[Illustration: VIEW OF UPERNAVIK AND KRESARSOAK.]
The town itself is otherwise not unlike Karsuk, and has about the same number of native inhabitants, an equal number of yelping dogs (I should say about a hundred), and the average proportion of the filth and stench inseparable from a town of such description. Among it all the trader’s little whitewashed house loomed up cheerily, and, like a light-house in a dirty fog, it was a pleasant thing to look upon. It was late at night when we dropped our anchor, but the photographers had time to get out their camera and bath; and as the clock struck twelve they made a picture of it—the most northern house upon the globe, _photographed by the light of the midnight sun_! a feat well suited to the place and the romantic circumstances of our situation. We carried the picture off as a pleasant souvenir.
But, unhappily, the proprietor of this house was not there, nor his family. They had all gone off reindeer-shooting—the entire family camping out in the open air—a circumstance which I regretted the more that the man had served me before as interpreter and dog-manager in 1860-’61, and I was naturally desirous to see him. We sent off a native courier, but the courier missed him, and after remaining twelve hours, and the case appearing hopeless, the _Panther_ was headed once more northward, and over the classic ground of the whalers we were soon passing Wedge Island and Cone Island, and Horse’s Head, and Cape Shackleton; and finally we fetched up at the Duck Islands, sixty miles beyond Tessuisak.
The Duck Islands were in former years a sort of whalemen’s rendezvous. To this point they fought their way among the great ice-fields along the Greenland coast; and here they are beyond the Danish colonies, and beyond the reach of human succor if misfortune happens them. Ahead of them lies Melville Bay, and the “middle ice” or “pack,” which they are bold to enter, and if lucky enough, in the end, to pass, they are pretty sure to find an ample reward in the cargo of whale blubber and whalebone which they will gather in the northern and western waters of Baffin’s Bay. In former times this fleet numbered something like a hundred sail; but now about a dozen steamers do the work of the noble old sailing ships, of which the recently destroyed _True Love_ was the last. As the fleet “take the ice” here early in June or late in May, we were of course too late for them.