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-God Harbor was born Mertuk's youngest child, Charles Polaris, nearer the pole than any other known infant. With undaunted courage and uncomplaining fortitude 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 passed 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 The incident of Mertuk's wifely heroism, herein told in detail, is drawn from an unpublished diary of Mr.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 passages of explorers and writers familiar with the incidents of Etah life. * * * * *