We had not gone very far when, driving through a village, we knocked over a man on a bicycle. People came running up through the darkness. Peter Freuchen leaped down from his seat to pick up the man, who seemed to be uninjured, and there was a great chatter in the Danish tongue, while I kept on shouting to Freuchen, “How much to pay?” After a while he resumed his seat and said, “Nodings to pay!” So we went on again, and after a long, cold drive without further incident, reached Elsinore, where Hamlet saw his father’s ghost.
At the hotel there we had something hot to drink, and then Mrs. Rasmussen caught sight of a dapper little man who was the Director of the Danish-Greenland Company and the owner of the launch which was to meet Doctor Cook.
I was left in the background while my three companions entered into conversation with him. From the expression on their faces, I soon saw that they were disappointed, and I resigned myself to the thought that I had the poorest chance of meeting the explorer’s ship at sea.
Presently Mrs. Rasmussen came back.
“He won’t take us,” she said.
“Hard luck!”
“But,” she added, “he will take you!”
That sounded ridiculous, but it was true. The pompous little man, it seemed, had had applications from half the ladies of Copenhagen, including his own wife, perhaps, to take them on his tug to meet the hero of the North Pole. He had refused them all, in order to favor none at the expense of others. It was impossible for him to take Mrs. Rasmussen and her friends. He very much regretted that. But when they told him that I was an English journalist, he said there would be a place for me with two or three Danish correspondents.
Amazing chance! But hard on the little party I had brought to Elsinore! They were very generous about the matter, and wished me good luck when I embarked on the small tug which was to steam out to a lightship in the Cattegat and at dawn go out to meet the Hans Egede, as Cook’s ship was called. Like a fool, I left my overcoat behind and nearly perished of cold, until an hour later I had climbed up an iron ladder to the lightship in a turbulent sea and descended into the skipper’s cabin, where there was a joyous “fugg” and some hot cocoa spiced with a touch of paraffin.
At dawn we saw, far away up the Cattegat, a little ship all gay with bunting. It was the Hans Egede. We steamed toward it, lay alongside, and climbed to its top deck up a rope ladder. There I saw a sturdy, handsome Anglo-Saxon-looking man, in furs, surrounded by a group of hairy and furry men, Europeans and Eskimos, and some Arctic dogs. There was no journalistic rival of mine aboard, except the young Danes with us.