Hans Egede

Hans Poulsen Egede (31 January 1686 – 5 November 1758) was a Norwegian Lutheran priest and missionary who launched mission efforts to Greenland, which led him to be styled the Apostle of Greenland. He established a successful mission among the Inuit and is credited with revitalizing Danish-Norwegian interest in the island after contact had been broken for about 300 years. He founded Greenland's capital Godthåb, now known as Nuuk.

Background Hans Egede was born into the home of a Danish-born civil servant, the priest son Povel Hansen Egede, and the Norwegian-born Kirsten Jensdatter Hind, daughter of a local merchant, in Harstad, Norway, nearly north of the Arctic Circle. His paternal grandfather had been a vicar in Vester Egede on southern Zealand, Denmark. Egede was schooled by an uncle, a clergyman in a local Lutheran Church. In 1704 he travelled to Copenhagen to enter the University of Copenhagen, where he earned a bachelor's degree in theology. He returned to Hinnøya Island after graduation, and on 15 April 1707 he was ordained and assigned to a parish on the equally remote archipelago of Lofoten. Also in 1707, he married Gertrud Rasch (or Rask). At the time he was about 21, while Rasch was 13 years his senior at 34. Four children were born to the marriage – two boys and two girls.

Greenland At Lofoten, Egede heard stories about the old Norse settlements on Greenland, with which contact had been lost centuries before. Beginning in 1711, with $9,000 in capital from Bergen merchants, $200 from Frederick IV of Denmark, and a $300 annual grant from the Royal Mission College.

The company was granted broad powers to govern Greenland, which was then believed to be a peninsula. It could raise its own army and navy, collect taxes, and administer justice. The king and his council, however, refused to grant the company monopoly rights to whaling and trade in Greenland, fearing this would antagonize the Dutch.

Haabet ("The Hope") and two smaller ships On 3 July More scurvy led to forty deaths and abandonment of the site not only by the Danes but by the Inuit as well. The Moravians, led by Christian David, established a station at Neu-Herrnhut. It later became the nucleus of modern Nuuk, Greenland's capital, and the Moravians went on to establish a string of missions along the island's west coast. The ship also returned one of Egede's convert children with a case of smallpox.

Language studies Egede began his language studies soon after arriving in Greenland in 1721. Searching for months for descendants of the old Norse colonists, he found only the local Kalaallit people and began learning their language.

A commonly repeated story concerns his early attempts to translate the phrase "Give us this day our daily bread" from the Lord's Prayer. Because bread was not part of the traditional Inuit diet, the phrase has sometimes been reported as "Give us this day our daily seal". Egede first tried the word "mamaq", believing it meant "food", but the word actually means "how delicious!". This attempt dates from 1724, about three years after his arrival in Greenland. He later adopted the word "neqissat", meaning "food".

In 1725 Egede also recorded the word "timiusaq" as a way of describing bread. Nearly two decades later, when his son Poul Egede published the four Gospels in Greenlandic in 1744, he used this term. Earlier dictionaries indicate that the related word "timia" referred to bone marrow or the porous inner part of a leg bone or horn, and in this sense "timiusaq" originally meant something resembling bone marrow. In later ecclesiastical usage the word came to mean "wafer", and in northern Greenland it was also used for ship's biscuit.

A catechism for use in Greenland was completed by 1747, more than twenty-five years after Egede first arrived in Greenland.

Legacy

Egede holds the legacy of a national "saint" of Greenland. The town of Egedesminde (lit. "Memory of Egede") commemorates him. It was established by Egede's second son, Niels, in 1759 on the Eqalussuit peninsula. It was moved to the island of Aasiaat in 1763, which had been the site of a pre-Viking Inuit settlement. His grandson and namesake Hans Egede Saabye also became a missionary to Greenland and published a celebrated diary of his time there.

The Royal Danish Geographical Society established the Egede Medal in his honour in 1916. The medal is in silver and awarded 'preferably for geographical studies and researches in the Arctic countries'.

A crater on the Moon is named after him: the Egede crater on the south edge of the Mare Frigoris (the Sea of Cold). The historical fiction novel "The Prophets of Eternal Fjord" narrates a tale of a missionary priest under Egede's instruction embarking upon Greenland to convert its indigenous peoples to Christianity.

Statues of Egede stand watch over Greenland's capital in Nuuk, outside of Vågan Church (Lofotkatedralen) in Kabelvåg and outside of Frederik's Church (Marmorkirken) in Copenhagen. In a subsequent vote, 921 voted to keep the statue while 600 wanted it removed.

Egede gave one of the oldest descriptions of a sea serpent, now believed to have been a giant squid. On 6 July 1734 he wrote that his ship was off the Greenland coast when those on board "saw a most terrible creature, resembling nothing they saw before. The monster lifted its head so high that it seemed to be higher than the crow's nest on the mainmast. The head was small and the body short and wrinkled. The unknown creature was using giant fins which propelled it through the water. Later the sailors saw its tail as well. The monster was longer than our whole ship".

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