The Missionary Who Sailed to Greenland to Find the Vikings

In the early summer of 1721, a small Norwegian-Danish merchant ship named the Haabet — The Hope — sailed out of Bergen carrying forty-three people, a few cattle, several months of provisions, and the intention to spend the rest of the lives of those aboard on the western coast of Greenland. The expedition was led by Hans Poulsen Egede, a thirty-five-year-old Lutheran pastor from northern Norway, with his wife Gertrud Rasch, their four children, and a mixed crew of merchant sailors and prospective colonists.

Egede had been petitioning the Danish-Norwegian crown for ten years to send him to Greenland. His purpose was specific. He believed that the Norse Christian colonies founded by Erik the Red in the late tenth century were still there, somewhere on the Greenland coast, but had lost contact with Europe in the early fifteenth century. He believed they were probably still Catholic, in the medieval sense, and therefore in need of conversion to the Lutheran faith that had become the official religion of Denmark-Norway after the Reformation. He believed that the right Christian gesture, two centuries after their abandonment, was for someone to sail to Greenland and bring them back into communion with the Protestant church.

He was wrong about almost every part of this. There were no Norse Christians left. There had been none for at least 270 years. The last bishop of Garðar — the great Norse cathedral on the southern coast — had died in Norway in 1378, and the last ship known to have called at the colonies had reached the Eastern Settlement around 1410. By 1450 the colonies were gone. Egede sailed for an audience that no longer existed.

What he did instead, over the following fifteen years on the coast, was found modern Greenland.

The Greenland he expected to find

The Norse settlements that Erik the Red and his followers had established in 985 AD on the southwestern Greenland coast had, at their height in the mid-thirteenth century, contained approximately three thousand inhabitants in two main districts — the Eastern Settlement (around modern Qaqortoq) and the smaller Western Settlement (around modern Nuuk). The colonies had supported a cathedral, sixteen parish churches, two monasteries, a small commercial economy based on walrus ivory and polar bear hides, and an annual shipping connection to Bergen in Norway. They were the westernmost Christian communities in the medieval world.

By the time Egede sailed in 1721 they had been gone, depending on how you counted, for between 270 and 320 years. The exact mechanism of their disappearance was — and largely still is — uncertain. The most commonly accepted modern reconstruction is that the Little Ice Age progressively shortened the Greenland growing season starting in the early 14th century, that ice expansion in the Davis Strait gradually made the annual Bergen shipping route impassable, that the loss of trade isolated the colonies, that ecological pressures combined with the encroaching Thule Inuit (who had moved south down the Greenland coast during the same warming-to-cooling transition) put further stress on the Norse pastoral economy, and that the colonies died slowly over a century or so of declining births, stagnant herds, and unreplaced losses. The last European to have personal knowledge of the colonies — a Norwegian ship captain named Hans Cordts who claimed to have visited the Eastern Settlement in the early 1400s — left no detailed description.

What Egede had access to in 1721 were the medieval Icelandic sagas describing Erik the Red’s foundation of the colonies, several bishops’ lists, the occasional papal letter mentioning Greenland from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and a small amount of secondhand information from Icelandic fishermen who had occasionally been blown off course onto the Greenland coast. He had no idea where on the coast the settlements had actually been. He had no idea what condition they might be in. He had no idea that the Inuit population he would encounter spoke a completely different language and had no folk memory of Norse contact.

He sailed anyway.

What he found

The Haabet reached the Greenland coast in the first week of July 1721, near the modern town of Nuuk. The party went ashore, set up a small wooden mission house, and began exploring. The first Greenlandic people Egede met were Inuit hunters in skin kayaks, who paddled out to inspect the ship and were given small trade goods (knives, needles, fishhooks). They were curious, peaceful, and entirely uninterested in being converted to Lutheranism. They spoke a language Egede had never heard. He immediately began learning it, working with the most patient of the local hunters, and within three years had produced the first European-language dictionary and grammar of the Greenlandic Inuit language. The dictionary is now considered a foundational document of modern linguistic fieldwork.

Egede searched for the Norse continuously for the next four years. He found, on various inlets along the southwestern coast, several extensive sets of stone ruins — house foundations, byre walls, the remains of small chapels, in one case the partly standing walls of what had probably been a church tower. The ruins were heavily covered by turf and partly collapsed but unmistakably European in construction style. They were Norse. None of them showed any sign of having been inhabited for centuries. There were no graves new enough to identify, no fresh middens, no recently-cut stumps. The settlements were entirely dead.

He kept looking. He sent his son Paul, who had been ten years old when the family arrived, on overland expeditions through the interior. Paul confirmed his father’s finding: the ruins were everywhere, the settlements were everywhere uninhabited, no Norse Christian had been alive in Greenland during any time the Inuit population could remember. The Inuit oral histories of the early eighteenth century preserved no story of contact with the Norse beyond a few vague references to kalâdliit — a word that some Greenlandic informants used to mean “long-ago strangers from the south.”

By 1725 Egede had given up on the Norse search. He had also lost his wife Gertrud, who died on the coast in 1735 of an illness Egede suspected (almost certainly correctly) was the smallpox that had recently arrived with one of the supply ships. The smallpox epidemic killed roughly a third of the local Inuit population over the next year. Egede personally nursed many of the sick and dying. The combination of his linguistic work and his medical service — and his obvious commitment to staying — had by then made him a trusted figure in the small coastal communities of the southwestern coast.

What he founded instead

The colonial settlement that Egede established near the Haabet’s 1721 landing site was named Godthåb — “Good Hope,” in Danish — in 1728. It was deliberately small. Egede had given up on converting any Norse and had committed instead to a long-term mission to the Greenlandic Inuit. The mission began producing the first Greenlandic Inuit converts to Lutheranism in 1729. The translation of the New Testament into Greenlandic, begun by Egede and completed by his son Paul, was published in 1766. The Bible was the first book in any Indigenous American language to be fully translated into a European typographic edition.

Egede returned to Denmark in 1736 after fifteen years on the coast, broken in health by the conditions and depressed by the death of his wife. He spent the remaining twenty-two years of his life in Copenhagen, training new missionaries for Greenland, supervising the publication of the dictionary, the grammar, and the partial Bible translation. He died in 1758. His son Paul stayed in Greenland, continued the mission, finished the New Testament translation, became the first European to write a sustained scientific account of Inuit life, and died in Copenhagen in 1789.

Godthåb is now Nuuk, the capital of modern Greenland, with a population of about nineteen thousand. The colonial mission house Egede built has been replaced several times; the current building on the site, dating to the late nineteenth century, is a small wooden Lutheran church called the Hans Egede Church. There is a statue of Egede on the hill above the harbor, looking out to sea.

The statue was the subject of significant local controversy in 2020 during the worldwide protests over colonial monuments. The statue was vandalized — covered in red paint — and a poll of Nuuk residents was held to decide whether to remove it. The vote was, narrowly, to leave it standing. The grounds, on both sides, were complicated. Egede had brought the disease that killed thousands of Inuit, had pursued conversion at the expense of traditional religion, and had founded the colonial system whose effects on Greenlandic society were still being argued out three hundred years later. He had also produced the language work that made modern Greenlandic literacy possible, had transmitted Inuit oral material that would otherwise have been lost, and had — through his linguistic and medical commitment to the people he had originally come to convert — made himself genuinely beloved in his lifetime among the very community whose ancestors his colonial project had ultimately harmed.

The 2020 poll produced a narrow majority to keep the statue. The poll was not binding. The municipal government, after consultation, left the statue in place but added a small bilingual plaque at its base. The plaque, in Greenlandic and in Danish, gives Egede’s dates and reads: He came looking for Norsemen and found us instead.

It is the most accurate single sentence anyone has written about him.