I need not put them below zero. That would be too cold an anticipation to carry even to this latitude. Zero: a poor, shabby village these Christian Esquimaux will have built, even after nigh a century of Moravian tuition. Still it will be a real village, not a distracted jumble of huts, such as we had seen below.
The prospect had been curiously pleasing. True, I desired much to see the unadulterated Esquimaux. But that would come, I had supposed, in the further prosecution of our voyage. Here I could see what they would become under loving instruction,—could gauge their capabilities, and thus answer one of the prime questions I had brought.
A real Hopedale, after all this wild, sterile, hopeless coast! A touch of civilization, to contrast with the impression of that Labradorian rag-tag existence which we had hitherto seen, and which one could not call human without coughing! I like deserts and wilds,—but, if you please, by way of condiment or sauce to civilization, not for a full meal. I have not the heroic Thoreau-digestion, and grow thin after a time on a diet of moss and granite, even when they are served with ice. Lift the curtain, therefore, and let us look forthwith on your Hopedale.
"Hopedale? Why, here it is,—look!"
Well, I have been doing nothing less for the last half-hour. If looking could make a village, I should begin to see one. There, to be sure, is the mission-house, conspicuous enough, quaint and by no means unpleasing. It is a spacious, substantial, two-story edifice, painted in two shades of a peculiar red, and looking for all the world as if a principal house, taken from one of those little German toy-villages which are in vogue about Christmas, had been enormously magnified, and shipped to Labrador. There, too, and in similar colors, is the long chapel, on the centre of whose roof there is a belfry, which looks like two thirds of immense red egg, drawn up at the top into a spindle, and this surmounted by a weathercock,—as if some giant had attempted to blow the egg from beneath, and had only blown out of it this small bird with a stick to stand on! Ah, yes! and there is the pig-sty,—not in keeping with the rest, by any means! It must be that they keep a pig only now and then, and for a short time, and house it any way for that little while. But no, it is not a piggery; it is not a building at all; it is some chance heap of rubbish, which will be removed to-morrow.
The mission-station, then, is here; but the village must be elsewhere. Probably it is on the other side of this point of land on which the house and chapel are situated; we can see that the water sweeps around there. That is the case, no doubt; Hopedale is over there. After dinner we will row around, and have a look at it.
After dinner, however, we decide to go first and pay our respects to the missionaries. They are entitled to the precedence. We long, moreover, to take the loving, self-sacrificing men by the hand; while, aside from their special claims to honor, it will be so pleasant to meet cultivated human beings once more! They are Germans, but their head-quarters are at London; they will speak English; and if their vocabulary prove scanty, we will try to eke it out with bits of German.
We row ashore in our own skiff, land, and—Bless us! what is this now? To the right of the large, neat, comfortable mission-house is a wretched, squalid spatter and hotch-potch of—what in the world to call them? Huts? Hovels? One has a respect for his mother-tongue,—above all, if he have assumed obligations toward it by professing the function of a writer; and any term by which human dwellings are designated must be taken cum grano salis, if applied to these structures. "It cannot be that this is Christian Hopedale!" Softly, my good Sir; it can be, for it is!
Reader, do you ever say, "Whew-w-w"? There were three minutes, on the 30th of July last, during which that piece of interjectional eloquence seemed to your humble servant to embody the whole dictionary!
To get breath, let us turn again to the mission-mansion, which now, under the effect of sudden contrast, seems too magnificent to be real, as if it had been built by enchantment rather than by the labor of man. This is situated half a dozen rods from the shore, at a slight elevation above it, and looks pleasantly up the bay to the southwest. The site has been happily chosen. Here, for a wonder, is an acre or two of land which one may call level,—broader toward the shore, and tapering to a point as it runs back. To the right, as we face it, the ground rises not very brokenly, giving a small space for the hunch of huts, then falls quickly to the sea; while beyond, and toward the ocean, islands twenty miles deep close in and shelter all. To the left go up again the perpetual hills, hills. Everywhere around the bay save here, on island and main, the immitigable gneiss hills rise bold and sudden from the water, now dimly impurpled with lichen, now in nakedness of rock surface, yet beautified in their bare severity by alternating and finely waving stripes of lightest and darkest gray,—as if to show sympathy with the billowy heaving of the sea.