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Updated: June 11, 2025
"We're all safe enough, Mr Egede," he cried, as he bound Grimlek's hands behind him with a cord. The Eskimos quickly performed the same office for their respective prisoners, and then, setting them up in a row, proceeded to talk over the massacre, and to discuss in their presence the best method of getting rid of the murderers.
For all that, the natives loved him. There came a day that brought this message from the North: "Say to the speaker to come to us to live, for the other strangers who come here can only talk to us of blubber, blubber, blubber, and we also would hear of the great Creator." Egede went as far as he could, but was compelled by ice and storms to turn back after weeks of incredible hardships.
Besides, several near relations as well as wife and children were dependent on him for sustenance, which increased the initial difficulty. But "where there's a will there's a way" is a proverb, the truth of which Hans Egede very soon began to exemplify.
No one knows now where it is; but in ice-girt Greenland, where the northern lights on wintry nights flash to the natives their message from the souls that have gone home, his memory will live when that of the North Pole seeker whom the world applauds is long forgotten. Hans Egede was their great man, their hero. He was more, he was their friend.
As the expression on Simek's face showed that he was not quite convinced, Egede added "Listen, Simek. I and my people were starving here. I prayed to God, in Jesus' name, to send us deliverance. Did He not answer my prayer by sending you and your party with food!" "True," assented Simek. "Listen again, Simek. Were you not in great danger when your oomiak and kayaks were crushed in the ice?"
But before that they tried to foment a regular mutiny, the colony being by that time well under way, and Egede had to arrest and punish the leaders. The natives naturally clung to them, and when Egede had mastered their language and tried to make clear that the Angekoks deceived them when they pretended to go to the other world for advice, they demurred. "Did you ever see them go?" he asked.
Egede spoke now in the language of the Eskimos, having long before that time learned to speak it sufficiently well to be understood. "Angut," said Ujarak, after a few moments, "listen to me. I cannot live long. Before I go, let me tell you that Nunaga is good good good! She is true to you, and she has been very, very good to me.
In Greenland the Brethren succeeded. As they settled down among the people they resolved at first to be very systematic in their method of preaching the Gospel; and to this end, like Egede before them, they expounded to the simple Eskimo folk the whole scheme of dogmatic theology, from the fall of man to the glorification of the saint. The result was dismal failure.
Perchance his interest would have deepened had he known that the man was none other than the famous Norwegian clergyman Hans Egede, the originator of the Danish mission to Greenland, who founded the colony of Godhaab in the year 1721, about twelve years before the commencement of the missions of the Moravian Brethren to that land.
The people ashore heard voices speaking in Danish, and flew to Egede, who had gone to bed, with the news. The ship brought good cheer. The Government was well disposed. Trading and preaching were to go on together, as planned. The work was now fairly under way.
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