early morning, while the sun was silvering the mountain crests and melting away the chilly mists of the night.
CHAPTER X.
JACOBSHAVN.
The view of the southern shore of Disco Island as we crossed the bay was truly magnificent. The gnarled shore, full of clefts and caverns, was white with the foam of the sea; the great tall cliffs were red with the glowing sun; the distant hills were bathed in purple, and long streaks of bright yellow sandstone, marking the coal-measures, broke in here and there to complete a picture which will be remembered long. The icebergs, too, were more than ordinarily beautiful. There are few places along the Greenland coast from which such large icebergs are discharged as Disco Bay. We stopped frequently to photograph them, and thus dawdled away the hours, so that we did not arrive at our destination until nightfall, for it must be borne in mind that there was a night now—the midnight sun having left us many days before, darkness coming on as soon as ten o’clock.
One of the icebergs that particularly attracted our attention had almost the perfect shape of a truncated cone. But its chief peculiarity was an immense arch running directly through the centre of it, which was apparently large enough for our ship to pass through, since it could not have been less than a hundred feet high and seventy feet wide. It would have been a very hazardous experiment to have undertaken to steam through the berg; but it would have been so novel a thing to have done, that I believe the consideration only of the berg’s liability to fall to pieces about us restrained every body from asking the captain to do the thing. This remarkable hole had been once a portion of a great natural culvert through the glacier into which the waters from the surface found their way and drained off to the sea.