True Tales of Arctic Heroism in the New World Part 21

[29] Among two hundred Eskimo tales and traditions given by Rink and Rasmussen there does not appear to be a single one wherein the qualities of self-sacrifice and absolute fidelity are the essential or main ideas.

THE WIFELY HEROISM OF MERTUK, THE DAUGHTER OF SHUNG-HU

"Deeper devotion Nowhere hath knelt; Fuller emotion Heart never felt."

--GOETHE (_Dwight's translation_).

Rarely, if ever, has there been recorded in history a more varied and adventurous life than that of Mertuk, wife of Hans Hendrik, who came into literature through the magical pen of Elisha Kent Kane as the "pretty daughter" of Shung-hu, an Etah Eskimo. She was born (and reared) as a veritable Child of the Ice, being one of the members of the northernmost tribe of the world,--a people, in the last century, of absorbing interest as a surviving offshoot of the Stone Age.

Mertuk married Hans Hendrik, an Eskimo of Moravian faith from Danish West Greenland, who was practically a deserter from Kane. This northern idyl was the reverse of Ruth of the Bible, since for the sake of Mertuk, Hans abandoned his family and his country, willingly separating himself from the comforts and certainties of civilized life for the vicissitudes and inconveniences of an archaic environment. Despite a lovely wife, Hans soon discovered the wretched discomforts and unwelcome methods of life on the Etah coast, where hunger and physical sufferings were not infrequent attendants on even the most skilful and active hunter.

When the polar expedition of Dr. Isaac I. Hayes touched in 1860 at Cape York, Hans joined the doctor's forces taking his wife and child with him; next year they emigrated to Danish Greenland when Hayes sailed south.

Ten years later Hans, with Mertuk and three children, joined Hall's north-polar expedition, which made a ship's record for the world. At Thank-G.o.d Harbor was born Mertuk's youngest child, Charles Polaris, nearer the pole than any other known infant. With undaunted courage and uncomplaining fort.i.tude she endured, with her four children (one a babe of three months), the fearful vicissitudes of the Polaris drift, set forth in another sketch, "The Marvellous Ice-Drift of Captain Tyson,"

carrying her babe in her seal-skin hood while dragging a heavy sledge over rough ice.

With quiet dignity, in keeping with her cool equanimity and her unblanching acceptance of hardships in the white North, Mertuk accepted the extraordinary experiences incident to temporary life in the great emporium of American civilization--New York City--which she was the first of her tribe to visit. Returning to Danish Greenland with her children, she there pa.s.sed the rest of her less eventful life, busy and happy in the domestic duties pertaining to her family and to her Inuit neighbors.

The incident of Mertuk's wifely heroism, herein told in detail, is drawn from an unpublished diary of Mr. Henry W. Dodge, mate of the schooner _United States_, then wintering under Dr. Hayes at Port Foulke.[30]

The sketch of the childhood of this heroic and interesting woman is based on various pa.s.sages of explorers and writers familiar with the incidents of Etah life.

Among the forceful and friendly natives of Etah sixty years since, in the days of Kane, was Shung-hu, famed equally for his qualities as a man and for his daring as a mighty hunter. He especially displayed his skill in the successful pursuit of the polar bear, whether on land along the coast, on the fast ice under the frowning snow-cliffs of Humboldt Glacier, or on the moving ice-floes of Smith Sound. Apart from his alert action and dignified bearing, his person was notable through his ample whiskers, on chin and on lips, which age and exposure had already softened by their silvery coloring. Indeed, he was the only full-bearded native in the nation, as is related by Hayes, whose distressed and starving boat party was only able in the last extremity to reach the _Advance_ through the aid of the Angekok Kalutunah and his comrade Shung-hu.

Among the much-loved children of Shung-hu was a daughter, Mertuk, whose mother's name is unknown, but she doubtless had that deep affection and tender care for her daughter which are common traits of these iron women of the Etah coast.

Nature and necessity had made the family lead a life of constant wandering, and so the child shared the seasonal and oft irregular journeys along the shut-in, narrow coast-land between the great Humboldt Glacier and the sea-beaten cliffs of Cape York. It was always a journey for food--birds and bears, deer and seals, walruses and narwhals, as time and good-fortune dictated.

Carried by her mother, little Mertuk travelled in true native fashion, thrust naked and feet foremost into the back part of the ample seal-skin hood. There she rode in warmth and comfort, safely seated astride of a soft, rounded walrus thong, which pa.s.sed under the arms of the mother and was made fast around her neck.

Mertuk thus grew and throve, happy and healthy, under conditions which to boys and girls of our own country would have seemed impossible of endurance. Sometimes the tiny child would be thrust out in a temperature in which mercury would freeze solid, and with laughter felt the biting, stimulating cold that only made the hood more welcome as a home-nest. It was the way of the wild, which must be followed in this country of sunless winters and of blinding blizzards, which every brave Inuit loved.

To this Eskimo maiden the whole world was made up of a few score men, women, and children of the igloos, of a dozen kinds of birds in the air, and on the cliffs; of white hares, bluish foxes, and reddish deer on land; of smooth seals, white whales, horned narwhals, and big-tusked walruses in the sea; and last but by no means least the enormous amphibious, sharp-clawed bear whose glistening, yellowish-white skin furnished material for the furry garments in which her father Shung-hu was always clothed.

At an early age Mertuk came to know the living creatures which were the sources of food and the means of life. She could tell the seasonal time in which came and went the wild fowl, of their breeding and of their young. The haunts and habits of the swift-footed animals of the glacier-enclosed land were all known to her, as well as the favorite resorts of the monsters of the bordering icy ocean, which furnished the hides and bones, the sinew and ivory, without which there would be neither needles and thread for the igloo, nor lances and sledges for the hunter.

It was a land of meat and flesh in which she lived, with no bread or vegetables, and the taste of sugar and of tea, the flavor of salt and of pepper, were absent from her food. She knew not books, matches, fire-arms, boats, stoves, crockery, nor cloth whether of cotton or fibre, of silk or wool. It was a land without wood, iron, medicines, or stimulants, and equally without government, schools, churches, hospitals, or even houses--unless one could so name the stone huts, the skin tents, or the transient snow igloos.

Her mother early taught her all the kinds of women's work which could make her useful to her tribe or to her family, and without doubt instilled in her a sense of some of the feminine graces which have softened the harshness of the world in all climes and in every country throughout the ages. Here they were a part of the life of the stone age, which the Etahs had inherited untainted by the outside world.

The daughter's supple fingers soon braided evenly and closely the sinews of the narwhal into the tense and needful bow-strings, for Shung-hu hunted reindeer with bow and arrows. Her strong hands tightly stretched the drying seal-skin, through which later her bone-needles and sinew-thread were so skilfully plied that the skin broke before the seams gave way. With deft action and with an unwonted taste she so shaped her bird-skin clothing and blue-fox hoods as to win praise for her garments from men and women alike. Her skill with the lamp soon became equal to that of the oldest expert of the tribe. Choosing and drying the long moss best suited for wicks, she applied a bit of walrus fat to the moss threads, and twisted them into a dense, even roll. While other lamps gave forth volumes of smoke, Mertuk so skilfully trimmed the lighted moss-wick that it gave an equal steady flame along the edge of the _koodlik_ (pot-stone lamp). An adept in all woman's work, always in health, gay, witty and even-tempered, Mertuk came also to be a comely maiden--well-formed in figure, fair of face, though very tiny in stature.

But even in this land of Eskimo plenty there come seasons of dire distress, when famine stalks abroad and slow starvation strikes down the weaklings of the tribe. In such a time of want and hunger Hans Hendrik came to the Etah tribe, to aid the half-famished folk in the hunt of the walrus, then needed to save from lingering death the sick men of Kane's ship as well as the strong people with Kalutunah and Shung-hu.

Mertuk had watched from a distance this wonderful youth, who spoke Inuit queerly, to the sly amus.e.m.e.nt of the listening Etahs. But he carried a long, strange weapon--fire-flashing, ear-splitting, and death-dealing--that killed a bear or a walrus at great and unheard-of distances. In the brief intervals of the urgent hunt he came to Shung-hu's igloo to sleep, to eat their scant fare, and to feed his wolfish dogs, which were ever fighting with those of Shung-hu. The hunt was fast and furious, and with such success that steaks and liver, walrus-skin and rich blubber, were again in plenty.

Of the joyous feast after this particular hunt, in which Mertuk partook with other famishing Etahs, Kane quotes Hans Hendrik, "an exact and truthful man," as saying: "Even the children ate all night. You (Kane) know the little two-year-old that Awiu (possibly the mother of Mertuk) carried in her hood--the one that bit you when you tickled her. That baby cut for herself, with a knife made out of an iron hoop and so heavy that she could hardly lift it, cut and ate, ate and cut, as long as I looked at her. She ate a _sipak_--the Eskimo name for the lump which is cut off close to the lips [of the eater]--as large as her own head.

Three hours afterward, when I went to bed, the baby was cutting off another lump and eating still."

The work of the hunt proved too strenuous for the Danish Greenlander, and finally Hans was worn out by exposure and fatigue, while he fell sick from cold and wet. In this condition he sought the breek[31] of Shung-hu's igloo for rest until he gained strength to enable him to return to Kane, to whom he had sent walrus meat.

The care of the strange Inuit fell on Mertuk. Prompt and gentle in her ministrations and attentions, jovial in her speech, and witty in conversation, she soon ensnared the heart of Hans. Indeed, from all accounts, she had that peculiar winning bashfulness that is so attractive among certain of the children of nature. Besides her tasteful dress she had a sense of order and of cleanliness, not always found among the Etahs. She not only kept her long, raven-black hair unmatted, but had also gathered her tresses into a tuft on the top of her head, where it was fastened by a finely embroidered seal-skin strap. This gave her a semblance of size and height quite needed, for she was only a trifle over four feet tall.

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,[32] 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 princ.i.p.ality 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 surpa.s.sing 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 pa.s.s 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."