King Christian founded a score of big trading companies to exploit the East, taking care that their ships should have their bulwarks pierced for at least six guns, so that they might serve as war-ships in time of need.  He sent one expedition after another to the waters of Greenland in search of the Northwest Passage.  It was on the fourth of these, in 1619, that Jens Munk with two ships and sixty-four sailors was caught in the ice of Hudson Bay and compelled to winter there.  One after another the crew died of hunger and scurvy.  When Jens Munk himself crept out from what he had thought his death-bed, he found only two of them all alive.  Together they burrowed in the snow, digging for roots until spring came when they managed to make their way down to Bergen in the smallest of the two vessels.  Jens Munk had deserved a better end than he got.  He spun his yarns so persistently at court that he got to be a tiresome bore, and at last one day the King told him that he had no time to listen to him.  Whereat the veteran took great umbrage and, slapping his sword, let the King know that he had served him well and was entitled to better treatment.  Christian snatched the weapon in anger and struck him with the scabbard.  The sailor never got over it.  “He withered away and died,” says the tradition.  It was the old superstition; but whether that killed him or not, the King lost a good man in Jens Munk.

He was not averse to hearing the truth, though, when boldly put.  When Ole Vind, a popular preacher, offended some of the nobles by his plain speech and they complained to the King, he bade him to the court and told him to preach the same sermon over.  Master Vind was game and the truths he told went straight home, for he knew well where the shoe pinched.  But King Christian promptly made him court preacher.  “He is the kind we need here,” he said.  There was never a day that the King did not devoutly read his Bible, and he was determined that everybody should read it the same way.  The result was a kind of Puritanism that filled the churches and compelled the employment of men to go around with long sticks to rap the people on the head when they fell asleep.  Christian the Fourth was not the first ruler who has tried to herd men into heaven by battalions.  But his people would have gladly gone in the fire for him.  He was their friend.  When on his tramps, as likely as not he would come home sitting beside some peasant on his load of truck, and would step off at the palace gate with a “So long, thanks for good company!” He was everywhere, interested in everything.  In his walking-stick he carried a foot-rule, a level, and other tools, and would stop at the bench of a workman in the navy-yard and test his work to see how well he was doing it.  “I can lie down and sleep in any hut in the land,” was his contented boast.  And he would have been safe anywhere.