True Tales of Arctic Heroism in the New World

Hans soon took careful notice of his nurse, who talked with overflowing mirth, while her busy fingers, in the intervals of personal service, unceasingly plaited the tough sinew-thread with which arrow-heads are secured or other hunting implements perfected. Deft and quick, busy with work, careful of her little brothers, she seemed to be the maiden suited to his taste, although the claims of other women were presented to him during his stay. Before he was strong, he had asked that she should become his wife. Most of her maiden comrades had sobbed and lamented when the time came for them to change the care-free, petted, and joyous child life for the onerous duties of an Etah matron. But Mertuk's heart glowed with happy feelings, and she sang with joy when the great Eskimo hunter, who had killed three of the five great walruses, asked that she would be his wife.

Kane relates the story of the courtship as follows: "Hans, the kind son and ardent lover of Fiskernaes,[26 - Kane says of him: "I obtained an Eskimo hunter at Fiskernaes, one Hans Christian (known elsewhere as Hans Hendrik), a boy of eighteen, an expert with the kayak and javelin. After Hans had given me a touch of his quality by spearing a bird on the wing, I engaged him. He was fat, good-natured, and except under the excitements of the hunt as stolid and unimpressive as one of our Indians."] has been missing for nearly two months. I am loath to tell the tale as I believe it, for it may not be the true one at all, and I would not intimate an unwarranted doubt of the consistency of boyish love. Before my April hunt, Hans with long face asked permission to visit Peteravik, as he had no boots and wanted to lay in a stock of walrus hide for soles. I consented.

"He has not returned and the stories of him that come from Etah were the theme of much conversation and surmise. He had given Nessark's wife an order for a pair of boots, and then wended his way to Peteravik (the halting-place), where Shung-hu and his pretty daughter had their home. This explanation was given by the natives with many an explanatory grin; for Hans was a favorite with all, and as a match one of the greatest men of the country.

"The story was everywhere the same. Hans the faithful, yet I fear the faithless, was last seen upon a native sledge, driving south from Peteravik with a maiden at his side, and professedly bound for a new principality at Uwarrow, high up Murchison Sound. Alas! for Hans the married man. Lover as he was, and nalegak (chief) by the all-hail hereafter, joy go with him, for he was a right good fellow."

Though Hans said that his mother-in-law "had always behaved to me like a tender mother," and that "the amiability of these unbaptized people is to be wondered at," yet life went hard with the married couple among "the unchristened natives of the North."

Touching at Cape York in 1860, Dr. Hayes found Hans and his wife living there. Of their quarters, Dodge, in his unpublished journal says: "Their shelter was a seal-skin tent, six by eight feet in size and six feet high, in which lived Hans, Mertuk, the baby, and the mother-in-law. The breek of large stones took up, with the bedding, two-thirds of the space, leaving scant room for the cooking utensils; a small stone pot hung above the blubber-fed stone lamp."

He continues: "Mertuk was with him, having at her back a baby not a year old. I must admit that Hans would not have been inexcusable for being allured by a pair of black eyes to cast in his lot with the roving tribes of the North. She is by far the handsomest native woman that we have yet seen, being much prettier than any woman of the mixed races of Danish Greenland. She is very small but is finely featured, and has hands and feet as delicate as a child's. Notwithstanding the general harshness of the Etah language, her voice is quite musical, and she has the most gleeful, ringing, bell-like laugh that I have ever heard."

Taking his wife and babe along, Hans joined the expedition of Dr. Hayes as hunter. In midwinter, as elsewhere related in "Sonntag's Fatal Sledge Journey," Hans went south as dog driver, with the astronomer, to buy dogs for the sledge journeys of the coming spring. After a month Dr. Hayes, becoming greatly alarmed at their protracted absence, decided to send Dodge, the mate, south to trace the missing men. But deep as may have been the anxiety of Hayes for Sonntag, it did not equal the anguish of Mertuk's soul as to the fate of her loved Hans.

The theory that the people of the stone age are purely animals, struggling only for food, for clothing, and for shelter, finds no support in the conduct of this tiny, ignorant, heathen woman, whose heart was filled with ideals of love and of duty.

Living under conditions of ease and luxury far surpassing anything of which Mertuk's mind had before been capable of imagining, this tiny, uncivilized woman resolved to quit her abode of warmth and light for piercing cold and utter darkness, to abandon her abundant food and comfortable berth for a chance bit of frozen seal meat and a snow igloo. And for what reason? To find a missing husband, in search of whom a party was to take the field. To non-polar people no words can convey an adequate idea of the dangers to be met, of the privations to be endured. It was a period of sunless days (the sun had been gone for more than a month), in the excessive cold of midwinter, at the season of fearful blizzards, along an uninhabited stretch of coast of utter desolation, in following which one must pass the dreaded Cape Alexander either on the outer moving ice-pack or along the treacherous ice-foot at the base of its precipitous cliffs. And no one knew better than Mertuk the misery and hardships, the sufferings and perils which must be faced on such a journey.

The tale of this woman's heroic resolution is thus told in his journal by Dodge, whom Hayes sent south to trace Sonntag's trail:

"Here let me introduce a little episode which might be useful to poets and novelists as an example of woman's constancy and devotion, showing perhaps that the true woman's heart beats the same in all ages, countries, and climes. It reveals itself equally strong in a Gertrude watching the livelong night beneath a scaffold, and in a simple, untutored savage, going out alone under the shadow of an arctic night, carrying a child upon her back and looking for a lost husband.

"Mrs. Hans [Mertuk] had discovered by some means that a searching party was being organized to discover the fate of the missing men. Being fearful that she would be detained if her intentions were known, she left the vessel an hour in advance of us, hoping that she would be allowed to keep on when she should be overtaken.

"This information was not pleasant for me, as those best acquainted with Eskimo character felt sure that she would not turn back, unless forcibly compelled to do so.

"Her intention was not suspected, however, and it was not until I was on the point of starting that one of the Eskimo told Jansen, the Dane, that Mertuk had gone in search of her husband.

"When we were on our way, two and a half miles from the ship, I discovered some distance ahead a little form, plodding through the snow, which I knew must be Mrs. Hans. In half an hour more we had overtaken her, and I must admit that it was an affecting sight to look upon this little woman, barely four feet tall.

"With her child only a year old on her back, Mertuk plodded bravely along through the snow, into which she sank knee-deep at almost every step, impressed with the idea that the dearest one on earth to her was somewhere in the vast desolation before her, and fired with the feeling that she must find him or perish too.

"As my companion, Christian Petersen the Dane, could make her understand him, I told him to tell her that she could not go on but must go back, while we would go on and look for Hans, explaining the reasons for her return. But to all his arguments Mertuk simply said that she must find Hans or die – and resolutely she set her face toward the south.

"While Christian talked to her I stood by, leaning on my rifle, awaiting anxiously the result of a discussion that I could not understand, except as I read the woman's face. We could not spare the time to go back with her. She could not accompany us, for our pace was too rapid for her and besides we must not be delayed in our mission. If she followed us she would be soon worn out with fatigue, carrying her child through the soft, deep snow; and if she sat down to rest, her fate was certain when overcome by sleep or through exhaustion."

When Petersen said that he could do nothing with her, as she obstinately declared that she was going on for her husband, Dodge, greatly disturbed, was perplexed as to what action he should take. Fortunately there came to his mind a thought, kindred to that so forcefully and beautifully expressed by Tennyson in his lines, "Home they brought her warrior dead," and he continues:

"Finding that Christian's arguments were likely to prove unavailing, I stepped up to Mertuk, lifted up a corner of the reindeer skin that she had thrown over her seal-skin hood, and pointed to the tiny baby who was sleeping quietly, and said [in English]: 'If you go on the child will die.' She could not understand my words, which the Dane did not translate, but something in her heart must have disclosed their meaning. For the first time she showed signs of irresolution, and her eyes filled with tears. Carefully covering the child's face, I brushed from the mother's hair and eyebrows the frost-feathers that had already formed through the awful cold. Looking steadily into her eyes, and talking in a low, firm voice, I told her that I would look faithfully for Hans, and bring him back to her if he could be found.

"I shall never forget the expression of her countenance, the moonbeams streaming down on her eager, upturned face. Her lips were slightly parted, and her whole soul seemed to be shining through her expressive eyes, which were fastened fixedly on mine.

"When I ceased speaking, she answered, talking in an eager, impassioned strain, which made her meaning plain enough, though her speech was in an unknown tongue. Finally she pointed to the south and said that she would go on, but the trembling tones of her voice did not show the same firmness as it had done before. Christian would have interpreted, but it was unnecessary; the woman and I understood one another, and I felt that the victory was won.

"Again I spoke to her in the same tone as before, and as she listened her eyes were once more dimmed by tears. I was sure that her determination was wavering. Now pointing first to the child, and then in the direction of the ship, I told her that she must go back. Though she felt my meaning she stood for a moment, most resolute in her attitude, gazing intently into my eyes, until she must have seen something forbidding in my unrelenting face."

Dodge later writes: "To fully appreciate the impressive effect of this most dramatic incident, the conditions under which it occurred should be remembered. We were far out of sight of the ship, were some distance off shore on the main ice-pack of Smith Sound, the moon was shedding a dim, ghost-like glare upon us, and it was the coldest day of the winter, the thermometer indicating seventy-five degrees below the freezing point."

He humorously adds regarding his forceful language in ordering Mertuk back to the ship: "I will not swear that the vigorous words froze as they came from my mouth, but after I finished there were pendant icicles an inch long to my whiskers and mustache."

As to Mertuk, orders, arguments, and requests, whether in pantomime English or in Danish-Eskimo dialect, would have utterly failed of effect, had she not been stirred by frequent allusions to her baby – Hans's child, who must be saved from danger of death. To the mother, cold, hunger, and privations were as naught.

Long and bitter was the conflict in Mertuk's heart between her motherly affection and her wifely devotion. Should she do alone her duty to her infant, or should she put the child's life aside in her arctic quest for her missing hunter husband? To the last her heart was undecided. Now she turned to the north, taking a few steps toward the ship, then she flew back on the trail after the searching party, which had now moved onward.

Finally, with a gesture as of despair at adverse and inexorable fate, she slowly took up her lonely march back to the ship – where food, warmth, and shelter awaited at least the child of Hans.

On shipboard Mertuk did not cease to bewail her weakness in returning from the search until the very day when Hans, who by no means hastened his return, came back to fill her heart with that sweet content which was absolutely insured by his presence alone.

By modern standards this woman of the stone age was low in the scale of humanity – uncouth, ignorant, a heathen, and even brutish in a way.

This tale of an Inuit girl is, however, but a loose leaf from the history of woman, which indicates that the spirit of altruistic devotion is an attribute implanted by God in the primitive races, and not, as some would fain have us believe, the golden fruit of developed humanity.

A century since an American poet paid due homage to a beautiful belle, who later became his wife, in verse that aptly depicts the lovable traits of Mertuk, the daughter of Shung-hu.

"Affections are as thoughts to her,
The measures of her hours;
Her feelings have the fragrancy,
The freshness of the flowers."

notes

1

While the north magnetic pole constantly changes its position, yet such movements are very slow, and while at present its exact situation is not known, its locality is quite near this.

2

These details as to the life of the squadron are drawn from various accounts of the hut, fireplace, pools, vegetation, bird-remains, and other domestic refuse discovered by the officers and men under Ommaney and Penny in August, 1850. Three graves with head-boards were found, but no trace or scrap of record or journal of any kind. They were the first traces discovered of Franklin's movements.

3

The primary importance of concerted and co-operative action in explorations covering such a broad field was strikingly illustrated by the situation at this time. While Franklin and his men were facing disaster and death in their ice-bound ships to the west of Boothia Felix Land, that distinguished arctic traveller, John Rae, was exploring Boothia Peninsula. On April 18, 1847, he was less than one hundred and fifty miles from his sorely distressed countrymen.

4

The full text of this record will be found in the sketch entitled "The Devotion of Lady Jane Franklin."

5

For full text, see sketch "The Heroic Devotion of Lady Jane Franklin."

6

Many of these details are from Gilder's "Schwatka's Search," a remarkable expedition by these young Americans.

7