They could count no further than five; at a stretch they might get to twenty, on their fingers and toes, but there they stopped.  However, they were not without resources.  It was the day of long Sunday services, and the Eskimos were a restless people.  When the sermon dragged, they would go up to Egede and make him measure on their arms how much longer the talk was going to be.  Then they tramped back to their seats and sat listening with great attention, all the time moving one hand down the arm, checking off the preacher’s progress.  If they got to the finger-tips before he stopped, they would shake their heads sourly and go back for a remeasurement.  No wonder Egede put his chief hope in the children, whom he gathered about him in flocks.

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.  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.  They were good enough for the Eskimos, they seem to have thought at Copenhagen.  There followed a terrible winter, during which mutiny and murder were threatened.  “It is a pity,” writes the missionary, “that while we sleep secure among the heathen savages, with so-called Christian people our lives are not safe.”  As a matter of fact they were not, for the soldiers joined in the mutiny against Egede as the cause of their having to live in such a place, and had not sickness and death smitten the malcontents, neither he nor the governor would have come safe through the winter.  On the Eskimos this view of the supposed fruits of Christian teaching made its own impression.  After seeing a woman scourged on shipboard for misbehavior, they came innocently enough to Egede and suggested that some of their best Angekoks be sent down to Denmark to teach the people to be sober and decent.