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. The
disappointment was the more severe to him because he had never quite
given up his hope of finding remnants of the ancient Norse
settlements. The fact that the old records spoke of a West Bygd
(settlement) and an East Bygd had misled many into believing that
the desolate east coast had once been colonized. Not until our own
day was this shown to be an error, when Danish explorers searched
that coast for a hundred miles and found no other trace of
civilization than a beer bottle left behind by the explorer
Nordenskjold.
Egede's hope had been that Greenland might be once more colonized by
Christian people. When the Danish Government, after some years, sent
up a handful of soldiers, with a major who took the title of
governor, to give the settlement official character as a trading
station, they sent with them twenty unofficial "Christians," ten men
out of the penitentiary and as many lewd and drunken women from the
treadmill, who were married by lot before setting sail, to give the
thing a halfway decent look.
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