THE LAND OF DESOLATION.* DR. HAYES deserves the thanks of
every intelligent reader of Arctic travels. He understands his subject thoroughly ; so well, indeed, that he can fearlessly condescend to make it interesting, and, instead of furnishing us with the usual carefully dated jottings, from diaries kept under circumstances beneath which the imagination itself is at the freezing-point at which torpor ensues, he tells his narrative as he may have told it first to eager listeners at the fireside. The illustrations, too, are remarkably good. We have one before us now in which we see Dr. Hayes and the Cap- tain crossing the crevasse, on an ice-bridge so narrow they have to sit astride and propel themselves across. It tells its own tale all but the sequel, and we confess it is not without some anxiety we turn the page to ascertain if the remarkable feat were really accomplished in safety, and not also without hearty sympathy with the feeling implied in the Captain's remark that " he doesn't want anymore of that sort of thing." Dr. Hayes undertook his voyage under favourable circum- stances, in company with a small party of friends, in the steam yacht of Mr. William Bradford, the well-known artist of the Arctic regions. Their voyage was a leisurely one. The extent of their range along the coast of Greenland was more than a thousand miles, and they visited the most northerly outpost of civilization, the last Douse, that is, the nearest to the North Pole of any on the globe. There, in that fearful snow- clad desert, stills dwells a Christian family,—" in a little white house, upon a naked rock, with the white-and-red emblem of Danish sovereignty fluttering from a little flagstaff on the roof," and no other human beings, save a few ignorant savages, within fifty miles. Here, in complete isolation, is the voluntary exile Peter Jensen, and his wife and little children. It is not easy- to conjecture how difficult life under its ordinary conditions must have become before a man who had once borne a musket in the ranks of the army and a woman bred in the midst of the civiliza- tion of Copenhagen could be induced to accept such a life as this. Dr. Hayes thinks it was the man's own restless nature which impelled him, and says he had lived several years in Greenland before he first knew him, in 1860-61, and that, " like all other men who have returned to the primitive life of the hunter, he could never again take kindly to other ways."
Our author has given much careful attention to the pre- sent condition and ancient history of Greenland. A brief abstract condensed from these pages will not be without interest for our readers, and if it sends them to Dr. Hayes' book for further information, they will be well rewarded. He commences his story by an abstract from the old chronicles, which narrate that " On a gloomy night in the month of July, 1585, the ship Sunshine, of fifty tons, ' fitted out ' by divers opulent merchants of London, for the discovery of a North- West passage, came in a thick and heavy mist to a place where there was a mighty roaring as of waves dashing on a rocky shore.' The captain of this ship was brave old John Davis, who when he had discovered his perilous situation put off in a boat, and thereby discovered that his ship was embayed in fields and hills of ice, the crashing together of which made the fearful sounds that he had heard. The ship drifted helplessly through the night, and when the morning dawned the people saw the tops of the mountains white with snow, and of a sugar-loaf shape, standing above the clouds ; while at their base the land was deformed and rocky, and everywhere beset with ice, which made such irksome noise that the land was called "the Land of Desolation." So much for the old chronicle, which Dr. Hayes paraphrases from his own experience thus :-
" On a gloomy night in the month of July, 1869, the ship Panther, of three hundred and fifty tons, fitted out for a summer voyage by a party in pursuit of pleasure, came in a like manner, through a thick and heavy mist, to a place where there was a mighty roaring as of waves dashing on a rocky shore. The captain of this ship was John Bartlett, who, when he had discovered his perilous situation, pat off in a boat, and returned with the knowledge that the Panther, like the Sun- shine of old, was embayed in fields and hills of ice,' the crashing together of which made the fearful sounds that he had heard ; and then, when the morning dawned, the people saw the tops of mountains white with snow, and of a sugar-loaf shape, standing above the clouds ; while at their base the land was deformed and rocky,' and the shore was every- where beset with ice, which made such irksome noise ' that the people knew their ship had drifted to the self-same spot where the Sunshine had drifted nearly three hundred years before, and that the land before them was Davis's Land of Desolation.' "
Fortunately they had the blindest confidence in their captain, who, in his pious horror of "heaving to" even to wait for daylight, had managed to steer his vessel in the teeth of a fierce storm so
• The Land of Desolation. By Isaac J. Hayes, M.D. London; Sampson Low and Co., Fleet Street. 1871. close to the desolate land, that they found themselves with an island of rock on one aide and an island of ice on the other, but consoled themselves in true American fashion by reflecting that, "after all, rashness was a safer quality than timidity," and in the long run the wisdom of the American mind was justified. The memories of the crew stored with legends of a people who had once dwelt in peace and plenty on these inhospitable shores, where the keenest eyes could now only discern illimitable wastes of ice, mountain peaks white with everlasting snow, and huge ice- bergs of enormous magnitude slowly moving through the angry waters. A pilot, however, at length appeared on the scene, a non- descript individual who emerged from the sea, and appeared to have suddenly come up from its depths, a kind "of marine centaur," who " smelt fishy ;" but under this strange guidance they did reach Julianashaab, and the Land of Desolation was touched at last. All the southern part of it is called Julianashaab, and the town or little port where the Panther cast anchor was the capital. The Gover- nor of the colony is called a Colonibestyrere, or " Steerer " of it ; and there are eleven other Colonibestyreres in the country, one for each of the eleven other districts, which, as Dr. Hayes informs us, stretch northward to the very confines of the habitable globe. The whole place is under Danish rule, which rule seems in all respects admirable, though Dr. Hayes cannot help expressing a regret that when America had the chance she did not buy a large share in the colony.
But the real interest of the little town, with its native Parlia- ment, its mission Church, and meagre life, lay in its ancient his- tory; for here, Dr. Hayes tells us, was the spot where " Eric the Red" had come nine centuries before, and with his followers had founded an independent State, which for five hundred years main- tained a place in the world's history, and then passed away, leaving scarcely a trace behind save a few ruins, among them an ancient church, in which Eric the Red himself worshipped after he abandoned the service of the war- god Odin. Dr. Hayes visited this church, and found its walls quite perfect ; they were from ten to eighteen feet in altitude, and even the "form of the gable is still preserved." The arched window in the east was nearly per- fect, and Dr. Hayes remarks that the church was constructed with singular exactness as to orientation. There were evidences on. every side of an ancient town, with traces of arable land once richly cultivated. Proofs were not wanting that the change in climate must have been considerable during the last nine centuries. Dr. Hayes mentions that in the old chronicles of the voyages of those eminent Northmen who followed the fortunes of Eric, little mention is made of ice as a disturbing element in navigation. The very title of the fiord on the border of which stands the present colony of Julianashaab is suggestive, " Igalliko,—the fiord of the deserted homes." A clear short history is given in these pages of the high-spirited son of the Norwegian jarl, and many of our readers to whom Icelandic history may be familar may yet not know that it was one of those men of whom Norway and Denmark have such just reason to be proud, one of the men who, having known the highest civilization Northern Europe had then to offer, chose life amid the wild rocks of an inhospitable country, rather than submit to the tyranny of the Norwegian King ; it was one of these men who founded the little state which for a while bore its part so gallantly in the struggle for existence. It would be curious to trace how much of the rough 'work of the world has been done by the out- laws of society. Necessity is very keen-sighted, and the man who can plant his foot on no inhabited spot in safety is apt at discovering a sufficiently large oasis in the wilderness. It was so at least with Eric, and when he knew his discovery would cover the multitude of his sins, he returned to Iceland, to ask for twenty-five ship-loader of people to share his fate. But though the subject is tempting, our space forbids us to follow their fortunes farther, though after reading Dr. Elayes's narrative, we heartily agree with him that though these Northmen were wonderful people and did wonderful things, of all their enterprises the most singular was their going to Greenland,— "Where they were without the lines of conquest which were sa attractive to their brothers and ancestors ; for they were kindred of the Northman Rollo, son of Rognvald, jarl of Maere, and king of the Orkneys, who ravaged the banks of the Seine, and played buffoon with the King of France ; the same with those Danes who, in Anglo-Saxon times, con- quered the half of England ; descendants they were of the same Cimbri who threatened Rome in the days of Marius, and of the Scythian soldiers of conquered Mithridates, who, under Odin, migrated from the borders of the Euxine Sea to the North of Europe, whence their posterity descended within a thousand years by the Mediterranean, and flourished their battle-axes in the streets of Constantinople ; fellows they were of all the sea-kings, and vikings, and ' barbrrians ' of the North, whose god of war was their former general, and who, scorning a peaceful death,
sought for Odin's 'bath of blood' whenever and wherever they could find it. In Greenland they appear like a fragment thrown off from a rovolving wheel by centrifugal force."
These people, with their wild love of adventure, sailed east and west,—in the west accomplishing half unconsciously the discovery of America long before it entered the dreams of Columbus ; from the east bringing over that Christianity to which they clung so tenaciously. But interesting as are the details of the communication established between the Northmen in Greenland and the natives of America, the sequel was disastrous enough. Many as were the causes which led to the extinction of the Northern settlers, among them doubt- less was the important one of the descent of the Skraellinga (the Esquimaux of the present time). And Dr. Hayes suggests the probability that these Esquimaux were identical (in race) with the savages whom Lief, three centuries before, had found on the shores of Massachusetts in sufficient numbers to prevent the Northmen from occupying the country, and he proceeds to give a curiously reasonable explanation (in confirmation of this theory) of the origin of their present name.
But if this book contains much to interest the antiquarian, it contains far more to delight the naturalist. There is a chapter on " The Birth of an Iceberg " which, but for the evidently rigid accuracy of the details with which it is accompanied, would read like a tale from some modern " Arabian Nights." And yet we suspect the author would be able, with some reason, to say the half was not told. Fancy looking upon " a perfect forest of Gothic spires, more or less symmetrical, giving the appearance of a vast cathedral fashioned by the hands of man," and then, while scarcely a boat's length distant from one more than two hundred feet high, to notice suddenly that it was quite detached, and in a moment, after a loud report, to see it sinking down, not toppling over, but going down bodily, crumbling 89 it disappeared, till the very summit was lost in a volume of spray, the whole process lasting about a quarter of a minute. Of one iceberg, the birth of which the travellers watched, and the height of which above the water was one hundred and forty feet, and its circumference a mile, Dr. Hayes writes, " It moved in the bright sunshine like a mammoth lapis lazuli, set in a sea of chased silver." But icebergs or snow-fields, kryolite mines or coal deposits, a native parliament or a solitary Danish settler, all had vivid interest in the eyes of the explorer who has so well and so minutely described them all, that the very name of Greenland will assume fresh significance in the minds of those whom his work may amuse or instruct.
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