The Eskimos came out in their kayaks, and the boldest climbed aboard the ship.  In one boat sat an old man who refused the invitation.  He paddled about the vessel, mumbling darkly in a strange tongue.  He was an Angekok, one of the native medicine-men of whom presently Egede was to know much more.  As he stood upon the deck and looked at these strangers for whose salvation he had risked all, his heart fell.  They were not the stalwart Northmen he had looked for, and their jargon had no homelike sound.  But a great wave of pity swept over him, and the prayer that rose to his lips was for strength to be their friend and their guide to the light.

Not at once did the way open for the coveted friendship with the Eskimos.  While they thought the strangers came only to trade they were hospitable enough, but when they saw them build, clearly intent on staying, they made signs that they had better go.  They pointed to the sun that sank lower toward the horizon every day, and shivered as if from extreme cold, and they showed their visitors the icebergs and the snow, making them understand that it would cover the house by and by.  When it all availed nothing and the winter came on, they retired into their huts and cut the acquaintance of the white men.  They were afraid that they had come to take revenge for the harm done their people in the olden time.  There was nothing for it, then, but that Egede must go to them, and this he did.

They seized their spears when they saw him coming, but he made signs that he was their friend.  When he had nothing else to give them, he let them cut the buttons from his coat.  Throughout the fifteen years he spent in Greenland Egede never wore furs, as did the natives.  The black robe he thought more seemly for a clergyman, to his great discomfort.  He tells in his diary and in his letters that often when he returned from his winter travels it could stand alone when he took it off, being frozen stiff.  After a while he got upon neighborly terms with the Eskimos; but, if anything, the discomfort was greater.  They housed him at night in their huts, where the filth and the stench were unendurable.  They showed their special regard by first licking off the piece of seal they put before him, and if he rejected it they were hurt.  Their housekeeping, of which he got an inside view, was embarrassing in its simplicity.  The dish-washing was done by the dogs licking the kettles clean.  Often, after a night or two in a hut that held half a dozen families, he was compelled to change his clothes to the skin in an open boat or out on the snow.  But the alternative was to sleep out in a cold that sometimes froze his pillow to the bed and the tea-cup to the table even in his own home.  Above all, he must learn their language.