This day I crossed with the boat to the new colony so that I might see how far they had advanced with the building work, which was yet to be completed, therefore making us anxious indeed that the house would not be sufficiently ready for us to move in before the winter. My family and I now had no other dwelling than an open storage shed which stood out at the old colony.
FROM HANS EGEDE’S JOURNAL, SEPTEMBER 1728
Abyssus abyssum!
How hideous is man. He inhabits a hideous world, the most hideous of all possible worlds. Who was it who said that? And as if to add insult to injury, it is now raining. It has rained and snowed since our arrival here. The ships lie shrouded in fog. The sea sighs heavily. The earth sighs when trodden upon, and the soul sighs when the foot becomes soaked. The rocks trickle with rainwater. The grey sky dips, sated and weary, to the land. The natives are filthy swine. The Danes hardly any better. When I see a man, I see his corpse, the dull, blue-green sheen of the muscles, the rotten belly, the grin of death. I cannot help it. It comes with the profession. The colony is full of corpses, more than a hundred; they dance their bony dance and grin; they drink and fornicate and pretend they are not dead. Man is a maggot-sack hastening towards the grave.
This is the problem of man, the opposite is true of the animals. We are created in God’s image. We carry within us the discrepancy between mortal flesh and undying spirit. And so we turn to God, for we cannot grasp our death. Man is too big to die, but too small to fathom his own death. Therefore, God ought surely to be death’s opposite, and its remedy? But for the blackcoats, the priests. It has all got out of hand with them. They say to us: Prepare ye for death! In the realm of the priests, God and death have become as one. This is their great mistake.
My name is Christian Kieding, surgeon of the colony. I am thirty-four years of age, born in Jutland. In Bergen I served at the garrison, becoming then barber-surgeon on the pink the Kronprinds Christian, which arrived here this spring, a couple of months before the three ships with the turmoil that is to be the King’s new colony.
The weather here is most peculiar. I am not even sure one could say it was raining. The moisture seems to hang in the air like wet washing, though without quite approaching what one would refer to as fog. It is the clouds of the sky descended to earth, to go about among men like the Titans of old. And that is on a good day. Often it blows up a storm from the south-west. Then, the rain, or the sleet, is slung sideways and finds its way inside the smallest crack or crevice, into one’s clothing, into one’s bones, into the crates of provisions, into the building materials, into everywhere. Much has already been discarded, meat unfit to eat, wriggling with maggots, timber gone to rot. The maggots thrive in the damp weather. For the moment they chew on the salted pork in the barrels. Soon they will find other, fresher meat on which to sate themselves. The tents in which the crew sleep are ruined. They have sought shelter in some peat-huts that house the natives in winter. This is worse than Bergen, and Bergen is bad. Yet the people are chased outside, for there is work to be done. At present they are erecting the foundation walls of the governor’s residence. Primum prima, as the old Romans used to say. The Governor himself keeps to his cabin in the Morian, which lies at anchor off the colony. The men are covered from head to toe in thick clay and resemble African slaves. Some jumped in the harbour to wash off the mud, only to clamber back onto land again as dirty as before and a whole lot colder. Now they lie coughing in their miserable beds. I tell them to take off their wet clothes and scrub themselves with flax so as to stimulate the flow of blood in their veins. But they shrink from being naked and would rather have aquavit than good advice from me. They can do as they please. There is no shortage of aquavit, and the quota has been put up in order to ease the mood. Drunkenness is on the rise, not just among the common crew, but also the officers. Occasionally, I will happen to see the Governor standing on the deck of the Morian staring in at the land, partly enveloped by fog. After a moment, he retires to his cabin again. He can do as he pleases.
The priest, Egede, seems not to be bothered by the bad weather. Nor has he been afflicted by the spreading consumption, the same being true of his family, his wife and the four youngsters, and the native boy who always follows along on his heels. He tells me the plants of the countryside, scurvy grass and angelica, are good for treating the sickness so many seamen suffer. In the winter it may be dug up from under the snow. And make sure to always be in motion, he says. Move about, work, do not sit still, or else misery and sickness will be upon you. He is forever chewing on some matter from the vegetable kingdom, and I now follow his advice. There are many herbs inside the peninsula. I drink nothing but fresh water and a little ale, and feel myself to be well. Never better, in fact.
His wife is much older than him, well over fifty, while he is around forty. They are dull, but as imperishable as old woodwork. Madame Egede seems stiffened into the mould of the dogged old woman, her face furrowed like a length of driftwood. The girls have their monthly indispositions, always at the same time, an irascible pair who resemble their father in mind and stature. They are of course besotted with the two young magisters and sit at their feet with their legs tucked underneath them, trying to make themselves delectable, which in many ways they are, especially when seen from behind. If they had any sense, they would sit facing away from the young gentlemen and tempt them with their rearmost curves. A girl with long hair, a sweeping loin and a pair of undarned socks poking out from under her backside can only call to a man’s aesthetic senses and engender his sympathy. But do not turn around, girls! Strange, how much a nose can ruin a good face, or indeed a whole person. Egede came from the north of Norway. He had made a nuisance of himself, so I hear, got some backs up, the sognepræst with whom he shared his fish tithes, the provost, the bishop and the parish officer, and then the thought occurred to him that he might travel to Greenland. I shouldn’t wonder they were glad to be rid of him. He had read accounts about the ancient Norsemen who were meant to be living here, but found only these small, dark people who had never heard of Jesus, much less of Luther, who is Egede’s house-god. Now he has taken it upon himself to save them instead. Most likely they would be best served living the way they have always done. But Egede still talks of the Norsemen, of them living in isolation with their devil worship and papism on the eastern side of the land. Pors has announced he will make an expedition there, and thinks he will ride over the ice-cap on horseback. I imagine his journey will be short. Or else long, as long as the afterlife.
Naturally, there is a shortage of building materials. Most will be used on the new residence, which will house both governor and priest in their separate wings, and where we, the officers, too will be quartered. No one seems to have given a thought to where the numerous crew are to be put up. They growl and mutter about it, though mostly to pressure the governor into putting up their aquavit ration. And this indeed is done, time and again, by the grace of our own highly esteemed pasteboard admiral. The Governor is straight out of the comedy house in Copenhagen, strutting about in his long wig, red uniform, sword and cocked hat. The officers have no time for him. But the crew love and honour him. And indeed one would do well not to underestimate him. He is a cunning one, shrewd for all his fine new clothes. Now and then, when the rain stops, he is to be seen galloping about on his mare, the water spraying from the animal’s hooves. The general dissatisfaction is directed more towards those more immediately in charge, the Paymaster and the Trader, as well as the officers who run the daily work and command them about.
The twenty-four released offenders are a fine illustration of how desperate and ill-conceived the King’s colonial fancies are when carried out into the real world. They are the worst rabble a person can imagine. Young people, though hardened and clouded in their deepest souls, where one must suppose a ray of sun has never once shone. Nearly all are ill with the consumption and the effects of the sea voyage. Not that it seems to hold them back. The women sell themselves to the officers and the tradesmen in return for tobacco and aquavit, and their husbands pocket the proceeds. And so it is that our Danish customs have been brought here to be mingled with the native swine. I shall wager that most have kicked the bucket by the time the first winter has gone. They can do as they please.
I don’t know why I’m so glad to be here. And yet I am. I wander about the inland landscape, dismissive of the rain, dismissive of the wind, finding grandness in the smallest detail – the tiny flowers that grow among the rocks, the misty, gurgling moors, quite white with cotton-grass, the wild thyme which has such a rich and splendid scent when rolled between the fingers, the stillness, the flitting sparrows, which are not frightened by man at all, but will come and feed from the hand – rather than in the spectacular surroundings, which anyway are shrouded by cloud. I gather herbs and plants, many of which presumably possess medicinal properties. I see hares and grouse, ravens, a fox whose zigzagging course I follow. It looks over its shoulder and keeps an eye on me. I will not harm you. It does not seem afraid of me either, though it has never seen a white man before. We come onto higher ground, behind a fell, to a tarn whose full extent is unclear to me due to the mist. I walk along its shore, and drink some water. It is pure and thirst-quenching. The fox pauses, it has seen a lemming or a mouse and stands for some time with a front paw raised, then steals forward all of a sudden to pounce, and the next moment a wriggling, squeaking rodent is locked in its jaws. It looks at me as if to say: There, you see, that is how it is done.
I carry a musket, of course, on my wanderings. But I do not use it. I have no desire to shoot anything. I am a friend of nature, no roaming murderer.
The whole colony project is rather fascinating. Grand in design, folly in practice, as any enterprise which emanates from the Chancellery. I shouldn’t wonder if not a single one of the fine gentlemen in those corridors possessed even a shred of the knowledge required of its human and material resources. Yet there is great dramaturgy in the endeavour, whose servants we all our. The spread of civilization! The conquest and cultivation of the barren land. The stupidity evident in the detail is balanced by the beauty of the whole. It possesses its own relentless momentum and bears with it its own survival, as we men bear with us our death. And thus the march of history and the fate of the individual run parallel in their opposite directions.
The dwelling-house on the Hope Isle, in which the Egede family have lived these past seven years, is being pulled down around its occupants, myself among them, who in the meantime have become more or less homeless. Daily I sail in to the new colony to see how the work is progressing. I cannot suffer the stuffy room. Family life is anathema to me.
I am not married. The salary of a garrison surgeon is modest indeed. Nor have I ever had the wish, not seriously. Of course, I have had my flings. I was in love with a girl once. It was in Bergen. Her name was Sørine Hall, and she was a merchant’s daughter. Alas, good Sørine, how sad your fate. A sixteen-year-old girl with spindly legs and thick pigtails, a freckled nose and eyes like a cow. Cows have such lovely eyes. But still they are cows. I was some years her elder, this was a couple of years ago. Her father, the merchant Gottfred Hall, was friendly to me. We smoked many a cigar and drank many a dram together. She was the last of his children to remain unmarried. I visited them often. They lived on their own with their servants. The mother had died some years before. It was clear to me that both she and her father were merely waiting for me to declare my intentions. But the strange thing is that the attraction went away, vanished simply, as the snow vanishes in spring. Suddenly I disliked her. I had kissed her a few times, and had held her to my chest and felt the desire, hers as well as my own. But of course she was coy and reticent, and although I knew full well that this was how it was meant to be, she being a respectable young lady of good family, this nonetheless made me despise her. I could no longer abide the sight of the girl. She was a dalliance, I saw it so clearly then. She knew nothing of housekeeping. Her teeth were slightly protruding. She gave all the impression of someone refusing to take life seriously. I noticed then that her breath smelled, an oddly nauseating odour, as if she were suffering the consumption. That smell is indeed noticeable and I have myself made the diagnosis on numerous occasions by simply leaning my nose towards a patient’s open mouth. It is an interesting bouquet. We all of us go about with a corpse inside us. And such a corpse smells. I terminated our acquaintance by writing her a letter. I do not love you. You are better served with another. Etc. Why not be honest? In the long run it is always the most considerate. I heard that the jomfru was sent to some family in the interior. But whether she lived or died, I have no idea. Most likely she died. It did not concern me. I was free.
The Governor’s housekeeper, the jomfru Titius, comes to me, a frail and tender-aged girl with the face of a Nefertiti. She has moved in with the Egedes. I am pregnant, she says, blurting the word.
I press her abdomen, though am unable to determine if she is or not.
My bleeding has not come.
It’s probably the voyage. I’m sure it will come again.
I don’t think so. I thought I’d tell you.
Have you been with a man?
I don’t know. Perhaps, when I was asleep or dead.
I see. It would not surprise me if a man had made free with her while she lay enfeebled by her falling sickness. Let us see in a couple of months. If you are pregnant then, I will be able to feel it. What will you do if you really are?
I’d like to have a child.
A child is not a doll. It needs care and looking after.
I know.
If what you believe turns out to be right, perhaps you would prefer to go home again in the Morian?
No, thank you. I like it here.
Then we are two, I say, and smile.
When I was young, I naturally wished to be a poet. I wrote sonnets, hymns, odes and villanelles to my beloved, which is to say, for want of another, my mother. I would sit up in the evenings and nights, writing as if in the grip of a fever. In the daytime, I would mutter out the feet of verses, and my mother was afraid I was going mad, so often did I go about talking to myself. I did not show my poems to anyone. I wished to let them lie and then return to them after a year or two in order to appraise them objectively from that greater distance. And indeed I did so, only to see that all of it was dreadful, banal, shamelessly bad. Whereupon I burned the lot and thereafter felt myself freed. That evening, I drank until drunk with some student friends. You seem so glad, they said. Have you ditched your sweetheart? Something like that, I told them. Since then, I have not felt the inclination to shape a verse. I have no ear for poetry either, and do not read it, preferring the prosaic marble of old Latin verse to the lyrical quagmires of the new Germans.
A number of the convicts have built their own peat-huts and have moved in with their women. Peter Hageman is one, a drunkard and a blighter. His wife is called Cellar-Katrine. Unfortunately, she became sweet with one of the older men, Georg Weerback, whose own very young wife, Wispy Kirstine, was summarily shown the door to live alone with the rest of the crew. This Kirstine is both prettier and more decent than any of the other convict women, so it defies my understanding that she could be ditched for such a haggard and toothless tart as Katrine. But no doubt she plays her instrument that much better than any of the others. In the meantime, Hageman soon tired of living alone and took the young Kirstine to himself. A man of the old school, he beat the girl and pulled her hair if she would not obey him. Black and blue she went about for a while, holding a hand to her ear after her ear-drum seemingly was perforated by a fiercely delivered blow from the hand of her chivalrous beau. However, the said Cellar-Katrine quickly became jealous of the young girl and eventually administered her a beating too, whereafter she took the opportunity to move back in with our Monsieur Peter again. Now once more the couple inhabit their peat-hut in nuptial bliss and harmony. This kind of marital drama is seen most every day. They can do as they please.
The Morian has departed, accompanied by ear-splitting cannonades from the land. The Governor has moved into Peter Hageman’s peat-hut together with Titia, for which reason Hageman himself has been forced to occupy another, poorer dwelling along with his wench. The eldest Egede son has left with the ship. He is to go into the priesthood and follow in his father’s footsteps here in this country. The galliot the West-Vlieland lies here still. Perhaps she will remain here over the winter. But even now, after the Morian’s departure, we can feel the winter approach, the inklings of what it will be like here when not a ship remains in the roadstead.
A number of crates containing salted meat, which have stood out in all weather since arriving here in July, were today opened. This meat too was of course infested with maggots and had to be ditched in the sea. However, some natives who have settled close to the colony and have already learned, like the crows and the ravens, to scavenge from us, retrieved it from the bottom and then boiled and ate it. Now they have become ill. At Madame Rasch’s request I have shown them the kindness of attending to them. They are all quite enfeebled, two of them seriously so, evacuating what is inside them from both ends and most certainly dying. Two children have distended bellies and eyes like fishes of the deepest sea, this from the diarrhoea and vomiting, and the loss of fluids that goes with it. They too will die. I bled a couple of these poor wretches, though found any other procedure futile. Those who are not affected as badly are of course alarmed by the situation and have expressed the wish for all to be baptized before they perish so as to avoid the descent into Hell, whose terrible details Egede has minutely elaborated to them. I pass this on to him. He declines.
I have preached to them for years until blue in the face, he says, and they have been nothing but contrary and inveterate. They are completely ignorant of the Gospel’s notion of grace, no matter how much I have endeavoured to make it plain to them. I cannot defend baptizing such people. His native son stands at his side, nodding piously at his father’s every word.
But infants receive the gift of grace in the baptism, I object. A person can hardly be more ignorant than a new-born child?
A child is brought to the baptism by a baptized guardian, whether it be the priest himself or a relative of the child. These people are heathens to the depths of their souls. Who should keep them to the Christian faith until the confirmation?
They will die before they get that far.
Then let them die. What do you say, Frederik Christian? He turns to his foster-son.
Yes, let them die, says the boy.
We stand buffeted by the wind, conversing in the open air. My hair, my clothing, my thoughts are wrenched this way and that and brought into disorder. Normally I am not bothered by windy weather. Egede is as little disturbed by it as by anything else. He is a pillar of serenity. But inside he is seething. He glares at me.
That they should be gripped by the fear of Hell in their hour of death and wish therefore to save themselves at the last minute is no concern of mine. Let them go to Hell, yes. They are awaited there.
Let them go to Hell, the boy repeats.
But will they not be consigned to limbo, as persons unbaptized? I ask.
Perhaps. Limbo is a papist invention, the Bible says nothing about it, Luther neither. However, there is a mention of an intermediate state for the unbaptized who are pure of heart, a state of paralysis, neither fire nor salvation. No need to tell them this, though. The fright will do them good.
Two of the sick survive, the rest perish in pain and fear. They can do as they please.
///
Johan Furst is the first of the Danes to die. One of the released offenders. He lies in his bed a week with a rattling cough and bloody sputum. He has been weak since the voyage, his condition gradually worsening. I bled him, applied leeches and cupping-glasses, and paler he grew, though never was he well again. It was a peaceful death. He was given the sacrament and clutched a crucifix in his hand as he passed in sleep. His spouse by lot, Johanne Nielsdatter, called Johanne Long-stocking, sat by him until the last. It seems the women cope much better in the damp weather here than their men.
I am told it has been the wettest and windiest summer in living memory. Everything is sodden, food, clothing, building materials. We are wet to the soul. And there are more deaths: two among the offenders, a couple of tradesmen, a soldier. I should think they burn poorly where they are, though time is on their side.
///
The Egede house is now pulled down and all of us moved into Godthåb. The residence is but half-built. The colony council has decided the house is to be divided into several parts, one for the Governor and one for the Egede family, with a combined school and mission room in between, the first floor given over to the two young clergymen and the officers, myself among them. For the time being we must shelter in the peat-huts and in the few tents that remain serviceable.
Fuel is in short supply. The coal is being saved to make sure we don’t run out in the winter. We burn our building materials, which amounts to pissing in our trousers to stay warm. All of us are freezing, cold to the marrow, and all of us coughing and hacking. Some have sought shelter with the savages, whose dwellings are forever boiling hot and where they sit naked, sweating like Jutland carthorses. They burn blubber. We could do the same, if only our stoves were made for it. There is plenty of it. It swims in the fjord.
The Governor and Egede may often be seen walking and speaking together. They seem to have come to some understanding. Happily so, as they are to live door by door when the house is finished. When the council meets, every Saturday, they endeavour as best they can to be in agreement, though often it is hard work, for the one is as singular as the other. It has now been decided that one of the ships, the West-Vlieland, will remain at the colony through the winter and serve as quarters for some of the officers as well as a store for various goods that they may be kept dry. The other ship, the Fortuna, has sailed.
///
The twenty-ninth of August. For once, there is sunshine today. The good weather prompts a ceremony by which the colony is formally declared. In his speech, Pors makes the prediction that the good weather is a herald of the colony’s good fortune. What the past two months of misery might herald is something he does not comment on. His speech is rather hopeful, sanguine almost. He is of course drunk, as most of the others, though not me. I drink seldom, and only in moderation. It is a day off, a day of festivity. Pors concludes with the words, Remember what the philosopher says: we live in the best of all possible worlds!
The sunshine and warm weather seem to agree.
Egede gives his first sermon in front of the residence, regardless that it remains unfinished. He asks the Lord to bless ‘Godthåb, the royal Danish colony in Greenland’. All the people of the colony are gathered, those who are well enough. More than three score on the open space in front of the house. How many of us will be left, I wonder, when the first year here is celebrated?
After the Governor has spoken, and the priest has delivered his sermon, a salute is given, a long series of cannonades into the blue sky. We proceed to the Governor’s peat-hut for dinner. His old grey eminence, Skård, serves for us. He has prepared the food with the housekeeper, Titia. They make an odd couple. As we begin on the soup, the rain begins to lash against the panes. It is almost as if a sigh of relief is heard around the table. Back to normal again.
Skål, says the Governor. Let us not hold back on the aquavit.
Even Egede is drunk that night. However, his intoxication does not make him cheerful, but seething with anger. He rants on about fire and brimstone, the Devil, the Antichrist in Rome. He can do as he pleases.
///
The following week, four more of the men die, two enlisted soldiers, one among the offenders and a carpenter. Many more lie ill. Yet the Earth still turns. And why should it not? If the Earth felt for those who lived on it, it would forget to revolve on its axis, or else it would spin faster, spiral out of control, shaking off all life that wriggles upon it, to vanish out among the cold and extinguished stars or be burnt up in the sun’s embrace. But the Earth does not feel for us. And we should be glad of the fact.
I still stand with my feet planted firmly on this soil. I am going nowhere. I’m fine here. I love this place, and as the English bard writes:
‘I must be cruel only to be kind;
thus bad begins and worse remains behind.’