There came a breathing spell after ten years of labor in what had often enough seemed to him the spiritual as well as physical ice-barrens of the North, when Egede surveyed a prosperous mission, with trade established, a hundred and fifty children christened and schooled, and many of their elders asking to be baptized.  In the midst of his rejoicing the summer’s ship brought word from Denmark that the King was dead, and orders from his successor to abandon the station.  Egede might stay with provisions for one year, if there was enough left over after fitting out the ship; but after that he would receive no further help.

When the Eskimos heard the news, they brought their little children to the mission.  “These will not let you go,” they said; and he stayed.  His wife, whom hardship and privation and the lonely waiting for her husband in the long winter nights had at last broken down, refused to leave him, though she sadly needed the care of a physician.  A few of the sailors were persuaded to stay another year.  “So now,” Egede wrote in his diary when, on July 31, 1731, he had seen the ship sail away with all his hopes, “I am left alone with my wife and three children, ten sailors and eight Eskimos, girls and boys who have been with us from the start.  God let me live to see the blessed day that brings good news once more from home.”  His prayer was heard.  The next summer brought word that the mission was to be continued, partly because Egede had strained every nerve to send home much blubber and many skins.  But it was as a glimpse of the sun from behind dark clouds.  His greatest trials trod hard upon the good news.

To rouse interest in the mission Egede had sent home young Eskimos from time to time.  Three of these died of smallpox in Denmark.  The fourth came home and brought the contagion, all unknown, to his people.  It was the summer fishing season, when the natives travel much and far, and wherever he went they flocked about him to hear of the “Great Lord’s land,” where the houses were so tall that one could not shoot an arrow over them, and to ask a multitude of questions:  Was the King very big?  Had he caught many whales?  Was he strong and a great Angekok? and much more of the same kind.  In a week the disease broke out among the children at the mission, and soon word came from islands and fjords where the Eskimos were fishing, of death and misery unspeakable.  It was virgin soil for the plague, and it was terribly virulent, striking down young and old in every tent and hut.  More than two thousand natives, one-fourth of the whole population, died that summer.  Of two hundred families near the mission only thirty were left alive.  A cry of terror and anguish rose throughout the settlements.  No one knew what to do.  In vain did Egede implore them to keep their sick apart.  In fever delirium they ran out in the ice-fields or threw themselves into the sea.  A wild panic seized the survivors, and they fled to the farthest tribes, carrying the seeds of death with them wherever they went.  Whole villages perished, and their dead lay unburied.  Utter desolation settled like a pall over the unhappy land.