CHAPTER III.

THE SOLITARY HOUSE OF PETER MOTZFELDT.

It is time now that I should recur again to the _Panther_, which we left steaming out of Ericsfiord.

When the revellers from the Julianashaab ball appeared after breakfast we were well away at sea. Most of them had either forgotten or had never been aware of the intention of the captain to sail so early in the day. When, however, they discovered where the steamer’s head was pointed, they were well pleased with the sudden change, and found a lively satisfaction in the prospect of new fields for adventure; all except the Prince, who was (or at least so affected) much grieved that no opportunity was allowed him to go ashore after the ball. The captain may, indeed, have anticipated some possible mischief to the young gentleman, and so lifted his anchor when all were sound asleep. What, indeed, might possibly have happened may be readily guessed from an account of what actually transpired, according to our sagaman, who wrote the following description of it:

“It was a thousand pities, sure, to wound a tender youth in his most tender spot; the ship had sailed three hours when first he found that she was steaming off at least ‘six knot.’ The youth was furious, vowed he would go back, and cried, in anguish, ‘Launch me that kayak.’ The kayak was the pilot’s, so he failed to sacrifice his very wretched life; then, after groaning once or twice, he hailed the steward: ‘Here, man, as you love your wife, go quick and bring me paper, pen, and ink. I’ll write a letter; then my will, I think.’

“Sad are these partings to the virgin heart—I mean the heart that never felt decay; when all the life has been the sunny part; no shadows flung into the gladsome day; and hard, indeed, it was upon our Prince; it was his first affair, and made him wince. No wonder! But the ink and pen were here; and so our hero grew more reconciled; he dashed away—they say it was a tear; and wrote, and wrote, and grew exceeding wild. Here’s what it was, and, if you’re so inclined, you may learn something of a tortured mind:

“‘Concordia, dear! Concordia, dear! My heart is with thee on the lonely isle; I’m forced to say adieu to thee, I fear, for I am carried off; I slept the while; I did but sleep that I might dream of thee, and, sleeping, off they carried me to sea. Concordia, dear! Concordia, dear! Thou only on this earth my heart hast got. Oh, listen to me while I shed a tear, of which I have shed enough to fill a pot. I’d fill a dozen could I go to thee; then from this lonely isle away we’d flee, o’er the glad waters of the deep blue sea; our thoughts quite boundless, and our hopes quite glad. Those seal-skin breeches! oh, Concordia! they are bewitching, and they make me mad; and then that top-knot on thy head so fair, I’ve yards of ribbon for thy raven hair. My messmates all, hard-hearted fellows they! do call me spooney when my pain they see. Ah! who can tell my sufferings, thou away? I’ll ever be a faithful spoon to thee. My image in thy bosom once install, I’ll take them then, ay, breeches, boots, and all.’

“Which, and much more such stuff outlandish, our hero wrote unto his lady-love; doing it in very bad Greenlandish; he’d billed and cooed with her like turtle-dove; learning thereby a string of _koos_ and _kahs_, and these he emphasized with ohs and ahs. A language which all maidens understand, of each and every nationality; you may write Greek and Choctaw with the hand; a maid will comprehend a sigh, you see; and every lover, be he green as grass, will wisely sigh, if he would catch his lass.

“The letter written, then the pilot went, bearing the missive with abundant warning, to take it safe and go where he was sent, and give it to the maiden in the morning. It must have touched her, Heaven only knows! the steamer steamed away; and thus it goes!—The tender-hearted must be torn away—sometimes it is ‘stern parent,’ sometimes steam. In this particular case you’d surely say, ‘The Prince is certain now to kick the beam.’ Oh no, not he! The youth but went below, slept, woke, then cried, ‘Now for another go!’”

And another “go” he had, and we all had, sure enough, but of a very different character from the Julianashaab “go.”

By keeping well inside the islands, which almost everywhere form a barrier along the Greenland coast, we managed to escape, in a great measure, the ice which had so much annoyed and alarmed us when we first “made” the Land of Desolation. Towards evening, our pilot, who had been on the bridge most of the day, approached the captain, and said:

“Captain, you see?”

“Yes,” said the captain.

“Two icebergs there—go between.”

“Yes,” said the captain.

“Starboard then”—explaining further the route into the port—“no, hit rock—go for iceberg—port, no deep water—starboard, plenty ice—port, small—starboard, plenty—let go—Kraksimeut—you see?”

“Yes, pilot,” said the captain, “certainly, clear as mud;” then, addressing himself to another quarter, he cried out, “For’ad, there!”

“Ay, ay, sir.”

“Lay out on the jib-boom and keep a sharp look-out for rocks. Stand by to heave the lead.”

“Ay, ay, sir.”

And now, what with dodging first one way and then the other, and with taking the ice first on one bow and then on the other, with shaving the rocks most uncomfortably close, they managed, between the pilot and the captain, to give the _Panther_ a pretty lively time of it, until we had finally come into a very narrow basin of water, where, in apparent danger of running our jib-boom into a solitary house, the order was given to “let go”—and we were at anchor in the harbor of Kraksimeut.

There was a great number of people about the solitary house. So far as appearances went, Kraksimeut comprised this one house only, and it was but one story high. Over it floated a Danish flag about the size of a pocket-handkerchief.

“My house,” said our pilot. “Governor’s house, Kraksimeut—me Governor.”

Our pilot was Peter Motzfeldt, already mentioned in a previous chapter; and a right noble fellow is Peter Motzfeldt, if he does live in a solitary house, and _is_ governor of Kraksimeut.

Kraksimeut stands upon a very small island, on the very outer extremity of the dividing ridge between the fiord which we had left and the fiord for which we were bound. In order to reach it, we have sailed north-west; to reach our next halting-place in the other fiord, we are to sail north-east. It is a good half-way station, and we resolve to spend the night there.

Peter Motzfeldt invites us ashore, and ashore we go to the government-house. The people we see are like those of Julianashaab; they smell of fish exceedingly. There is not another white man except Peter Motzfeldt. His wife is there, but she is a native, and has the inevitable native boots, and seal-skin pantaloons, and short jacket, and horn-like top-knot of hair, tied about with a profuse quantity of ribbons. Peter Motzfeldt’s twenty odd children are there, including the two boat-loads heretofore mentioned, who had gone down to Julianashaab to see the sights, and have returned in anticipation of our arrival.

The scenery around this solitary house is dreary enough; there are only faint traces of vegetation in the crevasses of the rocks, and there is a glimpse of water only to be seen here and there among the icebergs and islands; but there is a golden sky above the setting sun, and golden splendors dropped from heaven upon the sparkling jewelry of the sea.

I took a walk about the island, and came back to the solitary house, after all my comrades had assembled there, to encounter a great surprise. Instead of finding this only white inhabitant of the place

“Steeped in poverty to the very lips,”

he was rejoicing in abundance. Eatables and drinkables were on the table in great profusion; pipes, tobacco, and even cigars, were circulating freely, and a livelier party than that which greeted me on my arrival would be difficult to imagine. They had literally taken possession of all there was to see of Kraksimeut, including Motzfeldt himself, whose genial face beamed upon me through the mists which arose from a steaming punch-bowl; and, as he stretched out a hand to give me welcome, he bowled down at least half a dozen bottles.

“Have a cigar?” said the Prince, passing along a box out of a smoky cloud. “Capital Havanas! plenty of the same sort left.”

The Prince was clearly quite at home, as usual, and was already looking out generally for the public pleasures; for he continued:

“Lively times expected. Old chap there has sent for girls, and we’re to have a dance.”

And sure enough he had; for the girls came streaming in presently, and there was a repetition of the Julianashaab “break-down” (I know no better title by which to distinguish it). Of course, the Prince managed to pick out the prettiest girl, who had the advantage of being the daughter of Motzfeldt, and, by a pleasant coincidence, bore also the name of Concordia. This one had black hair and eyes, however. But, since there did not appear to be any Marcus to torment, the young gentleman clearly preferred the girl (with the auburn hair) he had left behind him.

Kraksimeut is one of the dozen principal outposts of the Julianashaab district, and the most remote one on the north; and it is, besides, one of the most productive. Its products are exclusively (if we except a little eider-down), the skins and blubber of seals; and during the season it is, according to all accounts, a very lively place. Peter Motzfeldt gets his pay out of the colony’s production, upon which he receives five per cent. This, added to his salary (one hundred Danish dollars), makes his income over a thousand dollars of that money annually, and sometimes reaches fifteen hundred, which equals about seven hundred and fifty of ours. Upon this he has lived happily, as he says, and I do not doubt it, for fifty years. He has raised two families, and provides now for twenty-four persons, himself and wife included. This wife is a most tidy person, a native, with a slight mixture of Danish blood, and dresses always in the native costume. Indeed, there is not, and never was, a petticoat in Kraksimeut. From pitying Peter Motzfeldt, as I did at first, I began in the end to wonder whether he was not a most sensible fellow after all, when I discovered that his income was more than sufficient for his needs, and that even, although his family was large, he lacked for nothing that he wished to send for from Copenhagen. Really, it is not so bad after all, to be the solitary white man, in a solitary house, on a solitary island.

Besides the Motzfeldt family, there are about forty other inhabitants, all natives, who live in the usual native huts, that are scarcely distinguishable in the general waste of rock.

I found that an American had been at Kraksimeut before, and that Motzfeldt preserved the most lively recollection of the “Americana,” who had taught him the little English he knew, and instructed him to sing “Yank Doodle” and “Hail Columby,” which he repeated for us with variations not originally made and provided. This American was Colonel Shaffner, who some years ago, after the first failure of the Atlantic Cable, interested himself to establish a line by way of the Faröe Islands, Iceland, Greenland, and Labrador; and it was a pity that his scheme was impossible of success. You would think so at least if you heard Peter Motzfeldt praise him; and I doubt not that he well deserved it all, for there have been few more spirited enterprises set on foot this many a day. I say it was impossible of success; not that the cable might not be laid and the shore-end secured, but it would be simply absurd to think of keeping it in a sea where icebergs ground in two or three hundred fathoms water.

On board the steamship _Panther_ there was a man, common enough in point of rank, but the like of which never was seen before with respect to qualities. He was the _mate_. Why he was ever put there in that capacity, unless it was to “try our virtue by affliction,” I can not imagine. He would beat a “reformer” any day for wrong-headedness, or a discontented donkey for obstinacy. As if these qualities were not enough, he was afflicted with the curiosity of a magpie. But the particular direction of his curiosity was aquatic. He was great on finding bottom. Upon one occasion he tried to find it by dropping overboard a gun; on another he got into a kayak and shoved off from the ship’s side, to find himself very quickly head downward, with the boat fast to his heels; and he would have been as certain of drowning as if he had undertaken to swim with his feet fast to a bladder, had his head not struck bottom, where luckily there was a lot of sea-weed, which he grasped and drew himself out among the shells and slime; there he got a footing, and, the water being shoal, he came right side up, with a great deal of water and very little breath in him. Had his disposition to find the bottom with the top of his head terminated there, it would have been well; but unhappily his weakness extended to the _Panther’s_ keel. If there was the remotest chance of putting her on the rocks at any time, he was sure to make the effort. And he was, moreover, very sly. He always waited until the captain was down below or had gone ashore, before he gave his mind to it. At Kraksimeut, he waited until the captain was well enveloped in a cloud of smoke, in the house of Peter Motzfeldt, before he tried the depth of the water in the harbor. Slacking up a rope, or neglecting to put out one, it matters not which, he let the _Panther_ swing with the tide, and her stern slid up as nicely on a rock as if she were coming to her bearings in a dry-dock. This astonishing mate then, with great apparent satisfaction, looked over the stern, and amidst the mud and sea-weed, which had been loosened, and which was bubbling up about the rudder-post, there read XIV.; and thus he had found the depth of Kraksimeut harbor, and was satisfied. Then he smoked his pipe while waiting for the water to fall; and we came on board to find the _Panther’s_ stern going steadily out of the sea, with great danger of breaking her unfortunate back. Meanwhile the mate was never before known to be in such capital spirits.

Fortunately, as it happened, the _Panther_ was not materially damaged, owing to her amazing strength of back-bone; but we were detained nearly a whole tide beyond our time. But when at length under way, we had a splendid sail among the islands, until we struck the open water of the fiord of Sermitsialik, when we stood fairly up midway between its lofty banks, directly for the glacier.

For a time we could not see the object that our eyes so eagerly sought, owing to a bend in the fiord, but, passing this, a great long line of whiteness came gradually out against the sky, and beneath it dropped a white curtain to the sea. As we proceeded this seeming curtain became a solid wall.