These savages possessed a number of skins of the fox, the bear, and the
seal, with many horns in pieces, ends, and trunks, which they exchanged
with the Danes for knives, needles, looking-glasses, and trifles of
different kinds. They showed no desire for gold or silver money, the
offer of which provoked their ridicule or excited their contempt. They
manifested on the other hand a passionate eagerness for every article of
steel manufacture, which they were willing to purchase by the sacrifice
of their greatest valuables, as of their bows and arrows, their boats
and oars. When they had nothing more to offer in exchange, they stripped
themselves to the skin, and offered to make away with all the clothes
they possessed.
Godske Lindenau remained three days in the road, but it is not said that
he once went ashore. He was probably afraid of trusting the lives of
the small number of persons he had with him in the midst of such a mass
of savages, by whom they were so greatly outnumbered.
He took his departure upon the fourth day; but before he set sail he
secured two of the natives on board his ship in order to carry them to
Denmark; but they made so many violent efforts to escape, that it became
necessary to secure them by cords in order to prevent them from plunging
into the sea. When the savages upon the beach saw two of their
countrymen made prisoners and fastened to the deck of the Danish vessel,
they discharged a shower of stones and arrows upon the Danes, who were
obliged to terrify them to a distance by firing off one of their great
guns. The admiral returned to Denmark by himself, without knowing what
had befallen the other two ships, with which he had originally embarked.
The Danish account of this expedition says, that the English captain
with the two Danish vessels, which had separated from that under
Lindenau, reached the coast at the Southern extremity of Greenland, or
Cape Farewell. It is also certain that the English commander entered
Davis’s Straits, and coasted along the shore to the East. He discovered
a number of good harbours, a fine country, and verdant plains. The
savages in this part of Greenland carried on some traffic with him; as
those upon the other side had done with Lindenau; but they exhibited
more distrust; for they had no sooner received the Danish commodities in
exchange for their own than they took to their boats with as much
precipitation as if they were pursued by an enemy.
The Danes armed themselves for the purpose of making a landing in one of
the bays. The soil, where they went ashore, appeared to be a mixture of
sand and rock, like that of Norway. Some fumes exhaled from the earth
made them suppose that there were mines of sulphur in the neighbourhood;
and they found many pieces of silver ore, which yielded twenty-six
ounces of silver to the hundred weight of ore.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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