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Hero Tales of the Far North

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Title: Hero Tales of the Far North

Author: Jacob A. Riis


        
Release date: May 1, 2004 [eBook #12481]
                Most recently updated: December 21, 2022

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HERO TALES OF THE FAR NORTH ***




HERO TALES OF THE FAR NORTH




               [Illustration: (Publisher colophon)]

                       THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
                    NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
                      ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO

                     MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
                    LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
                             MELBOURNE

                 THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
                              TORONTO




[Illustration: FREDERIKSBORG

  _See page 182_
]




                            HERO TALES
                         OF THE FAR NORTH

                                By
                           JACOB A. RIIS



               AUTHOR OF “HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES”
                    “THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN”
                       “THE OLD TOWN,” ETC.

                             New York
                       THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
                               1919

                       _All rights reserved_




                         COPYRIGHT, 1910,
                     BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

        Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1910.


                           Norwood Press
               J. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.
                       Norwood, Mass. U.S.A.




                    THIS BOOK OF MY DEAD HEROES

                   I DEDICATE TO MY LIVING HERO


                        THEODORE ROOSEVELT


           MAY IT BE MANY YEARS BEFORE THE LAST CHAPTER

                 OF HIS SPLENDID WHOLESOME LIFE IS

                    WRITTEN IN THE PAGES OF OUR

                         COUNTRY’S HISTORY




FOREWORD


When a man knocks at Uncle Sam’s gate, craving admission to his
house, we ask him how much money he brings, lest he become a
hindrance instead of a help. If now we were to ask what he brings,
not only in his pocket, but in his mind and in his heart, this
stranger, what ideals he owns, what company he kept in the country
he left that shaped his hopes and ambitions,—might it not, if the
answer were right, be a help to a better mutual understanding
between host and guest? For the _Mayflower_ did not hold all who
in this world have battled for freedom of home, of hope, and of
conscience. The struggle is bigger than that. Every land has its
George Washington, its Kosciusko, its William Tell, its Garibaldi,
its Kossuth, if there is but one that has a Joan d’Arc. What we
want to know of the man is: were its heroes his?

This book is an attempt to ask and to answer that question for my
own people, in a very small and simple way, it is true, but perhaps
abler pens with more leisure than mine may follow the trail it has
blazed. I should like to see some Swede write of the heroes of his
noble, chivalrous people, whom lack of space has made me slight
here, though I count them with my own. I should like to hear the
epic of United Italy, of proud and freedom-loving Hungary, the
swan-song of unhappy Poland, chanted to young America again and
again, to help us all understand that we are kin in the things that
really count, and help us pull together as we must if we are to
make the most of our common country.

These were my—our—heroes, then. Every lad of Northern blood, whose
heart is in the right place, loves them. And he need make no
excuses for any of them. Nor has he need of bartering them for the
great of his new home; they go very well together. It is partly
for his sake I have set their stories down here. All too quickly
he lets go his grip on them, on the new shore. Let him keep them
and cherish them with the memories of the motherland. The immigrant
America wants and needs is he who brings the best of the old home
to the new, not he who threw it overboard on the voyage. In the
great melting-pot it will tell its story for the good of us all.

To those who wonder that I have left the Saga era of the North
untouched, I would say that I have preferred to deal here only with
downright historic figures. For valuable aid rendered in insuring
accuracy I am indebted to the services of Dr. P.A. Rydberg, Dr. J.
Emile Blomén, Gustaf V. Lindner, and Professor Joakim Reinhard.
My thanks are due likewise to many friends, Danes by birth like
myself, who have helped me with the illustrations.

  J. A. R.

  RICHMOND HILL,
  June, 1910.




CONTENTS


  A KNIGHT ERRANT OF THE SEA                                   1

  HANS EGEDE, THE APOSTLE TO GREENLAND                        31

  GUSTAV VASA, THE FATHER OF SWEDEN                           61

  ABSALON, WARRIOR BISHOP OF THE NORTH                        87

  KING VALDEMAR, AND THE STORY OF THE DANNEBROG              125

  HOW THE GHOST OF THE HEATH WAS LAID                        153

  KING CHRISTIAN IV                                          179

  GUSTAV ADOLF, THE SNOW-KING                                205

  KING AND SAILOR, HEROES OF COPENHAGEN                      239

  THE TROOPER WHO WON A WAR ALONE                            263

  CARL LINNÉ, KING OF THE FLOWERS                            277

  NIELS FINSEN, THE WOLF-SLAYER                              305




A KNIGHT ERRANT OF THE SEA


The Eighteenth Century broke upon a noisy family quarrel in the
north of Europe. Charles the Twelfth of Sweden, the royal hotspur
of all history, and Frederik of Denmark had fallen out. Like their
people, they were first cousins, and therefore all the more bent
on settling the old question which was the better man. After the
fashion of the lion and the unicorn, they fought “all about the
town,” and, indeed, about every town that came in their way, now
this and now that side having the best of it. On the sea, which was
the more important because neither Swedes nor Danes could reach
their fighting ground or keep up their armaments without command
of the waterways, the victory rested finally with the Danes. And
this was due almost wholly to one extraordinary figure, the like
of which is scarce to be found in the annals of warfare, Peder
Tordenskjold. Rising in ten brief years from the humblest place
before the mast, a half-grown lad, to the rank of admiral, ennobled
by his King and the idol of two nations, only to be assassinated on
the “field of honor” at thirty, he seems the very incarnation of
the stormy times of the Eleven Years’ War, with which his sun rose
and set; for the year in which peace was made also saw his death.

Peder Jansen Wessel was born on October 28, 1690, in the city of
Trondhjem, Norway, which country in those days was united with
Denmark under one king. His father was an alderman with eighteen
children. Peder was the tenth of twelve wild boys. It is related
that the father in sheer desperation once let make for him a pair
of leathern breeches which he would not be able to tear. But the
lad, not to be beaten so easily, sat on a grind-stone and had
one of his school-fellows turn it till the seat was worn thin, a
piece of bravado that probably cost him dear, for doubtless the
exasperated father’s stick found the attenuated spot.

Since he would have none of the school, his father had him
apprenticed out to a tailor with the injunction not to spare the
rod. But sitting cross-legged on a tailor’s stool did not suit the
lad, and he took it out of his master by snowballing him thoroughly
one winter’s day. Next a barber undertook to teach him his trade;
but Peder ran away and was drifting about the streets when the King
came to Norway. The boy saw the splendid uniforms and heard the
story of the beautiful capital by the Öresund, with its palaces and
great fighting ships. When the King departed, he was missing, and
for a while there was peace in Trondhjem.

Down in Copenhagen the homeless lad was found wandering about by
the King’s chaplain, who, being himself a Norwegian, took him home
and made him a household page. But the boy’s wanderings had led
him to the navy-yard, where he saw mid-shipmen of his own size at
drill, and he could think of nothing else. When he should have
been waiting at table he was down among the ships. For him there
was ever but one way to any goal, the straight cut, and at fifteen
he wrote to the King asking to be appointed a midshipman. “I am
wearing away my life as a servant,” he wrote. “I want to give it,
and my blood, to the service of your Majesty, and I will serve you
with all my might while I live!”

The navy had need of that kind of recruits, and the King saw to it
that he was apprenticed at once. And that was the beginning of his
strangely romantic career.

Three years he sailed before the mast and learned seamanship,
while Charles was baiting the Muscovite and the North was resting
on its arms. Then came Pultava and the Swedish King’s crushing
defeat. The storm-centre was transferred to the North again, and
the war on the sea opened with a splendid deed, fit to appeal to
any ardent young heart. At the battle in the Bay of Kjöge, the
_Dannebrog_, commanded by Ivar Hvitfeldt, caught fire, and by its
position exposed the Danish fleet to great danger. Hvitfeldt could
do one of two things: save his own life and his men’s by letting
his ship drift before the wind and by his escape risking the rest
of the fleet and losing the battle, or stay where he was to meet
certain death. He chose the latter, anchored his vessel securely,
and fought on until the ship was burned down to the water’s edge
and blew up with him and his five hundred men. Ivar Hvitfeldt’s
name is forever immortal in the history of his country. A few years
ago they raised the wreck of the _Dannebrog_, fitly called after
the Danish flag, and made of its guns a monument that stands on
Langelinie, the beautiful shore road of Copenhagen.

Fired by such deeds, young Wessel implored the King, before he had
yet worn out his first midshipman’s jacket, to give him command of
a frigate. He compromised on a small privateer, the _Ormen_, but
with it he did such execution in Swedish waters and earned such
renown as a dauntless sailor and a bold scout whose information
about the enemy was always first and best, that before spring they
gave him a frigate with eighteen guns and the emphatic warning
“not to engage any enemy when he was not clearly the stronger.” He
immediately brought in a Swedish cruiser, the _Alabama_ of those
days, that had been the terror of the sea. In a naval battle in the
Baltic soon after, he engaged with his little frigate two of the
enemy’s line-of-battle ships that were trying to get away, and only
when a third came to help them did he retreat, so battered that he
had to seek port to make repairs. Accused of violating his orders,
his answer was prompt: “I promised your Majesty to do my best, and
I did.” King Frederik IV, himself a young and spirited man, made
him a captain, jumping him over fifty odd older lieutenants, and
gave him leave to war on the enemy as he saw fit.

The immediate result was that the Governor of Göteborg, the enemy’s
chief seaport in the North Sea, put a price on his head. Captain
Wessel heard of it and sent word into town that he was outside—to
come and take him; but to hurry, for time was short. While waiting
for a reply, he fell in with two Swedish men-of-war having in tow
a Danish prize. That was not to be borne, and though they together
mounted ninety-four guns to his eighteen, he fell upon them like a
thunderbolt. They beat him off, but he returned for their prize.
That time they nearly sank him with three broad-sides. However, he
ran for the Norwegian coast and saved his ship. In his report of
this affair he excuses himself for running away with the reflection
that allowing himself to be sunk “would not rightly have benefited
his Majesty’s service.”

However, the opportunity came to him swiftly of “rightly
benefiting” the King’s service. After the battle of Kolberger
Heide, that had gone against the Swedes, he found them beaching
their ships under cover of the night to prevent their falling into
the hands of the victors. Wessel halted them with the threat that
every man Jack in the fleet should be made to walk the plank, saved
the ships, and took their admiral prisoner to his chief. When
others slept, Wessel was abroad with his swift sailer. If wind and
sea went against him, he knew how to turn his mishap to account.
Driven in under the hostile shore once, he took the opportunity,
as was his wont, to get the lay of the land and of the enemy. He
learned quickly that in the harbor of Wesensö, not far away, a
Swedish cutter was lying with a Danish prize. She carried eight
guns and had a crew of thirty-six men; but though he had at the
moment only eighteen sailors in his boat, he crept up the coast at
once, slipped quietly in after sundown, and took ship and prize
with a rush, killing and throwing overboard such as resisted. In
Sweden mothers hushed their crying children with his dreaded name;
on the sea they came near to thinking him a troll, so sudden and
unexpected were his onsets. But there was no witchcraft about it.
He sailed swiftly because he was a skilled sailor and because he
missed no opportunity to have the bottom of his ship scraped and
greased. And when on board, pistol and cutlass hung loose; for it
was a time of war with a brave and relentless foe.

His reconnoitring expeditions he always headed himself, and
sometimes he went alone. Thus, when getting ready to take
Marstrand, a fortified seaport of great importance to Charles, he
went ashore disguised as a fisherman and peddled fish through the
town, even in the very castle itself, where he took notice, along
with the position of the guns and the strength of the garrison,
of the fact that the commandant had two pretty daughters. He was
a sailor, sure enough. Once when ashore on such an expedition,
he was surprised by a company of dragoons. His men escaped, but
the dragoons cut off his way to the shore. As they rode at him,
reaching out for his sword, he suddenly dashed among them, cut
one down, and, diving through the surf, swam out to the boat, his
sword between his teeth. Their bullets churned up the sea all about
him, but he was not hit. He seemed to bear a charmed life; in all
his fights he was wounded but once. That was in the attack on the
strongly fortified port of Strömstad, in which he was repulsed with
a loss of 96 killed and 246 wounded, while the Swedish loss footed
up over 1500, a fight which led straight to the most astonishing
chapter in his whole career, of which more anon.

All Denmark and Norway presently rang with the stories of
his exploits. They were always of the kind to appeal to the
imagination, for in truth he was a very knight errant of the sea
who fought for the love of it as well as of the flag, ardent
patriot that he was. A brave and chivalrous foe he loved next to a
loyal friend. Cowardice he loathed. Once when ordered to follow a
retreating enemy with his frigate _Hvide Örnen_ (the White Eagle)
of thirty guns, he hugged him so close that in the darkness he ran
his ship into the great Swedish man-of-war _Ösel_ of sixty-four
guns. The chance was too good to let pass. Seeing that the _Ösel’s_
lower gun-ports were closed, and reasoning from this that she
had been struck in the water-line and badly damaged, he was for
boarding her at once, but his men refused to follow him. In the
delay the _Ösel_ backed away. Captain Wessel gave chase, pelted her
with shot, and called to her captain, whose name was _Söstjerna_
(sea-star), to stop.

“Running away from a frigate, are you? Shame on you, coward and
poltroon! Stay and fight like a man for your King and your flag!”

Seeing him edge yet farther away, he shouted in utter exasperation,
“Your name shall be dog-star forever, not sea-star, if you don’t
stay.”

“But all this,” he wrote sadly to the King, “with much more which
was worse, had no effect.”

However, on his way back to join the fleet he ran across a
convoy of ten merchant vessels, guarded by three of the enemy’s
line-of-battle ships. He made a feint at passing, but, suddenly
turning, swooped down upon the biggest trader, ran out his boats,
made fast, and towed it away from under the very noses of its
protectors. It meant prize-money for his men, but their captain did
not forget their craven conduct of the night, which had made him
lose a bigger prize, and with the money they got a sound flogging.

The account of the duel between his first frigate, _Lövendahl’s
Galley_, of eighteen guns, and a Swede of twenty-eight guns reads
like the doings of the old vikings, and indeed both commanders
were likely descended straight from those arch fighters. Wessel
certainly was. The other captain was an English officer, Bactman by
name, who was on the way to deliver his ship, that had been bought
in England, to the Swedes. They met in the North Sea and fell to
fighting by noon of one day. The afternoon of the next saw them at
it yet. Twice the crew of the Swedish frigate had thrown down their
arms, refusing to fight any more. Vainly the vessel had tried to
get away; the Dane hung to it like a leech. In the afternoon of the
second day Wessel was informed that his powder had given out. He
had a boat sent out with a herald, who presented to Captain Bactman
his regrets that he had to quit for lack of powder, but would he
come aboard and shake hands?

The Briton declined. Meanwhile the ships had drifted close enough
to speak through the trumpet, and Captain Wessel shouted over from
his quarter-deck that “if he could lend him a little powder, they
might still go on.” Captain Bactman smilingly shook his head,
and then the two drank to one another’s health, each on his own
quarter-deck, and parted friends, while their crews manned what was
left of the yards and cheered each other wildly.

Wessel’s enemies, of whom he had many, especially among the
nobility, who looked upon him as a vulgar upstart, used this
incident to bring him before a court-martial. It was unpatriotic,
they declared, and they demanded that he be degraded and fined. His
defence, which with all the records of his career are in the Navy
Department at Copenhagen, was brief but to the point. It is summed
up in the retort to his accusers that “they themselves should be
rebuked, and severely, for failing to understand that an officer in
the King’s service should be promoted instead of censured for doing
his plain duty,” and that there was nothing in the articles of war
commanding him to treat an honorable foe otherwise than with honor.

It must be admitted that he gave his critics no lack of cause.
His enterprises were often enough of a hair-raising kind, and he
had scant patience with censure. Thus once, when harassed by an
Admiralty order purposely issued to annoy him, he wrote back: “The
biggest fool can see that to obey would defeat all my plans. I
shall not do it. It may suit folk who love loafing about shore, but
to an honest man such talk is disgusting, let alone that the thing
can’t be done.” He was at that time twenty-six years old, and in
charge of the whole North Sea fleet. No wonder he had enemies.

However, the King was his friend. He made him a nobleman, and gave
him the name Tordenskjold. It means “thunder shield.”

“Then, by the powers,” he swore when he was told, “I shall thunder
in the ears of the Swedes so that the King shall hear of it!” And
he kept his word.

Charles had determined to take Denmark with one fell blow. He had
an army assembled in Skaane to cross the sound, which was frozen
over solid. All was ready for the invasion in January 1716. The
people throughout Sweden had assembled in the churches to pray
for the success of the King’s arms, and he was there himself to
lead; but in the early morning hours a strong east wind broke up
the ice, and the campaign ended before it was begun. Charles then
turned on Norway, and laid siege to the city of Frederikshald,
which, with its strong fort, Frederiksteen, was the key to that
country. A Danish fleet lay in the Skagerak, blocking his way of
reënforcements by sea. Tordenskjold, with his frigate, _Hvide
Örnen_, and six smaller ships (the frigate _Vindhunden_ of sixteen
guns, and five vessels of light draught, two of which were heavily
armed), was doing scouting duty for the Admiral when he learned
that the entire Swedish fleet of forty-four ships that was intended
to aid in the operations against Frederikshald lay in the harbor of
Dynekilen waiting its chance to slip out. It was so well shielded
there that its commander sent word to the King to rest easy;
nothing could happen to him. He would join him presently.

Tordenskjold saw that if he could capture or destroy this fleet
Norway was saved; the siege must perforce be abandoned. And Norway
was his native land, which he loved with his whole fervid soul. But
no time was to be lost. He could not go back to ask for permission,
and one may shrewdly guess that he did not want to, for it would
certainly have been refused. He heard that the Swedish officers,
secure in their stronghold, were to attend a wedding on shore the
next day. His instructions from the Admiralty were: in an emergency
always to hold a council of war, and to abide by its decision. At
daybreak he ran his ship alongside _Vindhunden_, her companion
frigate, and called to the captain:

“The Swedish officers are bidden to a wedding, and they have
forgotten us. What do you say—shall we go unasked?”

Captain Grip was game. “Good enough!” he shouted back. “The wind is
fair, and we have all day. I am ready.”

That was the council of war and its decision. Tordenskjold gave
the signal to clear for action, and sailed in at the head of his
handful of ships.

The inlet to the harbor of Dynekilen is narrow and crooked, winding
between reefs and rocky steeps quite two miles, and only in
spots more than four hundred feet wide. Half-way in was a strong
battery. Tordenskjold’s fleet was received with a tremendous fire
from all the Swedish ships, from the battery, and from an army of
four thousand soldiers lying along shore. The Danish ships made
no reply. They sailed up grimly silent till they reached a place
wide enough to let them wear round, broadside on. Then their guns
spoke. Three hours the battle raged before the Swedish fire began
to slacken. As soon as he noticed it, Tordenskjold slipped into the
inner harbor under cover of the heavy pall of smoke, and before the
Swedes suspected their presence they found his ships alongside.
Broadside after broadside crashed into them, and in terror they
fled, soldiers and sailors alike. While they ran Tordenskjold
swooped down upon the half-way battery, seized it, and spiked its
guns. The fight was won.

But the heaviest part was left—the towing out of the captured
ships. All the afternoon Tordenskjold led the work in person,
pulling on ropes, cheering on his men. The Swedes, returning
gamely to the fight, showered them with bullets from shore. One
of the abandoned vessels caught fire. Lieutenant Toender, of
Tordenskjold’s staff, a veteran with a wooden leg, boarded it just
as the quartermaster ran up yelling that the ship was full of
powder and was going to blow up. He tried to jump overboard, but
the lieutenant seized him by the collar and, stumping along, made
him lead the way to the magazine. A fuse had been laid to an open
keg of powder, and the fire was sputtering within an inch of it
when Lieutenant Tönder plucked it out, smothered it between thumb
and forefinger, and threw it through the nearest port-hole. There
were two hundred barrels of powder in the ship.

Tordenskjold had kept his word to the King. Not as much as a yawl
of the Dynekilen fleet was left to the enemy. He had sunk or
burned thirteen and captured thirty-one ships with his seven, and
all the piled-up munitions of war were in his hands. King Charles
gave up the siege, marched his army out of Norway, and the country
was saved. The victory cost Tordenskjold but nineteen killed and
fifty-seven wounded. On his own ship six men were killed and twenty
wounded.

Of infinite variety was this sea-fighter. After a victory like
this, one hears of him in the next breath gratifying a passing whim
of the King, who wanted to know what the Swedish people thought of
their Government after Charles’s long wars that are said to have
cost their country a million men. Tordenskjold overheard it, had
himself rowed across to Sweden, picked up there a wedding party,
bridegroom, minister, guests, and all, including the captain of
the shore watch who was among them, and returned in time for the
palace dinner with his catch. King Frederik was entertaining Czar
Peter the Great, who had been boasting of the unhesitating loyalty
of his men which his Danish host could not match. He now had the
tables turned upon him. It is recorded that the King sent the party
back with royal gifts for the bride. One would be glad to add that
Tordenskjold sent back, too, the silver pitcher and the parlor
clock his men took on their visit. But he didn’t. They were still
in Copenhagen a hundred years later, and may be they are yet. It
was not like his usual gallantry toward the fair sex. But perhaps
he didn’t know anything about it.

Then we find him, after an unsuccessful attack on Göteborg that
cost many lives, sending in his adjutant to congratulate the
Swedish commandant on their “gallant encounter” the day before,
and exchanging presents with him in token of mutual regard. And
before one can turn the page he is discovered swooping down upon
Marstrand, taking town and fleet anchored there, and the castle
itself with its whole garrison, all with two hundred men, swelled
by stratagem into an army of thousands. We are told that an officer
sent out from the castle to parley, issuing forth from a generous
dinner, beheld the besieging army drawn up in street after street,
always two hundred men around every corner, as he made his way
through the town, piloted by Tordenskjold himself, who was careful
to take him the longest way, while the men took the short cut to
the next block. The man returned home with the message that the
town was full of them and that resistance was useless. The ruse
smacks of Peder Wessel’s boyish fight with a much bigger fellow who
had beaten him once by gripping his long hair, and so getting his
head in chancery. But Peder had taken notice. Next time he came to
the encounter with hair cut short and his whole head smeared with
soft-soap, and that time he won.

The most extraordinary of all his adventures befell when, after the
attack on Strömstad, he was hastening home to Copenhagen. Crossing
the Kattegat in a little smack that carried but two three-pound
guns, he was chased and overtaken by a Swedish frigate of sixteen
guns and a crew of sixty men. Tordenskjold had but twenty-one,
and eight of them were servants and non-combatants. They were
dreadfully frightened, and tradition has it that one of them wept
when he saw the Swede coming on. Her captain called upon him to
surrender, but the answer was flung back:

“I am Tordenskjold! Come and take me, if you can.”

With that came a tiny broadside that did brisk execution on
the frigate. Tordenskjold had hauled both his guns over on the
“fighting side” of his vessel. There ensued a battle such as Homer
would have loved to sing. Both sides banged away for all they were
worth. In the midst of the din and smoke Tordenskjold used his
musket with cool skill; his servants loaded while he fired. At
every shot a man fell on the frigate.

Word was brought that there was no more round shot. He bade them
twist up his pewter dinner service and fire that, which they did.
The Swede tried vainly to board. Tordenskjold manœuvred his smack
with such skill that they could not hook on. Seeing this, Captain
Lind, commander of the frigate, called to him to desist from the
useless struggle; he would be honored to carry such a prisoner into
Göteborg. Back came the taunt:

“Neither you nor any other Swede shall ever carry me there!” And
with that he shot the captain down.[1]

When his men saw him fall, they were seized with panic and made off
as quickly as they could, while Tordenskjold’s crew, of whom only
fourteen were left, beat their drums and blew trumpets in frantic
defiance. Their captain was for following the Swede and boarding
her, but he couldn’t. Sails, rigging, and masts were shot to
pieces. Perhaps the terror of the Swedes was increased by the sight
of Tordenskjold’s tame bear making faces at them behind his master.
It went with him everywhere till that day, and came out of the
fight unscathed. But during the night the crew ran the vessel on
the Swedish shore, whence Tordenskjold himself reached Denmark in
an open boat which he had to keep bailing all night, for the boat
was shot full of holes, and though he and his companions stuffed
their spare clothing into them it leaked badly. The enemy got the
smack, after all, and the bear, which, being a Norwegian, proved so
untractable on Swedish soil that, sad to relate, in the end they
cut him up and ate him.

King Charles, himself a knightly soul and an admirer of a gallant
enemy, gave orders to have all Tordenskjold’s belongings sent
back to him, but he did not live to see the order carried out. He
was found dead in the rifle-pits before Frederiksteen on December
11, 1718, shot through the head. It was Tordenskjold himself who
brought the all-important news to King Frederik in the night
of December 28,—they were not the days of telegraphs and fast
steamers,—and when the King, who had been roused out of bed to
receive him, could not trust his ears, he said with characteristic
audacity, “I wish it were as true that your Majesty had made me a
schoutbynacht,”—the rank next below admiral. And so he took the
step next to the last on the ladder of his ambition.

Within seven months he took Marstrand. It is part of the record
of that astonishing performance that when the unhappy Commandant
hesitated as the hour of evacuation came, not sure that he had done
right in capitulating, Tordenskjold walked up to the fort with a
hundred men, half his force, banged on the gate, went in alone and
up to the Commandant’s window, thundering out:

“What are you waiting for? Don’t you know time is up?”

In terror and haste, Colonel Dankwardt moved his Hessians out, and
Tordenskjold marched his handful of men in. When he brought the
King the keys of Marstrand, Frederik made him an admiral.

It was while blockading the port of Göteborg in the last year of
the war that he met and made a friend of Lord Carteret, the English
Ambassador to Denmark, and fell in love with the picture of a young
Englishwoman, Miss Norris, a lady of great beauty and wealth,
who, Lord Carteret told him, was an ardent admirer of his. It was
this love which indirectly sent him to his death. Lord Carteret
had given him a picture of her, and as soon as peace was made he
started for England; but he never reached that country. The remnant
of the Swedish fleet lay in the roadstead at Göteborg, under the
guns of the two forts, New and Old Elfsborg. While Tordenskjold was
away at Marstrand, the enemy sallied forth and snapped up seven
of the smaller vessels of his blockading fleet. The news made him
furious. He sent in, demanding them back at once, “or I will come
after them.” He had already made one ineffectual attempt to take
New Elfsborg that cost him dear. In Göteborg they knew the strength
of his fleet and laughed at his threat. But it was never safe to
laugh at Tordenskjold. The first dark night he stole in with ten
armed boats, seized the shore batteries of the old fort, and spiked
their guns before a shot was fired. The rising moon saw his men
in possession of the ships lying at anchor. With their blue-lined
coats turned inside out so that they might pass for Swedish
uniforms, they surprised the watch in the guard-house and made them
all prisoners. Now that there was no longer reason for caution,
they raised a racket that woke the sleeping town up in a fright.
The commander of the other fort sent out a boat to ascertain the
cause. It met the Admiral’s and challenged it, “Who goes there?”

“Tordenskjold,” was the reply, “come to teach you to keep awake.”

It proved impossible to warp the ships out. Only one of the seven
lost ones was recovered; all the rest were set on fire. By the
light of the mighty bonfire Tordenskjold rowed out with his men,
hauling the recovered ship right under the guns of the forts, the
Danish flag flying at the bow of his boat. He had not lost a single
man. A cannon-ball swept away all the oars on one side of his boat,
but no one was hurt.

At Marstrand they had been up all night listening to the
cannonading and the crash upon crash as the big ships blew up. They
knew that Tordenskjold was abroad with his men. In the morning,
when they were all in church, he walked in and sat down by his
chief, the old Admiral Judicher, who was a slow-going, cautious
man. He whispered anxiously, “What news?” but Tordenskjold only
shrugged his shoulders with unmoved face. It is not likely that
either the old Admiral or the congregation heard much of that
sermon, if indeed they heard any of it. But when it was over, they
saw from the walls of the town the Danish ships at anchor and heard
the story of the last of Tordenskjold’s exploits. It fitly capped
the climax of his life. Sweden’s entire force on the North Sea,
with the exception of five small galleys, had either been captured,
sunk, or burned by him.

The King would not let Tordenskjold go when peace was made, but he
had his way in the end. To his undoing he consented to take with
him abroad a young scalawag, the son of his landlord, who had more
money than brains. In Hamburg the young man fell in with a gambler,
a Swedish colonel by name of Stahl, who fleeced him of all he had
and much more besides. When Tordenskjold heard of it and met the
Colonel in another man’s house, he caned him soundly and threw him
out in the street. For this he was challenged, but refused to fight
a gambler.

“Friends,” particularly one Colonel Münnichhausen, who volunteered
to be his second, talked him over, and also persuaded him to give
up the pistol, with which he was an expert. The duel was fought at
the Village of Gledinge, over the line from Hanover, on the morning
of November 12, 1720. Tordenskjold was roused from sleep at five,
and, after saying his prayers, a duty he never on any account
omitted, he started for the place appointed. His old body-servant
vainly pleaded with his master to take his stout blade instead of
the flimsy parade sword the Admiral carried. Münnichhausen advised
against it; it would be too heavy, he said. Stahl’s weapon was a
long fighting rapier, and to this the treacherous second made no
objection. Almost at the first thrust he ran the Admiral through.
The seconds held his servant while Stahl jumped on his horse and
galloped away. Tordenskjold breathed out his dauntless soul in the
arms of his faithful servant and friend.

His body lies in a black marble sarcophagus in the “Navy Church”
at Copenhagen. The Danish and Norwegian peoples have never ceased
to mourn their idol. He was a sailor with a sailor’s faults. But
he loved truth, honor, and courage in foe and friend alike. Like
many seafaring men, he was deeply religious, with the unquestioning
faith of a child. There is a letter in existence written by him
to his father when the latter was on his death-bed that bears
witness to this. He thanks him with filial affection for all his
care, and says naïvely that he would rather have his prayers
than fall heir to twenty thousand daler. His pictures show a
stocky, broad-shouldered youth with frank blue eyes, full lips,
and an eagle nose. His deep, sonorous voice used to be heard, in
his midshipman days, above the whole congregation in the Navy
Church. In after years it called louder still to Denmark’s foes.
When things were at their worst in storm or battle, he was wont
to shout to his men, “Hi, _now_ we are having a fine time!” and
his battle-cry has passed into the language. By it, in desperate
straits demanding stout hearts, one may know the Dane after his own
heart, the real Dane, the world over. Among his own Tordenskjold is
still and always will be “the Admiral of Norway’s fleet.”


Footnotes:

[1] He was not mortally wounded, and Tordenskjold took him prisoner
later at the capture of Marstrand.




HANS EGEDE, THE APOSTLE TO GREENLAND


When in the fall of 1909 the statement was flashed around the
world that the North Pole had at last been reached, a name long
unfamiliar ran from mouth to mouth with that of the man who claimed
to be its discoverer. Dr. Cook was coming to Copenhagen, the daily
despatches read, on the Danish Government steamer _Hans Egede_. A
shipload of reporters kept an anxious lookout from the Skaw for
the vessel so suddenly become famous, but few who through their
telescopes made out the name at last upon the prow of the ship
gave it another thought in the eager welcome to the man it brought
back from the perils of the Farthest North. Yet the name of that
vessel stood for something of more real account to humanity than
the attainment of a goal that had been the mystery of the ages. No
such welcome awaited the explorer Hans Egede, who a hundred and
seventy-two years before sailed homeward over that very route,
a broken, saddened man, and all he brought was the ashes of his
best-beloved that they might rest in her native soil. No gold medal
was struck for him; the people did not greet him with loud acclaim.
The King and his court paid scant attention to him, and he was
allowed to live his last days in poverty. Yet a greater honor is
his than ever fell to a discoverer: the simple natives of Greenland
long reckoned the time from his coming among them. To them he was
in their ice-bound home what Father Damien was to the stricken
lepers in the South seas, and Dr. Grenfell is to the fishermen of
Labrador.

Hans Poulsen Egede, the apostle of Greenland, was a Norwegian of
Danish descent. He was born in the Northlands, in the parish of
Trondenäs, on January 31, 1686. His grandfather and his father
before him had been clergymen in Denmark, the former in the town of
West Egede, whence the name. Graduated in a single year from the
University of Copenhagen, “at which,” his teachers bore witness,
“no one need wonder who knows the man,” he became at twenty-two
pastor of a parish up in the Lofoden Islands, where the fabled
maëlstrom churns. Eleven years he preached to the poor fisherfolk
on Sunday, and on week-days helped his parishioners rebuild the old
church. When it was finished and the bishop came to consecrate it,
he chided Egede because the altar was too fine; it must have cost
more than they could afford.

“It did not cost anything,” was his reply. “I made it myself.”

No wonder his fame went far. When the church bell of Vaagen called,
boats carrying Sunday-clad fishermen were seen making for the
island from every point of the compass. Great crowds flocked to
his church; great enough to arouse the jealousy of neighboring
preachers who were not so popular, and they made it so unpleasant
that his wife at last tired of it. They little dreamed that they
were industriously paving the way for his greater work and for his
undying fame.

The sea that surges against that rockbound coast ever called its
people out in quest of adventure. Some who went nine hundred years
ago found a land in the far Northwest barred by great icebergs; but
once inside the barrier, they saw deep fjords like their own at
home, to which the mountains sloped down, covered with a wealth of
lovely flowers. On green meadows antlered deer were grazing, the
salmon leaped in brawling brooks, and birds called for their mates
in the barrens. Above it all towered snow-covered peaks. They saw
only the summer day; they did not know how brief it was, and how
long the winter night, and they called the country Greenland. They
built their homes there, and other settlers came. They were hardy
men, bred in a harsh climate, and they stayed. They built churches
and had their priests and bishops, for Norway was Christian by
that time. And they prospered after their fashion. They even paid
Peter’s Pence to Rome. There is a record that their contribution,
being in kind, namely, walrus teeth, was sold in 1386 by the Pope’s
agent to a merchant in Flanders for twelve livres, fourteen sous.
They kept up communication with their kin across the seas until the
Black Death swept through the Old World in the Fourteenth Century;
Norway, when it was gone, was like a vast tomb. Two-thirds of its
people lay dead. Those who were left had enough to do at home; and
Greenland was forgotten.

The seasons passed, and the savages, with whom the colonists
had carried on a running feud, came out of the frozen North and
overwhelmed them. Dim traditions that were whispered among the
natives for centuries told of that last fight. It was the Ragnarok
of the Northmen. Not one was left to tell the tale. Long years
after, when fishing vessels landed on that desolate coast, they
found a strange and hostile people in possession. No one had ever
dared to settle there since.

This last Egede knew, but little more. He believed that there were
still settlements on the inaccessible east coast of Greenland where
descendants of the old Northmen lived, cut off from all the world,
sunk into ignorance and godlessness,—men and women who had once
known the true light,—and his heart yearned to go to their rescue.
Waking and dreaming, he thought of nothing else. The lamp in his
quiet study shone out over the sea at night when his people were
long asleep. Their pastor was poring over old manuscripts and the
logs of whalers that had touched upon Greenland. From Bergen he
gathered the testimony of many sailors. None of them had ever seen
traces of, or heard of, the old Northmen.

To his bishop went Egede with his burden. Ever it rang in his
ears: “God has chosen you to bring them back to the light.” The
bishop listened and was interested. Yes, that was the land from
which seafarers in a former king’s time had brought home golden
sand. There might be more. It couldn’t be far from Cuba and
Hispaniola, those golden coasts. If one were to go equipped for
trading, no doubt a fine stroke of business might be done. Thus
the Right Reverend Bishop Krog of Trondhjem, and Egede went home,
disheartened.

At home his friends scouted him, said he was going mad to think
of giving up his living on such a fool’s chase. His wife implored
him to stay, and with a heavy heart Egede was about to abandon
his purpose when his jealous neighbor, whose parishioners had
been going to hear Egede preach, stirred up such trouble that his
wife was glad to go. She even urged him to, and he took her at
her word. They moved to Bergen, and from that port they sailed on
May 3, 1721, on the ship _Haabet_ (the Hope), with another and
smaller vessel as convoy, forty-six souls all told, bound for the
unknown North. The Danish King had made Egede missionary to the
Greenlanders on a salary of three hundred daler a year, the same
amount which Egede himself contributed of his scant store toward
the equipment. The bishop’s plan had prevailed; the mission was to
be carried by the expected commerce, and upon that was to be built
a permanent colonization.

Early in June they sighted land, but the way to it was barred
by impassable ice. A whole month they sailed to and fro, trying
vainly for a passage. At last they found an opening and slipped
through, only to find themselves shut in, with towering icebergs
closing around them. As they looked fearfully out over the rail,
their convoy signalled that she had struck, and the captain of
_Haabet_ cried out that all was lost. In the tumult of terror that
succeeded, Egede alone remained calm. Praying for succor where
there seemed to be none, he remembered the One Hundred and Seventh
Psalm: “He brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death,
and brake their bands in sunder.” And the morning dawned clear,
the ice was moving and their prison widening. On July 3, _Haabet_
cleared the last ice-reef, and the shore lay open before them.

The Eskimos came out in their kayaks, and the boldest climbed
aboard the ship. In one boat sat an old man who refused the
invitation. He paddled about the vessel, mumbling darkly in a
strange tongue. He was an Angekok, one of the native medicine-men
of whom presently Egede was to know much more. As he stood upon
the deck and looked at these strangers for whose salvation he had
risked all, his heart fell. They were not the stalwart Northmen he
had looked for, and their jargon had no homelike sound. But a great
wave of pity swept over him, and the prayer that rose to his lips
was for strength to be their friend and their guide to the light.

Not at once did the way open for the coveted friendship with the
Eskimos. While they thought the strangers came only to trade they
were hospitable enough, but when they saw them build, clearly
intent on staying, they made signs that they had better go. They
pointed to the sun that sank lower toward the horizon every day,
and shivered as if from extreme cold, and they showed their
visitors the icebergs and the snow, making them understand that
it would cover the house by and by. When it all availed nothing
and the winter came on, they retired into their huts and cut the
acquaintance of the white men. They were afraid that they had come
to take revenge for the harm done their people in the olden time.
There was nothing for it, then, but that Egede must go to them, and
this he did.

They seized their spears when they saw him coming, but he made
signs that he was their friend. When he had nothing else to give
them, he let them cut the buttons from his coat. Throughout the
fifteen years he spent in Greenland Egede never wore furs, as
did the natives. The black robe he thought more seemly for a
clergyman, to his great discomfort. He tells in his diary and in
his letters that often when he returned from his winter travels it
could stand alone when he took it off, being frozen stiff. After
a while he got upon neighborly terms with the Eskimos; but, if
anything, the discomfort was greater. They housed him at night in
their huts, where the filth and the stench were unendurable. They
showed their special regard by first licking off the piece of seal
they put before him, and if he rejected it they were hurt. Their
housekeeping, of which he got an inside view, was embarrassing in
its simplicity. The dish-washing was done by the dogs licking the
kettles clean. Often, after a night or two in a hut that held half
a dozen families, he was compelled to change his clothes to the
skin in an open boat or out on the snow. But the alternative was to
sleep out in a cold that sometimes froze his pillow to the bed and
the tea-cup to the table even in his own home. Above all, he must
learn their language.

It proved a difficult task, for the Eskimo tongue was both very
simple and very complex. In all the things pertaining to their
daily life it was exceedingly complex. For instance, to catch one
kind of fish was expressed by one word, to catch another kind in
quite different terms. They had one word for catching a young seal,
another for catching an old one. When it came to matters of moral
and spiritual import, the language was poor to desperation. Egede’s
instruction began when he caught the word “kine”—what is it? And
from that time on he learned every day; but the pronunciation was
as varied as the workaday vocabulary, and it was an unending task.

It proceeded with many interruptions from the Angekoks, who
tried more than once to bewitch him, but finally gave it up,
convinced that he was a great medicine-man himself, and therefore
invulnerable. But before that they tried to foment a regular
mutiny, the colony being by that time well under way, and Egede
had to arrest and punish the leaders. The natives naturally clung
to them, and when Egede had mastered their language and tried to
make clear that the Angekoks deceived them when they pretended to
go to the other world for advice, they demurred. “Did you ever see
them go?” he asked. “Well, have you seen this God of yours of whom
you speak so much?” was their reply. When Egede spoke of spiritual
gifts, they asked for good health and blubber: “Our Angekoks give
us that.” Hell-fire was much in theological evidence in those
days, but among the Eskimos it was a failure as a deterrent. They
listened to the account of it eagerly and liked the prospect. When
at length they became convinced that Egede knew more than their
Angekoks, they came to him with the request that he would abolish
winter. Very likely they thought that one who had such knowledge of
the hot place ought to have influence enough with the keeper of it
to obtain this favor.

It was not an easy task, from any point of view, to which he had
put his hands. As that first winter wore away there were gloomy
days and nights, and they were not brightened when, with the return
of the sun, no ship arrived from Denmark. The Dutch traders came,
and opened their eyes wide when they found Egede and his household
safe and even on friendly terms with the Eskimos. Pelesse—the
natives called the missionary that, as the nearest they could
come to the Danish _präst_ (priest)—Pelesse was not there after
blubber, they told the Dutchmen, but to teach them about heaven
and of “Him up there,” who had made them and wanted them home with
Him again. So he had not worked altogether in vain. But the brief
summer passed, and still no relief ship. The crew of _Haabet_
clamored to go home, and Egede had at last to give a reluctant
promise that if no ship came in two weeks, he would break up. His
wife alone refused to take a hand in packing. The ship was coming,
she insisted, and at the last moment it did come. A boat arriving
after dark brought the first word of it. The people ashore heard
voices speaking in Danish, and flew to Egede, who had gone to bed,
with the news. The ship brought good cheer. The Government was well
disposed. Trading and preaching were to go on together, as planned.
Joyfully then they built a bigger and a better house, and called
their colony Godthaab (Good Hope).

The work was now fairly under way. Of the energy and the hardships
it entailed, even we in our day that have heard so much of Arctic
exploration can have but a faint conception. Shut in on the coast
of eternal ice and silence,—silence, save when in summer the
Arctic rivers were alive, and crash after crash announced that the
glaciers coming down from the inland mountains were “casting their
calves,” the great icebergs, upon the ocean,—the colonists counted
the days from the one when that year’s ship was lost to sight till
the returning spring brought the next one, their only communication
with their far-off home. In summer the days were sometimes burning
hot, but the nights always bitterly cold. In winter, says Egede,
hot water spilled on the table froze as it ran, and the meat they
cooked was often frozen at the bone when set on the table. Summer
and winter Egede was on his travels between Sundays, sometimes in
the trader’s boat, more often the only white man with one or two
Eskimo companions, seeking out the people. When night surprised
him with no native hut in sight, he pulled the boat on some desert
shore and, commending his soul to God, slept under it. Once he and
his son found an empty hut, and slept there in the darkness. Not
until day came again did they know that they had made their bed on
the frozen bodies of dead men who had once been the occupants of
the house, and had died they never knew how. Peril was everywhere.
Again and again his little craft was wrecked. Once the house blew
down over their heads in one of the dreadful winter storms that
ravage those high latitudes. Often he had to sit on the rail of his
boat, and let his numbed feet hang into the sea to restore feeling
in them. On land he sometimes waded waist-deep in snow, climbed
mountains and slid down into valleys, having but the haziest notion
of where he would land. At home his brave wife sat alone, praying
for his safety and listening to every sound that might herald his
return. Tremble and doubt they did, Egede owns, but they never
flinched. Their work was before them, and neither thought of
turning back.

The Eskimos soon came to know that Egede was their friend. When
his boat entered a fjord where they were fishing, and his rowers
shouted out that the good priest had come who had news of God, they
dropped their work and flocked out to meet him. Then he spoke to
a floating congregation, simply as if they were children, and, as
with Him whose message he bore, “the people heard him gladly.” They
took him to their sick, and asked him to breathe upon them, which
he did to humor them, until he found out that it was an Angekok
practice, whereupon he refused. Once, after he had spoken of the
raising of Lazarus from the dead, they took him to a new-made grave
and asked him, too, to bring back their dead. They brought him a
blind man to be healed. Egede looked upon them in sorrowful pity.
“I can do nothing,” he said; “but if he believes in Jesus, He has
the power and can do it.”

“I do believe,” shouted the blind man: “let Him heal me.” It
occurred to Egede, perhaps as a mere effort at cleanliness, to wash
his eyes in cognac, and he sent him away with words of comfort. He
did not see his patient again for thirteen years. Then he was in a
crowd of Eskimos who came to Godthaab. The man saw as well as Egede.

“Do you remember?” he said, “you washed my eyes with sharp water,
and the Son of God in whom I believed, He made me to see.”

Children the Eskimos were in their idolatry, and children they
remained as Christians. By Egede’s prayers they set great store.
“You ask for us,” they told him. “God does not hear us; He does
not understand Eskimo.” Of God they spoke as “Him up there.” They
believed that the souls of the dead went up on the rainbow, and,
reaching the moon that night, rested there in the moon’s house,
on a bench covered with the white skins of young polar bears.
There they danced and played games, and the northern lights were
the young people playing ball. Afterward they lived in houses on
the shore of a big lake overshadowed by a snow mountain. When the
waters ran over the edge of the lake, it rained on earth. When the
“moon was dark,” it was down on earth catching seal for a living.
Thunder was caused by two old women shaking a dried sealskin
between them; the lightning came when they turned the white side
out. The “Big Nail” we have heard of as the Eskimos’ Pole, was a
high-pointed mountain in the Farthest North on which the sky rested
and turned around with the sun, moon, and stars. Up there the stars
were much bigger. Orion’s Belt was so near that you had to carry a
whip to drive him away.

The women were slaves. An Eskimo might have as many wives as he
saw fit; they were his, and it was nobody’s business. But adultery
was unknown. The seventh commandment in Egede’s translation came
to read, “One wife alone you shall have and love.” The birth of
a girl was greeted with wailing. When grown, she was often wooed
by violence. If she fled from her admirer, he cut her feet when
he overtook her, so that she could run no more. The old women
were denounced as witches who drove the seals away, and were
murdered. An Eskimo who was going on a reindeer hunt, and found
his aged mother a burden, took her away and laid her in an open
grave. Returning on the third day, he heard her groaning yet, and
smothered her with a big stone. He tried to justify himself to
Egede by saying that “she died hard, and it was a pity not to speed
her.” Yet they buried a dog’s head with a child, so that the dog,
being clever, could run ahead and guide the little one’s steps to
heaven.

They could count no further than five; at a stretch they might
get to twenty, on their fingers and toes, but there they stopped.
However, they were not without resources. It was the day of long
Sunday services, and the Eskimos were a restless people. When the
sermon dragged, they would go up to Egede and make him measure
on their arms how much longer the talk was going to be. Then
they tramped back to their seats and sat listening with great
attention, all the time moving one hand down the arm, checking off
the preacher’s progress. If they got to the finger-tips before he
stopped, they would shake their heads sourly and go back for a
remeasurement. No wonder Egede put his chief hope in the children,
whom he gathered about him in flocks.

For all that, the natives loved him. There came a day that brought
this message from the North: “Say to the speaker to come to us to
live, for the other strangers who come here can only talk to us
of blubber, blubber, blubber, and we also would hear of the great
Creator.” Egede went as far as he could, but was compelled by ice
and storms to turn back after weeks of incredible hardships. The
disappointment was the more severe to him because he had never
quite given up his hope of finding remnants of the ancient Norse
settlements. The fact that the old records spoke of a West Bygd
(settlement) and an East Bygd had misled many into believing
that the desolate east coast had once been colonized. Not until
our own day was this shown to be an error, when Danish explorers
searched that coast for a hundred miles and found no other trace
of civilization than a beer bottle left behind by the explorer
Nordenskjold.

Egede’s hope had been that Greenland might be once more colonized
by Christian people. When the Danish Government, after some years,
sent up a handful of soldiers, with a major who took the title of
governor, to give the settlement official character as a trading
station, they sent with them twenty unofficial “Christians,” ten
men out of the penitentiary and as many lewd and drunken women
from the treadmill, who were married by lot before setting sail,
to give the thing a half-way decent look. They were good enough
for the Eskimos, they seem to have thought at Copenhagen. There
followed a terrible winter, during which mutiny and murder were
threatened. “It is a pity,” writes the missionary, “that while we
sleep secure among the heathen savages, with so-called Christian
people our lives are not safe.” As a matter of fact they were not,
for the soldiers joined in the mutiny against Egede as the cause
of their having to live in such a place, and had not sickness and
death smitten the malcontents, neither he nor the governor would
have come safe through the winter. On the Eskimos this view of the
supposed fruits of Christian teaching made its own impression.
After seeing a woman scourged on shipboard for misbehavior, they
came innocently enough to Egede and suggested that some of their
best Angekoks be sent down to Denmark to teach the people to be
sober and decent.

There came a breathing spell after ten years of labor in what
had often enough seemed to him the spiritual as well as physical
ice-barrens of the North, when Egede surveyed a prosperous mission,
with trade established, a hundred and fifty children christened and
schooled, and many of their elders asking to be baptized. In the
midst of his rejoicing the summer’s ship brought word from Denmark
that the King was dead, and orders from his successor to abandon
the station. Egede might stay with provisions for one year, if
there was enough left over after fitting out the ship; but after
that he would receive no further help.

When the Eskimos heard the news, they brought their little children
to the mission. “These will not let you go,” they said; and he
stayed. His wife, whom hardship and privation and the lonely
waiting for her husband in the long winter nights had at last
broken down, refused to leave him, though she sadly needed the
care of a physician. A few of the sailors were persuaded to stay
another year. “So now,” Egede wrote in his diary when, on July 31,
1731, he had seen the ship sail away with all his hopes, “I am
left alone with my wife and three children, ten sailors and eight
Eskimos, girls and boys who have been with us from the start. God
let me live to see the blessed day that brings good news once more
from home.” His prayer was heard. The next summer brought word that
the mission was to be continued, partly because Egede had strained
every nerve to send home much blubber and many skins. But it was as
a glimpse of the sun from behind dark clouds. His greatest trials
trod hard upon the good news.

To rouse interest in the mission Egede had sent home young Eskimos
from time to time. Three of these died of smallpox in Denmark. The
fourth came home and brought the contagion, all unknown, to his
people. It was the summer fishing season, when the natives travel
much and far, and wherever he went they flocked about him to hear
of the “Great Lord’s land,” where the houses were so tall that
one could not shoot an arrow over them, and to ask a multitude of
questions: Was the King very big? Had he caught many whales? Was
he strong and a great Angekok? and much more of the same kind. In
a week the disease broke out among the children at the mission,
and soon word came from islands and fjords where the Eskimos were
fishing, of death and misery unspeakable. It was virgin soil for
the plague, and it was terribly virulent, striking down young
and old in every tent and hut. More than two thousand natives,
one-fourth of the whole population, died that summer. Of two
hundred families near the mission only thirty were left alive. A
cry of terror and anguish rose throughout the settlements. No one
knew what to do. In vain did Egede implore them to keep their sick
apart. In fever delirium they ran out in the ice-fields or threw
themselves into the sea. A wild panic seized the survivors, and
they fled to the farthest tribes, carrying the seeds of death with
them wherever they went. Whole villages perished, and their dead lay
unburied. Utter desolation settled like a pall over the unhappy land.

Through it all a single ray of hope shone. The faith that Egede
had preached all those years, and the life he had lived with them,
bore their fruit. They had struck deeper than he thought. They
crowded to him, all that could, as their one friend. Dying mothers
held their suckling babes up to him and died content. In a deserted
island camp a half-grown girl was found alone with three little
children. Their father was dead. When he knew that for him and the
baby there was no help, he went to a cave and, covering himself and
the child with skins, lay down to die. His parting words to his
daughter were, “Before you have eaten the two seals and the fish I
have laid away for you, Pelesse will come, no doubt, and take you
home. For he loves you and will take care of you.” At the mission
every nook and cranny was filled with the sick and the dying. Egede
and his wife nursed them day and night. Childlike, when death
approached, they tried to put on their best clothes, or even to
have new ones made, that they might please God by coming into His
presence looking fine. When Egede had closed their eyes, he carried
the dead in his arms to the vestibule, where in the morning the men
who dug the graves found them. At the sight of his suffering the
scoffers were dumb. What his preaching had not done to win them
over, his sorrows did. They were at last one.

That dreadful year left Egede a broken man. In his dark moments
he reproached himself with having brought only misery to those he
had come to help and serve. One thorn which one would think he
might have been spared rankled deep in it all. Some missionaries
of a dissenting sect—Egede was Lutheran—had come with the smallpox
ship to set up an establishment of their own. At their head was
a man full of misdirected zeal and quite devoid of common-sense,
who engaged Egede in a wordy dispute about justification by faith
and condemned him and his work unsparingly. He had grave doubts
whether he was in truth a “converted man.” It came to an end when
they themselves fell ill, and Egede and his wife had the last word,
after their own fashion. They nursed the warlike brethren through
their illness with loving ministrations and gave them back to life,
let us hope, wiser and better men.

At Christmas, 1735, Egede’s faithful wife, Gertrude, closed her
eyes. She had gone out with him from home and kin to a hard and
heathen land, and she had been his loyal helpmeet in all his
trials. Now it was all over. That winter scurvy laid him upon a bed
of pain and, lying there, his heart turned to the old home. His
son had come from Copenhagen to help, happily yet while his mother
lived. To him he would give over the work. In Denmark he could do
more for it than in Greenland, now he was alone. On July 29, 1736,
he preached for the last time to his people and baptized a little
Eskimo to whom they gave his name, Hans. The following week he
sailed for home, carrying, as all his earthly wealth, his beloved
dead and his motherless children.

The Eskimos gathered on the shore and wept as the ship bore their
friend away. They never saw him again. He lived in Denmark eighteen
years, training young men to teach the Eskimos. They gave him the
title of bishop, but so little to live on that he was forced in
his last days to move from Copenhagen to a country town, to make
both ends meet. His grave was forgotten by the generation that came
after him. No one knows now where it is; but in ice-girt Greenland,
where the northern lights on wintry nights flash to the natives
their message from the souls that have gone home, his memory will
live when that of the North Pole seeker whom the world applauds is
long forgotten. Hans Egede was their great man, their hero. He was
more,—he was their friend.




GUSTAV VASA, THE FATHER OF SWEDEN


A great and wise woman had, after ages of war and bloodshed, united
the crowns of the three Scandinavian kingdoms upon one head. In the
strong city of Kalmar, around which the tide of battle had ever
raged hottest, the union was declared in the closing days of the
Thirteenth Century. Norwegian, Swede, and Dane were thenceforth
to stand together, to the end of time; so they resolved. It was
all a vain dream. Queen Margaret was not cold in her grave before
the kingdoms fell apart. Norway clung to Denmark, but Sweden went
her own way. In the wars of two generations the Danish kings won
back the Swedish crown and lost it, again and again, until in 1520
King Christian II clutched it for the last time, at the head of a
conquering army. He celebrated his victory with a general amnesty,
and bade the Swedish nobles to a great feast, held at the capital
in November.

Christian is one of the unsolved riddles of history. Ablest but
unhappiest of all his house, he was an instinctive democrat,
sincerely solicitous for the welfare of the plain people, but
incredibly cruel and faithless when the dark mood seized him.
The coronation feast ended with the wholesale butchery of the
unsuspecting nobles. Hundreds were beheaded in the public square;
for days it was filled with the slain. It is small comfort that
the wicked priest who egged the King on to the dreadful deed was
himself burned at the stake by the master he had betrayed. The
Stockholm Massacre drowned the Kalmar Union in its torrents of
blood. Retribution came swiftly. Above the peal of the Christmas
bells rose the clash and clangor of armed hosts pouring forth from
the mountain fastnesses to avenge the foul treachery. They were led
by Gustav[2] Eriksson Vasa, a young noble upon whose head Christian
had set a price.

The Vasas were among the oldest and best of the great Swedish
families. It was said of them that they ever loved a friend,
hated a foe, and never forgot. Gustav was born in the castle of
Lindholmen, when the news that the world had grown suddenly big by
the discovery of lands beyond the unknown seas was still ringing
through Europe, on May 12, 1496. He was brought up in the home
of his kinsman, the Swedish patriot Sten Sture, and early showed
the fruits of his training. “See what I will do,” he boasted in
school when he was thirteen, “I will go to Dalecarlia, rouse the
people, and give the Jutes (Danes) a black eye.” Master Ivar, his
Danish teacher, gave him a whaling for that. White with anger,
the boy drove his dirk through the book, nailing it to the desk,
and stalked out of the room. Master Ivar’s eyes followed the slim
figure in the scarlet cloak, and he sighed wearily “_nobilium nati
nolunt aliquid pati_,—the children of the great will put up with
nothing.”

Hardly yet of age, he served under the banner of Sten Sture against
King Christian, and was one of six hostages sent to the King when
he asked an interview of the Swedish leader. But Christian stayed
away from the meeting and carried the hostages off to Denmark
against his plighted faith. There Gustav was held prisoner a year.
All that winter rumors of great armaments against Sweden filled the
land. He heard the young bloods from the court prate about bending
the stiff necks in the country across the Sound, and watched them
throw dice for Swedish castles and Swedish women,—part of the loot
when his fatherland should be laid under the yoke. Ready to burst
with anger and grief, he sat silent at their boasts. In the spring
he escaped, disguised as a cattle-herder, and made his way to
Luebeck, where he found refuge in the house of the wealthy merchant
Kort König.

They soon heard in Denmark where he was, and the King sent letters
demanding his surrender; but the burghers of the Hanse town hated
Christian with cause, and would not give him up. Then came Gustav’s
warder who had gone bail for him in sixteen hundred gulden, and
pleaded for his prisoner.

“I am not a prisoner,” was Gustav’s retort, “I am a hostage, for
whom the Danish king pledged his oath and faith. If any one can
prove that I was taken captive in a fight or for just cause, let
him stand forth. Ambushed was I, and betrayed.” The Lübeck men
thought of the plots King Christian was forever hatching against
them. Now, if he succeeded in getting Sweden under his heel, their
turn would come next. Better, they said, send this Gustav home to
his own country, perchance he might keep the King busy there; by
which they showed their good sense. His ex-keeper was packed off
back home, and Gustav reached Sweden, sole passenger on a little
coast-trader, on May 31, 1520. A stone marks the spot where he
landed, near Kalmar; for then struck the hour of Sweden’s freedom.

But not yet for many weary months did the people hear its summons.
Swedish manhood was at its lowest ebb. Stockholm was held by the
widow of Sten Sture with a half-famished garrison. In Kalmar
another woman, Anna Bjelke, commanded, but her men murmured, and
the fall of the fortress was imminent. When Gustav Vasa, who had
slipped in unseen, exhorted them to stand fast, they would have
mobbed him. He left as he had come, the day before the surrender.
Travelling by night, he made his way inland, finding everywhere
fear and distrust. The King had promised that if they would obey
him “they should never want for herring and salt,” so they told
Gustav, and when he tried to put heart into them and rouse their
patriotism, they took up bows and arrows and bade him be gone.
Indeed, there were not wanting those who shot at him. Like a hunted
deer he fled from hamlet to hamlet. Such friends as he had left
advised him to throw himself upon the King’s mercy; told him of the
amnesty proclaimed. But Gustav’s thoughts dwelt grimly among the
Northern mountaineers whom as a boy he had bragged he would set
against the tyrant. Insensibly he shaped his course toward their
country.

He was with his brother-in-law, Joachim Brahe, when the King’s
message bidding him to the coronation came. Gustav begged him not
to go, but Brahe’s wife and children were within Christian’s reach,
and he did not dare stay away. When he left, the fugitive hid in
his ancestral home at Räfsnäs on lake Mälar. There one of Brahe’s
men brought him news of the massacre in which his master and
Gustav’s father had perished. His mother, grandmother, and sisters
were dragged away to perish in Danish dungeons. On Gustav’s head
the King had set a price, and spies were even then on his track.

Gustav’s mind was made up. What was there now to wait for? Clad as
a peasant, he started for Dalecarlia with a single servant to keep
him company, but before he reached the mines the man stole all his
money and ran away. He had to work now to live, and hired out to
Anders Persson, the farmer of Rankhyttan. He had not been there
many days when one of the women saw an embroidered sleeve stick out
under his coat and told her master that the new hand was not what
he pretended to be. The farmer called him aside, and Gustav told
him frankly who he was. Anders Persson kept his secret, but advised
him not to stay long in any one place lest his enemies get wind of
him. He slipped away as soon as it was dark, nearly lost his life
by breaking through the ice, but reached Ornäs on the other side of
Lake Runn, half dead with cold and exposure. He knew that another
Persson who had been with him in the war lived there, and found
his house. Arendt Persson was a rascal. He received him kindly,
but when he slept harnessed his horse and went to Måns Nilsson, a
neighbor, with the news: the King’s reward would make them both
rich, if he would help him seize the outlawed man.

Måns Nilsson held with the Danes, but he was no traitor, and he
showed the fellow the door. He went next to the King’s sheriff;
he would be bound to help. To be sure, he would claim the lion’s
share of the blood-money, but something was better than nothing.
The sheriff came soon enough with a score of armed men. But Arendt
Persson had not reckoned with his honest wife. She guessed his
errand and let Gustav down from the window to the rear gate, where
she had a sleigh and team in waiting. When the sheriff’s posse
surrounded the house, Gustav was well on his way to Master Jon, the
parson of Svärdsjö, who was his friend. Tradition has it that while
Christian was King, the brave little woman never dared show her
face in the house again.

Master Jon was all right, but news of the man-hunt had run through
the country, and when the parson’s housekeeper one day saw him hold
the wash-bowl for his guest she wanted to know why he was so polite
to a common clod. Master Jon told her that it was none of her
business, but that night he piloted his friend across the lake to
Isala, where Sven Elfsson lived, a gamekeeper who knew the country
and could be trusted. The good parson was hardly out of sight on
his way back when the sheriff’s men came looking for Gustav. It
did not occur to them that the yokel who stood warming himself by
the stove might be the man they were after. But the gamekeeper’s
wife was quick to see his peril. She was baking bread and had just
put the loaves into the oven with a long-handled spade. “Here, you
lummox!” she cried, and whacked him soundly over the back with
it, “what are ye standing there gaping at? Did ye never see folks
afore? Get back to your work in the barn.” And Gustav, taking the
hint, slunk out of the room.

For three days after that he lay hidden under a fallen tree in
the snow and bitter cold; but even there he was not safe, and the
gamekeeper took him deeper into the forest, where a big spruce grew
on a hill in the middle of a frozen swamp. There no one would seek
him till he could make a shift to get him out of the country. The
hill is still there; the people call it the King’s Hill, and not
after King Christian, either. But in those long nights when Gustav
Vasa listened to the hungry wolves howling in the woods and nosing
about his retreat, it was hardly kingly conceits his mind brooded
over. His father and kinsmen were murdered; his mother and sister
in the pitiless grasp of the tyrant who was hunting him to his
death; he, the last of his race, alone and forsaken by his own.
Bitter sorrow filled his soul at the plight of his country that had
fallen so low. But the hope of the young years came to the rescue:
all was not lost yet. And in the morning came Sven, the gamekeeper,
with a load of straw, at the bottom of which he hid him. So no one
would be the wiser.

It was well he did it, for half-way to the next town some prowling
soldiers overtook them, and just to make sure that there was
nothing in the straw, prodded the load with their spears. Nothing
stirred, and they went on their way. But a spear had gashed
Gustav’s leg, and presently blood began to drip in the snow. Sven
had his wits about him. He got down, and cut the fetlock of one of
the beasts with his jack-knife so that it bled and no one need ask
questions. When they got to Marnäs, Gustav was weak from the loss
of blood, but a friendly surgeon was found to bind up his wounds.

Farther and farther north he fled, keeping to the deep woods in the
day, until he reached Rättwik. Feeling safer there, he spoke to the
people coming from church one Sunday and implored them to shake off
the Danish yoke. But they only shook their heads. He was a stranger
among them, and they would talk it over with their neighbors. Not
yet were his wanderings over. To Mora he went next, where Parson
Jakob hid him in a lonely farm-house. Evil chance led the spies
direct to his hiding-place, and once more it was the housewife
whose quick wit saved him. Dame Margit was brewing the Yule beer
when she saw them coming. In a trice she had Gustav in the cellar
and rolled the brewing vat over the trap-door. Then they might
search as they saw fit; there was nothing there. The first blood
was spilled for Gustav Vasa while he was at Mora, and it was a
Dane who did it. He was the kind that liked to see fair play; when
an under-sheriff came looking for the hunted man there, the Dane
waylaid and killed him.

Christmas morning, when Master Jakob had preached his sermon in the
church, Gustav spoke to the congregation out in the snow-covered
churchyard. A gravestone was his pulpit. Eloquent always, his
sorrows and wrongs and the memory of the hard months lent wings to
his words. His speech lives yet in Dalecarlia, for now he was among
its mountains.

“It is good to see this great meeting,” he said, “but when I think
of our fatherland I am filled with grief. At what peril I am here
with you, you know who see me hounded as a wild beast day by day,
hour by hour. But our beloved country is more to me than life. How
long must we be thralls, we who were born to freedom? Those of you
who are old remember what persecution Swedish men and women have
suffered from the Danish kings. The young have heard the story of
it and have learned from they were little children to hate and
resist such rule. These tyrants have laid waste our land and sucked
its marrow, until nothing remains for us but empty houses and lean
fields. Our very lives are not safe.” He called upon them to rise
and drive the invaders out. If they wanted a leader, he was ready.

His words stirred the mountaineers deeply. Cries of anger were
heard in the crowd; it was not the first time they had taken up
arms in the cause of freedom. But when they talked it over, the
older heads prevailed; there had not been time enough to hear both
sides. They told him that they would not desert the King; he must
expect nothing of them.

Broken-hearted and desperate, Gustav Vasa turned toward the
Norwegian frontier. He would leave the country for which there was
no hope. While the table in the poorest home groaned with Yuletide
cheer, Sweden’s coming king hid under an old bridge, outcast and
starving, till it was safe to leave. Then he took up his weary
journey alone. The winter cold had grown harder as the days grew
shorter. Famished wolves dogged his steps, but he outran them on
his snow-shoes. By night he slept in some wayside shelter, such
as they build for travellers in that desolate country, or in the
brush. The snow grew deeper, and the landscape wilder, as he went.
For days he had gone without food, when he saw the sun set behind
the lofty range that was to bar him out of home and hope forever.
Even there was no abiding place for him. What thoughts of his
vanished dream, perchance of the distant lands across the seas
where the tyrant’s hand could not reach him, were in his mind, who
knows, as he bent his strength to the last and hardest stage of his
journey? He was almost there, when he heard shouts behind him and
turned to sell his life dear. Two men on skis were calling to him.
They were unarmed, and he waited to let them come up.

Their story was soon told. They had come to call him back. After he
left, an old soldier whom they knew in Mora had come from the south
and told them worse things than even Gustav knew. It was all true
about the Stockholm murder; worse, the King was having gallows set
up in every county to hang all those on who said him nay; a heavy
tax was laid upon the peasants, and whoever did not pay was to have
a hand or foot cut off; they could still follow the plow. And now
they had sent away the one man who could lead against the Danes,
with the forests full of outlawed men who would have enlisted
under him as soon as ever the cry was raised! While the men of
Dalecarlia were debating the news among themselves orders came from
the bailiff at Westerås that the tax was to be paid forthwith. That
night runners were sent on the trail of Gustav to tell him to come
back; they were ready.

When he came, it was as if a mighty storm swept through the
mountains. The people rose in a body. Every day whole parishes
threw off their allegiance to King Christian. Sunday after Sunday
Gustav spoke to the people at their meeting-houses, and they raised
their spears and swore to follow him to death. Two months after
the murder in Stockholm an army of thousands that swelled like an
avalanche was marching south, and province after province joined
in the rebellion. King Christian’s host met them at Brunbäck in
April. One of its leaders asked the country folk what kind of men
the Dalecarlians were, and when he was told that they drank water
and ate bread made of bark, he cried out, “Such a people the devil
himself couldn’t whip; let us get out.” But his advice was not
taken and the Danish army was wiped out. Gustav halted long enough
to drill his men and give them time to temper their arrows and
spears, then he fell upon Westerås and beat the Danes there. The
peasant mob scattered too soon to loot the town, and the King’s men
came back with a sudden rush. Only Gustav’s valor and presence of
mind saved the day that had been won once from being lost again.

When it was seen that the Danes were not invincible, the whole
country rose, took the scattered castles, and put their defenders
to the sword. Gustav bore the rising on his shoulders from first
to last. He was everywhere, ordering and leading. His fiery
eloquence won over the timorous; his irresistible advance swept
every obstacle aside. In May he took Upsala; by midsummer he was
besieging Stockholm itself. Most of the other cities were in his
hands. The Hanse towns had found out what this Gustav could do
at home. They sang his praise, but as for backing him with their
purse, that was another matter. They refused to lend Gustav two
siege-guns when he lay before Stockholm, though he offered to
pledge a castle for each. He had no money. Happily his enemy,
Christian, was even worse off. Neither pledges nor promises could
get him the money he needed. His chief men were fighting among
themselves and made peace only to turn upon him. Within a year
after the Swedish people had chosen Gustav Vasa to be Regent at
the Diet of Vadstena, Christian went into exile and, when he tried
to get his kingdom back, into prison, where he languished the rest
of his life. He fully deserved his fate. Yet he meant well and had
done some good things in his day. Had he been able to rule himself,
he might have ruled others with better success. Schoolboys remember
with gratitude that he forbade teachers to “spank their pupils
overmuch and without judgment, as was their wont.”

At the Diet of Vadstena the people had offered Gustav the crown,
but he put it from him. Scarce eight months had passed since he hid
under the bridge, hunted and starving. When Stockholm had fallen
after a siege of two years and all Sweden was free, the people met
(1523) and made him King, whether or no. He still objected, but
gave in at last and was crowned.

Popular favor is fickle. Hard times came that were not made easier
by Gustav’s determination to fill the royal coffers, and the very
Dalecarlians who had put him in the high seat rose against him and
served notice that if things did not mend they would have none of
him. Gustav made sure that they had no backing elsewhere, then went
up and persuaded them to be good by cutting off the heads of their
leaders, who both happened to be priests: one was even a bishop.
He had been taught in a school that always found an axe ready to
hand. Let those who lament the savagery of modern warfare consider
what happened then to a Danish fleet that tried to bring relief
to hard-pressed Stockholm. It was beaten in a fight in which six
hundred men were taken prisoners. They were all, say the accounts,
“tied hand and foot and flung overboard amid the beating of drums
and blowing of trumpets to drown their cries.” The clergy fared
little better than the laymen in that age, but then it was their
own fault. In plotting and scrapping they were abreast of the worst
and took the consequences.

They were the days of the Reformation, and Gustav would not have
been human had he failed to see a way out of his money troubles by
confiscating church property. He had pawned the country’s trade to
the merchants of Lübeck and there was nothing else left. Naturally
the church opposed him. The King took the bull by the horns. He
called a meeting and told the people that he was sick of it all. He
had encouraged the Reformation for their good; now, if they did not
stand by him, they might choose between him and his enemies. The
oldest priest arose at that and said that the church’s property was
sacred. The King asked if the rest of them thought the same way.
Only one voice was raised, and to say yes.

“Then,” said Gustav, “I don’t want to be your King any more. If it
does not rain, you blame me; if the sun does not shine, you do the
same. It is always so. All of you want to be masters. After all my
trouble and labor for you, you would as lief see my head split with
an axe, though none of you dare lay hold of the handle. Give me
back what I have spent in your service and I will go away and never
come back.” And go he did, to his castle, with half a dozen of his
nearest friends.

They sat and looked at one another when he was gone, and then
priests and nobles fell to arguing among themselves, all talking
at once. The plain people, the burghers and the peasants, listened
awhile, but when they got no farther, let them know that if
they couldn’t settle it, they, the people, would, and in a way
that would give them little joy. The upshot of it all was that
messengers were sent to bring the King back. He made them go three
times, and when he came at last, it was as absolute master. In the
ordering of the kingdom that was made there, he became the head of
the church as well as of the state. Gustav’s pen was as sharp as
his tongue. When Hans Brask, the oldest prelate in the land, who
had stood stoutly by the old régime, left the country and refused
to come back, he wrote to him: “As long as you might milk and shear
your sheep, you staid by them. When God spake and said you were to
feed them, not to shear and slaughter them, you ran away. Every
honest man can judge if you have done well.” Hard words to a good
old man; but there were plenty of others who deserved them. That
was the end of the hierarchy in Sweden.

But not of the unruly peasants who had tasted the joys of
king-making. How kindly they took to the Reformation at the outset
one can judge from the demand of some of them that the King should
“burn or otherwise kill such as ate meat on Friday.” They rose
again and again, and would listen only to the argument of force.
When the Lübeckers pressed hard for the payment of old debts,
and the treasury was empty as usual, King Gustav hit upon a new
kind of revenue. He demanded of every church in the land that it
give up its biggest bell to the funds. It was the last straw.
The Dalecarlians rose against what they deemed sacrilege, under
the leadership of Måns Nilsson and Anders Persson of Rankhyttan,
the very men who had befriended Gustav in his need, and the
insurrection spread. The “War of the Bells” was settled with the
sword, and the peasants gave in. But Gustav came of a stock that
“never forgot.” Two years later, when his hands were free at home,
he suddenly invaded Dalecarlia with a powerful army, determined to
“pull those weeds up by the roots.” He summoned the peasants to
Thing, made a ring around them of armed men, and gave them their
choice:

“Submit now for good and all,” he said, “or I will spoil the land
so that cock shall not crow nor hound bark in it again forever!”

The frightened peasants fell on their knees and begged for mercy.
He made them give up their leaders, including his former friends,
and they were all put to the sword. After that there was peace in
Dalecarlia.

Gustav Vasa’s long reign ended in 1560. Like his enemy, Christian
II, he was a strange mixture of contradictions. He was brave in
battle, wise in council, pious, if not a saint, clean, and merciful
when mercy fitted into his plans. His enemies called him a greedy,
suspicious despot. Greedy he was. More than eleven thousand farms
were confiscated by the crown during his reign, and he left four
thousand farms and a great fortune to his children as his personal
share. But historians have called him “the great housekeeper” who
found waste and loss and left an ordered household. He gave all
for Sweden, and all he had was at her call. It was share and share
alike, in his view. Despotic he could be, too. _L’état c’est moi_
might have been said by him. But he did not exploit the state;
he built it. He fashioned Sweden out of a bunch of quarrelsome
provincial governments into a hereditary monarchy, as the best
way—indeed, the only way then—of giving it strength and stability.
He was suspicious because everybody had betrayed him, or had tried
to. With all that, his steady purpose was to raise and enlighten
his people and make them keep the peace, if he had to adopt the
Irishman’s plan of keeping it himself with an axe. He was the
father of a line of great warriors. Gustav Adolf was his grandson.

[Illustration: GUSTAV VASA BIDDING HIS PEOPLE GOOD-BY]

Bent under the burden of years, he bade his people good-by at the
Diet of Stockholm, a few weeks before his death. His old eloquence
rings unimpaired in the farewell. He thanked God, who had chosen
him as His tool to set Sweden free from thralldom. Almost might
he liken himself to King David, whom God from a shepherd had made
the leader of his people. No such hope was in his heart when,
forty years before, he hid in the woods from a bloodthirsty enemy.
For what he had done wrong as king, he asked the people’s pardon;
it was not done on purpose. He knew well that many thought him a
hard ruler, but the time would come when they would gladly dig him
up from his grave if they only could. And with that he went out,
bowing deeply to the Diet, the tears streaming down his face.

They saw him no more; but on his tomb the Swedish people,
forgetting all else, have written that he was the “Father of his
Country.”


Footnotes:

[2] The older spelling of this name is followed here in preference
to the more modern Gustaf. Gustav Vasa himself wrote his name so.




ABSALON, WARRIOR BISHOP OF THE NORTH


A welcome change awaits the traveller who, having shaken off the
chill of the German Dreadnaughts at Kiel, crosses the Baltic to
the Danish Islands—a change from the dread portents of war to
smiling peace. There can be nothing more pastoral and restful than
the Seeland landscape as framed in a car window; yet he misses
its chief charm whom its folk-lore escapes—the countless legends
that cling to field and forest from days long gone. The guide-book
gives scarce a hint of them; but turn from its page and they meet
you at every step, hail you from every homestead, every copse. Nor
is their story always of peace. Here was Knud Lavard slain by his
envious kinsman for the crown, and a miraculous spring gushed forth
where he fell. Of the church they built for the pilgrims who sought
it from afar they will show you the site, but the spring dried
up with the simple old faith. Yonder, under the roof of Ringsted
church, lie Denmark’s greatest dead. Not half an hour from the
ferry landing at Korsör, your train labors past a hill crowned by a
venerable cross, Holy Anders’ Hill. So saintly was that masterful
priest that he was wont, when he prayed, to hang his hat and gloves
on a sunbeam as on a hook. And woe to the land if his cross be
disturbed, for then, the peasant will tell you, the cattle die of
plague and the crops fail. A little further on, just beyond Sorö,
a village church rears twin towers above the wheat-field where the
skylark soars and sings to its nesting mate. For seven hundred
years the story of that church and its builder has been told at
Danish firesides, and the time will never come when it is forgotten.

Fjenneslev is the name of the village, and Asker Ryg[3] ruled
there in the Twelfth Century, when the king summoned his men to
the war. Bidding good-by to his wife, Sir Asker tells her to build
a new church while he is away, for the old, “with wall of clay,
straw-thatched and grim,” is in ruins. And let it be worthy of the
Master:

      “The roof let make of tiling red;
      Of stone thou build the wall;”

and then he whispers in her ear:

      “Hear thou, my Lady Inge,
        Of women thou art the flower;
      An’ thou bearest to me a son so bold,
        Set on the church a tower.”

Should the child be a girl, he tells her to build only a spire, for
“modesty beseemeth a woman.” Well for Sir Asker that he did not
live in our day of clamoring suffragists. He would have “views”
without doubt. But no such things troubled him while he battled
in foreign lands all summer. It was autumn when he returned and
saw from afar the swell behind which lay Fjenneslev and home.
Impatiently he spurred his horse to the brow of the hill, for no
news had come of Lady Inge those many months. The bard tells us
what he saw there:

      “It was the good Sir Asker Ryg;
        Right merrily laughed he,
      When from that green and swelling hill
        Two towers did he see.”

Two sons lay at the Lady Inge’s breast, and all was well.

      “The first one of the brothers two
        They called him Esbern Snare.[4]
      He grew as strong as a savage bear
        And fleeter than any hare.

      “The second him called they Absalon,
        A bishop he at home.
      He used his trusty Danish sword
        As the Pope his staff at Rome.”

Absalon and Esbern were not twins, as tradition has it. They were
better than that. They became the great heroes of their day, and
the years have not dimmed their renown. And Absalon reached far
beyond the boundaries of little Denmark to every people that speaks
the English tongue. For it was he who, as archbishop of the North,
“strictly and earnestly” charged his friend and clerk Saxo to
gather the Danish chronicles while yet it was time, because, says
Saxo, in the preface of his monumental work, “he could no longer
abide that his fatherland, which he always honored and magnified
with especial zeal, should be without a record of the great deeds
of the fathers.” And from the record Saxo wrote we have our Hamlet.

It was when they had grown great and famous that Sir Asker and his
wife built the church in thanksgiving for their boys, not when they
were born, and the way that came to light was good and wholesome.
They were about to rebuild the church, on which there had been
no towers at all since they crumbled in the middle ages, and had
decided to put on only one; for the sour critics, who are never
content in writing a people’s history unless they can divest it of
all its flesh and make it sit in its bones, as it were, sneered
at the tradition and called it an old woman’s tale. But they did
not shout quite so loud when, in peeling off the whitewash of the
Reformation, the mason’s hammer brought forth mural paintings that
grew and grew until there stood the whole story to read on the
wall, with Sir Asker himself and the Lady Inge, clad in garments
of the Twelfth Century, bringing to the Virgin the church with the
twin towers. So the folk-lore was not so far out after all, and the
church was rebuilt with two towers, as it should be.

Under its eaves, whether of straw or tile, the two boys played
their childish games, and before long there came to join in them
another of their own age, young Valdemar, whose father, the very
Knud Lavard mentioned above, had been foully murdered a while
before. It was a time, says Saxo, in which “he must be of stout
heart and strong head who dared aspire to Denmark’s crown. For
in less than a hundred years more than sixteen of her kings and
their kin were either slain without cause by their own subjects,
or otherwise met a sudden death.” Sir Asker and the murdered
Knud had been foster brothers, and throughout the bloody years
that followed, he and his brothers, sons of the powerful Skjalm
Hvide,[5] espoused his cause in good and evil days, while they saw
to it that no harm came to the young prince under their roof.

The three boys, as they grew up, were bred to the stern duties of
fighting men, as was the custom of their class. Absalon, indeed,
was destined for the church; but in a country so recently won from
the old war gods, it was the church militant yet, and he wielded
spear and sword with the best of them. When, at eighteen, they
sent him to France to be taught, he did not for his theological
studies neglect the instruction of his boyhood. There he became
the disciple and friend of the Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux, more
powerful then than prince or Pope, and when the abbot preached the
second great crusade, promising eternal salvation to those who
took up arms against the unbelievers, whether to wrest from them
the Holy Sepulchre or to plant the cross among the wild heathen
on the Baltic, his heart burned hot within him. It was a long way
to the Holy Land, but with the Baltic robbers his people had a
grievous score to settle. Their yells had sounded in his boyish
ears as they ravished the shores of his fatherland, penetrating
with murder and pillage almost to his peaceful home. And so, while
he lent a diligent ear to the teachings of the church, earning the
name of the “most learned clerk” in the cloister of Ste. Geneviève
in Paris, daily he laid the breviary aside and took up sword and
lance, learning the arts of modern warfare with the graces of
chivalry. In the old way of fighting, man to man, the men of the
North had been the equals of any, if not their betters; but against
the new methods of warfare their prowess availed little. Absalon,
the monk, kept his body strong while soul and mind matured. When
nothing more adventurous befell, he chopped down trees for the
cloister hearths. But oftener the clash of arms echoed in the quiet
halls, or the peaceful brethren crossed themselves as they watched
him break an unruly horse in the cloister fen. Saxo tells us that
he swam easily in full armor, and in more than one campaign in
later years saved drowning comrades who were not so well taught.

The while he watched rising all about some of the finest churches
in Christendom. It was the era of cathedral building in Europe.
The Romanesque style of architecture had reached its highest
development in the very France where he spent his young manhood’s
years, and the Gothic, with its stamp of massive strength, was
beginning to displace its gentler curve. Ten years of such an
environment, in a land teeming with historic traditions, rounded
out the man who set his face toward home, bent on redeeming his
people from the unjust reproach of being mere “barbarians of the
North.”

It was a stricken Denmark to which he came back. Three claimants
were fighting for the crown. The land was laid waste by sea-rovers,
who saw their chance to raid defenceless homes while the men able
to bear arms were following the rival kings. The people had lost
hope. Just when Absalon returned, peace was made between the
claimants. Knud, Svend, and Valdemar, his foster brother of old,
divided up the country between them. They swore a dear oath to keep
the pact, but for all that “the three kingdoms did not last three
days.” The treacherous Svend waited only for a chance to murder
both his rivals, and it came quickly, when he and Valdemar were
the guests of Knud at Roskilde. They had eaten and drunk together
and were gathered in the “Storstue,” the big room of the house,
when Knud saw Svend whispering aside with his men. With a sudden
foreboding of evil, he threw his arms about Valdemar’s shoulders
and kissed him. The young King, who was playing chess with one
of his men, looked up in surprise and asked what it meant. Just
then Svend left the hall, and his henchmen fell upon the two with
drawn swords. Knud was cut down at once, his head cleft in twain.
Valdemar upset the table with the candles and, wrapping his cloak
about his arm to ward off the blows that showered upon him, knocked
his assailants right and left and escaped, badly wounded.

Absalon came into the room as Knud fell and, thinking it was
Valdemar, caught him in his arms and took his wounded head in his
lap. Sitting there in utter sorrow and despair, heedless of the
tumult that raged in the darkness around him, he felt the King’s
garment and knew that the man who was breathing his last in his
arms was not his friend. He laid the lifeless body down gently and
left the hall. The murderers barred his way, but he brushed their
swords and spears aside and strode forth unharmed. Valdemar had
found a horse and made for Fjenneslev, twenty miles away, with all
speed, and there Absalon met him and his brother Esbern in the
morning.

King Svend sought him high and low to finish his dastardly work,
while on Thing he wailed loudly before the people that Valdemar
and Knud had tried to kill him, showing in proof of it his cloak,
which he had rent with his own sword. But Valdemar’s friends were
wide awake. Esbern flew through the island on his fleet horse
in Valdemar’s clothes, leading his pursuers a merry dance, and
when the young King’s wound was healed, he found him a boat and
ferried him across to the mainland, where the people flocked to
his standard. When Svend would have followed, it was the Lady Inge
who scuttled his ship by night and gave her foster son the start
he needed. There followed a short and sharp struggle that ended on
Grathe Heath with the utter rout of Svend’s forces. He himself was
killed, and Valdemar at last was King of all Denmark.

From that time the three friends were inseparable as in the old
days when they played about the fields of Fjenneslev. Absalon was
the keeper of the King’s conscience who was not afraid to tell him
the truth when he needed to hear it. And where they were Esbern
was found, never wavering in his loyalty to either. Within a year
Absalon was made bishop of Roskilde, the chief See of Denmark.
Saxo innocently discovers to us King Valdemar’s little ruse to
have his friend chosen. He was yet a very young man, scarce turned
thirty, and had not been considered at all for the vacancy. There
were three candidates, all of powerful families, and, according to
ecclesiastical law, the brethren of the chapter were the electors.
The King went to their meeting and addressed them in person.
Nothing was farther from him, he said, than to wish to interfere
with their proper rights. Each must do as his conscience dictated,
unhindered. And with that he laid on the table _four_ books with
blank leaves and bade them write down their names in them, each for
his own choice, to get the matter right on the record. The brethren
thanked him kindly and all voted “nicely together” for Absalon. So
three of the books were wasted. But presently Saxo found good use
for them.

For now had come the bishop’s chance of putting in practice the
great abbot’s precepts. “Pray and fight” was the motto he had
written into the Knights Templars’ rule, and Absalon had made it
his own. Of what use was it to build up the church at home, when
any day might see it raided by its enemies who were always watching
their chance outside? The Danish waters swarmed with pirates, the
very pagans against whom Abbot Bernard had preached his crusade. Of
them all the Wends were the worst, as they were the most powerful
of the Slav tribes that still resisted the efforts of their
neighbors, the Christian Germans, to dislodge them from their old
home on the Baltic. They lived in the island of Rügen, fairly in
sight of the Danish shores. Every favoring wind blew them across
the sea in shoals to burn and ravage. The Danes, once the terror of
the seas, had given over roving when they accepted the White Christ
in exchange for Thor and his hammer, and now, when they would be at
peace, they were in turn beset by this relentless enemy, who burned
their homes and their crops and dragged the peaceful husbandman
away to make him a thrall or offer him up as a sacrifice to heathen
idols. More than a third of all Denmark lay waste under their
ferocious assault. Here was the blow to be struck if the country
was to have peace and the church prosperity.

The chance to strike came speedily. Absalon had been bishop only
a few months when, on the evening before Palm Sunday, word was
brought that the enemy had landed, twenty-four ship-crews strong,
and were burning and murdering as usual. Absalon marshalled his
eighteen house-carles and such of the country folk as he could,
and fell upon the Wends, routing them utterly. A bare handful
escaped, the rest were killed, while the bishop lost but a single
man. He said mass next morning, red-handed it is true, but one may
well believe that for all that his Easter message reached hearts
filled with a new, glad hope for their homes and for the country.
That was a bishop they could understand. So the first blow Absalon
struck for his people was at home. But he did not long wait for
the enemy to come to him. Half his long and stirring life he lived
on the seas, seeking them there. Saxo mentions, in speaking of his
return from one of his cruises, that he had then been nine months
on shipboard. And in a way he was shepherding his flock there, if
it was with a scourge; for, many years before, a Danish king had
punished the Wends in their own home and laid their lands under the
See of Roskilde, though little good it did them or any one else
then. But when Absalon had got his grip, there were days when he
baptized as many as a thousand of them into the true faith.

He was not altogether alone in the stand he took. Here and there,
from very necessity, the people had organized to resist the
invaders, but as no one could tell where they would strike next,
they were not often successful, and fear and discouragement sat
heavy on the land. From his own city of Roskilde a little fleet of
swift sailers under the bold Wedeman had for years waged relentless
war upon the freebooters and had taken four times the number of
their own ships. Their crews were organized into a brotherhood
with vows like an order of fighting monks. Before setting out on
a cruise they were shriven and absolved. Their vows bound them to
unceasing vigilance, to live on the plainest of fare, to sleep
on their arms, ready for instant attack, and to the rescue of
Christians, wherever they were found in captivity. The Roskilde
guild became the strong core of the King’s armaments in his score
of campaigns against the Wends.

Perhaps it was not strange that Valdemar should be of two minds
about venturing to attack so formidable an enemy in his own house.
The nation was cowed and slow to move. In fact, from the first
expedition, that started with 250 vessels, only seven returned with
the standard, keeping up a running fight all the way across the
Baltic with pursuing Wends. The rest had basely deserted. On the
way over, the King, listening to their doubts and fears, turned
back himself once, but Absalon, who always led in the attack and
was the last on the homeward run, overtook him and gave him the
talking to be deserved. Saxo, who was very likely there and heard,
for there is little doubt that he accompanied his master on many of
the campaigns he so vividly describes, gives us a verbatim report
of the lecture:

“What wonder,” said the bishop, “if the words stick in our throats
and are nigh to stifling us, when such grievous dole is ours!
Grieve we must, indeed, to find in you such a turncoat that naught
but dishonor can come of it. You follow where you should lead, and
those you should rule over, you make your peers. There is nothing
to stop us but our own craven souls, hunt as we may for excuses. Is
it with such laurel you would bind your crown? with such high deed
you would consecrate your reign?”

The King was hard hit, and showed it, but he walked away without
a word. In the night a furious storm swept the sea and kept the
fleet in shelter four whole days, during which Valdemar’s anger had
time to cool. He owned then that Absalon was right, and the friends
shook hands. The King gave order to make sail as soon as the gale
abated. If there was still a small doubt in Absalon’s mind as he
turned, on taking leave, and asked, “What now, if we must turn back
once more?” Valdemar set it at rest:

“Then you write me from Wendland,” he laughed, “and tell me how
things are there.”

If little glory or gain came to the Danes from this first
expedition, at least they landed in the enemy’s country and made
reprisal for past tort. The spirit of the people rose and shamed
them for their cowardice. When the King’s summons went round again,
as it did speedily, there were few laggards. Attacked at home, the
Wends lost much of the terror they had inspired. Before many moons,
the chronicle records, the Danes cut their spear-shafts short, that
they might the more handily get at the foe. Scarce a year passed
that did not see one or more of these crusades. Absalon preached
them all, and his ship was ever first in landing. In battle he and
the King fought shoulder to shoulder. In the spring of 1169, he
had at last his wish: the heathen idols were destroyed and their
temples burned.

The holy city of the Wends, Arcona, stood on a steep cliff,
inaccessible save from the west, where a wall a hundred feet high
defended it. While the sacred banner Stanitza waved over it the
Danes might burn and kill, but the power of Svantevit was unbroken.
Svantevit was the god of gods in whose presence his own priests
dared not so much as breathe. When they had to, they must go to
the door and breathe in the open, a good enough plan if Saxo’s
disgust at the filth of the Wendish homes was justified. Svantevit
was a horrid monster with four heads, and girt about with a huge
sword. Up till then the Christian arms had always been stayed at
his door, but this time the King laid siege to Arcona, determined
to make an end of him. Some of the youngsters in his army, making
a mock assault upon the strong walls, discovered an accidental
hollow under the great tower over which the Stanitza flew and,
seizing upon a load of straw that was handy, stuffed it in and set
it on fire. It was done in a frolic, but when the tower caught
fire and was burned and the holy standard fell, Absalon was quick
to see his advantage, and got the King to order a general assault.
The besieged Wends, having no water, tried to put out the fire
with milk, but, says the chronicle, “it only fed the flames.” They
fought desperately till, between fire and foe, they were seized
with panic and, calling loudly upon Absalon in their extremity,
offered to give up their city. The army clamored for the revenge
that was at last within their grasp, and the King hesitated; but
Absalon met the uproar firmly, reminding them that they had crossed
the seas to convert the heathen, not to sack their towns.

The city was allowed to surrender and the people were spared, but
Svantevit and his temple were destroyed. A great crowd of his
followers had gathered to see him crush his enemies at the last,
and Absalon cautioned the men who cut the idol down to be careful
that he did not fall on them and so seem to justify their hopes.
“He fell with so great a noise that it was a wonder,” says Saxo,
naïvely; “and in the same moment the fiend ran out of the temple in
a black shape with such speed that no eye could follow him or see
where he went.” Svantevit was dragged out of the town and chopped
into bits. That night he fed the fires of the camp. So fickle is
popular favor that when the crowd saw that nothing happened, they
spurned the god loudly before whom they had grovelled in the dust
till then.

[Illustration: FALL OF ARCONA. THE IDOL SVANTEVIT DESTROYED]

When they heard of Arcona’s fall in the royal city of Karents, they
hastened with offers of surrender, and Absalon went there with a
single ship’s crew to take possession. They were met by 6000 armed
Wends, who guarded the narrow approach to the city. In single file
they walked between the ranks of the enemy, who stood with inverted
spears, watching them in sullen silence. His men feared a trap, but
Absalon strode ahead unmoved. Coming to the temple of their local
god, Rygievit, he attacked him with his axe and bade his guard fall
to, which they did. Saxo has left us a unique description of this
idol that stood behind purple hangings, fashioned of oak “in every
evil and revolting shape. The swallows had made their nests in his
mouths and throats” (there were seven in so many faces) “and filled
him up with all manner of stinking uncleanness. Truly, for such god
was such sacrifice fit.” He had a sword for every one of his seven
faces, buckled about his ample waist, but for all that he went the
way of the others, and even had to put up with the indignity of
the Christian priests standing upon him while he was being dragged
out. That seems to have helped cure his followers of their faith
in him. They delivered the temple treasure into the hands of the
King—seven chests filled with money and valuables, among them a
silver cup which the wretched King Svend had sent to Svantevit as
a bribe to the Wends for joining him against his own country and
kin. But those days were ended. It was the Danes’ turn now, and
Wendland was laid waste until “the swallows found no eaves of any
house whereunder to build their nests and were forced to build them
on the ships.” A sad preliminary to bringing the country under the
rule of the Prince of Peace; but in the scheme of those days the
sword was equal partner with the cross in leading men to the true
God.

The heathen temples were destroyed and churches built on their
sites of the timber gathered for the siege of Arcona. The people,
deserted by their own, accepted the Christians’ God in good faith,
and were baptized in hosts, thirteen hundred on one day and nine
hundred on the next. Three days and nights Absalon saw no sleep. He
did nothing half-way. No sooner was he back home than he sent over
priests and teachers supplied with everything, even food for their
keep, so that they “should not be a burden to the people whom they
had come to show the way to salvation.”

The Wends were conquered, but the end was not yet. They had savage
neighbors, and many a crusade did Absalon lead against them in
the following years, before the new title of the Danish rulers,
“King of the Slavs and Wends,” was much more than an empty boast.
He organized a regular sea patrol of one-fourth of the available
ships, of which he himself took command, and said mass on board
much oftener than in the Roskilde church. It is the sailor, the
warrior, the leader of men one sees through all the troubled years
of his royal friend’s life. Now the Danish fleet is caught in
the inland sea before Stettin, unable to make its way out, and
already the heathen hosts are shouting their triumph on shore.
It is Absalon, then, who finds the way and, as one would expect,
he forces it. The captains wail over the trap and abuse him for
getting them into it. Absalon, disdaining to answer them, leads
his ships in single file straight for the gap where the Wendish
fleet lies waiting, and gets the King to attack with his horsemen
on shore. Between them the enemy is routed, and the cowards are
shamed. But when they come to make amends, he is as unmoved as ever
and will have none of it. Again, when he is leading his men to the
attack on a walled town, a bridge upon which they crowd breaks, and
it is the bishop who saves his comrades from drowning, swimming
ashore with them in full armor.

Resting in his castle at Haffn, the present Copenhagen, which he
built as a defence against the sea-rovers, he hears, while in his
bath, his men talking of strange ships that are sailing into the
Sound, and, hastily throwing on his clothes, gives chase and kills
their crews, for they were pirates whose business was murder, and
they merely got their deserts. In the pursuit his archers “pinned
the hands of the rowers to the oars with their arrows” and crippled
them, so skilful had much practice made them. Turn the leaf of
Saxo’s chronicle, and we find him under Rügen with his fleet,
protecting the now peaceful Wendish fishermen in their autumn
herring-catch, on which their livelihood depended. Of such stuff
was made the bishop who

      “Used his trusty Danish sword
      As the Pope his staff in Rome.”

Wherever danger threatens Valdemar and Absalon, Esbern is found,
too, earning the name of the Fleet (Snare), which the people had
fondly given to their favorite. Where the fighting was hardest, he
was sure to be. The King’s son had ventured too far and was caught
in a tight place by an overwhelming force, when Esbern pushed his
ship in between him and the enemy and bore the brunt of a fight
that came near to making an end of him. He had at last only a
single man left, but the two made a stand against a hundred. “When
the heathen saw his face they fled in terror.” At last they knocked
him senseless with a stone and would have killed him, but in the
nick of time the King’s men came to the rescue.

Coming home from Norway he ran afoul of forty pirate ships under
the coast of Seeland. He tried to steal past; forty against one
were heavy odds. But it was moonlight and he was discovered. The
pirates lay across his course and cut him off. Esbern made ready
for a fight and steered straight into the middle of them. The
steersman complained that he had no armor, and he gave him his own.
He beat his pursuers off again and again, but the wind slackened
and they were closing in once more, swearing by their heathen gods
that they would have him dead or alive, for a Danish prisoner on
one of their ships had told who he was. But Esbern had more than
one string to his bow. He sent a man aloft with flint and steel
to strike fire in the top, and the pirates, believing that he was
signalling to a fleet he had in ambush, fled helter-skelter. Esbern
got home safe.

The German emperors’ fingers had always itched for the
over-lordship of the Danish isles, and they have not ceased to
do so to this day. When Frederick Barbarossa drove Alexander III
from Rome and set up a rival Pope in his place, Archbishop Eskild
of Lund, who was the Primate of the North, championed the exiled
Pope’s case, and Valdemar, whose path the ambitious priest had
crossed more than once, let it be known that he inclined to the
Emperor’s cause, in part probably from mere pique, perhaps also
because he thought it good politics. The archbishop in a rage
summoned Absalon and bade him join him in a rising against the
King. Absalon’s answer is worthy the man and friend:

“My oath to you I will keep, and in this wise, that I will not
counsel you to your own undoing. Whatever your cause against the
King, war against him you cannot, and succeed. And this know, that
never will I join with you against my liege lord, to whom I have
sworn fealty and friendship with heart and soul all the days of my
life.”

He could not persuade the archbishop, who went his own way and was
beaten and exiled for a season, nor could he prevent the King from
yielding to the blandishments of Frederick and getting mixed up
in the papal troubles; but he went with him to Germany and saved
him at the last moment from committing himself by making him leave
the church council just as the anti-pope was about to pronounce
sentence of excommunication against Alexander. He commanded Absalon
to remain, as a servant of the church, but Absalon replied calmly
that he was not there in that capacity, but as an attendant on
his King, and must follow where he went. It appeared speedily
that the Emperor’s real object was to get Valdemar to own him
as his over-lord, and this he did, to Absalon’s great grief, on
the idle promise that Frederick would join him in his war upon
all the Baltic pagans. However, it was to be a purely personal
matter, in nowise affecting his descendants. That much was saved,
and Absalon lived long enough to fling back, as the counsellor of
Valdemar’s son, from behind the stout wall he built at Denmark’s
southern gate, the Emperor’s demand for homage, with the reply that
“the King ruled in Denmark with the same right as the Emperor in
Germany, and was no man’s subject.”

However grievously Absalon had offended the aged archbishop, when
after forty years in his high office illness compelled him to lay
it down, he could find no one so worthy to step into his shoes. He
sent secretly to Rome and got the Pope’s permission to name his own
successor, before he called a meeting of the church. The account of
what followed is the most singular of all Saxo’s stories. Valdemar
did not know what was coming and, fearing fresh trouble, got the
archbishop to swear on the bones of the saints before them all
that he was not moved to abdication by hate of the King, or by any
coercion whatever. Then the venerable priest laid his staff, his
mitre, and his ring on the altar and announced that he had done
with it all forever. But he had made up his mind not to use the
power given him by the Pontiff. They might choose his successor
themselves. He would do nothing to influence their action.

The bishops and clergy went to the King and asked him if he had any
choice. The King said he had, but if he made it known he would get
no thanks for it and might estrange his best friend. If he did not,
he would certainly be committing a sin. He did not know what to do.

“Name him,” said they, and Valdemar told them it was the bishop of
Roskilde.

At that the old archbishop got up and insisted on the election then
and there; but Absalon would have none of it. The burden was too
heavy for his shoulders, he said. However, the clergy seized him,
“being,” says Saxo, who without doubt was one of them, “the more
emboldened to do so as the archbishop himself laid hands upon him
first.” Intoning the hymn sung at archiepiscopal consecrations,
they tried to lead him to the altar. He resisted with all his might
and knocked several of the brethren down. Vestments were torn and
scattered, and a mighty ruction arose, to which the laity, not to
be outdone, added by striking up a hymn of their own. Archbishop
and King tried vainly to make peace; the clamor and battle only
rose the higher. Despite his struggles, Absalon was dragged to the
high seat, but as they were about to force him into it, he asked
leave to say a single word, and instantly appealed his case to the
Pope. So there was an end; but when the aged Eskild, on the plea
of weakness, begged him to pronounce the benediction, he refused
warily, because so he would be exercising archiepiscopal functions
and would be _de facto_ incumbent of the office.[6]

Here, as always, Absalon thought less of himself than of his
country, so the event showed. For when the Pope heard his plea,
though he decided against him, he allowed him to hold the bishopric
of Roskilde together with the higher office, and so he was left at
Valdemar’s side to help finish their work of building up Denmark
within and without. At Roskilde he spent, as a matter of fact, most
of his time while Valdemar lived. At Lund he would have been in
a distant part of the country, parted from his friend and out of
touch with the things that were the first concern of his life.

They were preparing to aim a decisive blow against the Pomeranian
pagans when Valdemar died, on the very day set for the sailing. The
parting nearly killed Absalon. Saxo draws a touching picture of him
weeping bitterly as he said the requiem mass over his friend, and
observes: “Who can doubt that his tears, rising with the incense,
gave forth a peculiar and agreeable savour in high heaven before
God?” The plowmen left their fields and carried the bier, with sobs
and lamentations, to the church in Ringsted, where the great King
rests. His sorrow laid Absalon on a long and grievous sick-bed,
from which he rose only when Valdemar’s son needed and called him.

In the fifteen years that follow we see his old warlike spirit
still unbroken. Thus his defiance of the German Emperor, whose
anger was hot. Frederick, in revenge, persuaded the Pomeranian duke
Bugislav to organize a raid on Denmark with a fleet of five hundred
sail. Scant warning reached Absalon of the danger. King Knud was
away, and there was no time to send for him. Mustering such vessels
as were near, he sailed across the Baltic and met the enemy under
Rügen the day after Whitsuntide (1184). The bishop had gone ashore
to say mass on the beach, when word was brought that the great
fleet was in sight. Hastily pulling off his robe and donning armor
instead, he made for his ship with the words: “Now let our swords
sing the praise of God.” The Pomeranians were taken completely by
surprise. They did not know the Danes were there, and when they
heard the archbishop’s dreaded war-cry raised, they turned and fled
in such terror and haste that eighteen of their ships were run down
and sunk with all on board. On one, a rower hanged himself for fear
of falling into the hands of the Danes. Absalon gave chase, and the
rout became complete. Of the five hundred ships only thirty-five
escaped; all the rest were either sunk or taken. Duke Bugislav soon
after became a vassal of Denmark, and of the Emperor’s plots there
was an end.

It was the last blow, and the story of it went far and wide.
Absalon’s work was nearly done. Denmark was safe from her enemies.
The people were happy and prosperous. Valdemar’s son ruled
unchallenged, and though he was childless, by his side stood his
brother, a manly youth who, not yet full grown, had already shown
such qualities of courage and sagacious leadership that the old
archbishop could hang up the sword with heart at ease. The promise
was kept. The second Valdemar became Denmark’s royal hero for all
time. Absalon’s last days were devoted to strengthening the Church,
around which he had built such a stout wall. He built churches and
cloisters, and guided them with a wise and firm hand. And he made
Saxo, his clerk, set it all down as an eye-witness of these things,
and as one who came to the task by right; for, says the chronicler,
“have not my grandfather and his father before him served the King
well on land and sea, hence why should not I serve him with my
book-learning?” He bears witness that the bishop himself is his
authority for much that he has written.

Archbishop Absalon closed his eyes on St. Benedict’s Day, March
21, 1201, in the cloister at Sorö which Sir Asker built and where
he lived his last days in peace. Absalon’s statue of bronze, on
horseback, battle-axe in hand, stands in the market square in
Copenhagen, the city he founded and of which he is the patron
saint; but his body lies within the quiet sanctuary where, in
the deep forest glades, one listens yet for the evensong of the
monks, long silent now. When his grave was opened, in 1826, the
lines of his tall form, clad in clerical robes, were yet clearly
traceable. The strong hands, turned to dust, held a silver chalice
in which lay his episcopal ring. They are there to be seen to-day,
with remnants of his staff that had partly crumbled away. No Dane
approaches his grave without emotion. “All Denmark grieved for
him,” says a German writer of that day, “and commended his soul
to Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, for that in his lifetime he
had led many who were enemies to peace and concord.” In his old
cathedral, in Roskilde town, lies Saxo, according to tradition
under an unmarked stone. When he went to rest his friend and master
had slept five years.

Esbern outlived his brother three years. The hero of so many
battles met his death at last by an accidental fall in his own
house. The last we hear of him is at a meeting in the Christmas
season, 1187, where emissaries of Pope Gregory VIII preached a
general crusade. Their hearers wept at the picture they drew of the
sufferings Christians were made to endure in the Holy Land. Then
arose Esbern and reminded them of the great deeds of the fathers
at home and abroad. The faith and the fire of Absalon were in his
words:

“These things they did,” he said, “for the glory of their name and
race, knowing nothing of our holy religion. Shall we, believing,
do less? Let us lay aside our petty quarrels and take up this
greater cause. Let us share the sufferings of the saints and earn
their reward. Perhaps we shall win—God keeps the issue. Let him who
cannot give himself, give of his means. So shall all we, sharing
the promise, share also the reward.”

The account we have says that many took the cross, such was the
effect of his words, more likely of the man and what he was and had
been in the sight of them all throughout his long life.


Footnotes:

[3] Pronounced Reeg.

[4] Pronounced Snare, with a as in are. In the Danish hare rhymes
with snare, so pronounced.

[5] Pronounced Veethe.

[6] That all this in no way affected the personal relations of the
two men Saxo assures us in one of the little human touches with
which his chronicle abounds. When Eskild was going away to end his
days as a monk in the monastery of Clairvaux, he rested awhile with
Absalon at his castle Haffn, where he was received as a father. The
old man suffered greatly from cold feet, and Absalon made a box
with many little holes in, and put a hot brick in it. With this at
his feet, Eskild was able to sleep, and he was very grateful to
Absalon, both because of the comfort it gave him and “because that
he perceived that filial piety rather than skill in the healer’s
art” prompted the invention.




KING VALDEMAR, AND THE STORY OF THE DANNEBROG


To the court of King Ottocar of Bohemia there came in the year
1205 a brilliant embassy from far-off Denmark to ask the hand of
his daughter Dragomir for King Valdemar, the young ruler of that
country. Sir Strange[7] Ebbesoen and Bishop Peder Sunesön were the
spokesmen, and many knights, whose fame had travelled far in the
long years of fighting to bring the Baltic pagans under the cross,
rode with them. The old king received them with delight. Valdemar
was not only a good son-in-law for a king to have, being himself
a great and renowned ruler, but he was a splendid knight, tall
and handsome, of most courteous bearing, ambitious, manly, and of
ready wit. So their suit prospered well. The folk-song tells how
they fared; how, according to the custom of those days, Sir Strange
wedded the fair princess by proxy for his lord, and how King
Ottocar, when he bade her good-by, took this promise of her:

      In piety, virtue, and fear of God,
      Let all thy days be spent;
      And ever thy subjects be thy thought,
      Their hopes on thy care be bent.

The daughter kept her vow. Never was queen more beloved of her
people than Dagmar. That was the name they gave her in Denmark, for
the Bohemian Dragomir was strange to them. Dagmar meant daybreak
in their ancient tongue, and it really seemed as if a new and
beautiful day dawned upon the land in her coming. The dry pages of
history have little enough to tell of her beyond the simple fact of
her marriage and untimely death, though they are filled with her
famous husband’s deeds; but not all of his glorious campaigns that
earned for him the name of “The Victor” have sunk so deep into the
people’s memory, or have taken such hold of their hearts, as the
lovely queen who

      Came without burden, she came with peace;
      She came the good peasant to cheer.

Through all the centuries the people have sung her praise, and they
sing it yet. Of the many folk-songs that have come down from the
middle ages, those that tell of Queen Dagmar are the sweetest, as
they are the most mournful, for her happiness was as brief as her
life was beautiful.

They sailed homeward over sunny seas, until they came to the shore
where the royal lover awaited his bride, impatiently scanning the
horizon for the gilded dragon’s head of the ship that bore her. The
minstrel sings of the great wedding that was held in the old city
of Ribe.[8] The gray old cathedral in which they knelt together
still stands; but of Valdemar’s strong castle only a grass-grown
hill is left. It was the privilege of a bride in those days to ask
a gift of her husband on the morning after the wedding, and have it
granted without question. Two boons did Dagmar crave,

  “right early in the morning, long before it was day”:

one, that the plow-tax might be forgiven the peasant, and that
those who for rising against it had been laid in irons be set free;
the other, that the prison door of Bishop Valdemar be opened.
Bishop Valdemar was the arch-enemy of the King. The first request
he granted; but the other he refused for cause:

      An’ he comes out, Bishop Valdemar,
      Widow he makes you this year.

And he did his worst; for in the end the King yielded to Dagmar’s
prayers, and much mischief came of it.

Seven years the good queen lived. Seven centuries have not dimmed
the memory of them, or of her. The King was away in a distant part
of the country when they sent to him in haste with the message
that the queen was dying. The ballad tells of his fears as he sees
Dagmar’s page coming, and they proved only too true.

      The king his checker-board shut in haste,
      The dice they rattled and rung.
      Forbid it God, who dwells in heaven,
      That Dagmar should die so young.

In the wild ride over field and moor, the King left his men far
behind:

      When the king rode out of Skanderborg
      Him followed a hundred men.
      But when he rode o’er Ribe bridge,
      Then rode the king alone.

The tears of weeping women told him as he thundered over the
drawbridge of the castle that he was too late. But Dagmar had only
swooned. As he throws himself upon her bed she opens her eyes, and
smiles upon her husband. Her last prayer, as her first, is for
mercy and peace. Her sin, she says, is not great; she has done
nothing worse than to lace her silken sleeves on a Sunday. Then she
closes her eyes with a tired sigh:

      The bells of heaven are chiming for me;
      No more may I stay to speak.

Thus the folk-song. Long before Dagmar went to her rest, Bishop
Valdemar had stirred up all Germany to wreak his vengeance upon
the King. He was an ambitious, unscrupulous priest, who hated his
royal master because he held himself entitled to the crown, being
the natural son of King Knud, who was murdered at Roskilde, as told
in the story of Absalon. While they were yet young men, when he
saw that the people followed his rival, he set the German princes
against Denmark, a task he never found hard. But young Valdemar
made short work of them. He took the strong cities on the Elbe
and laid the lands of his adversaries under the Danish crown. The
bishop he seized, and threw him into the dungeon of Söborg Castle,
where he had sat thirteen years when Dagmar’s prayers set him free.
He could hardly walk when he came out, but he could hate, and all
the world knew it. The Pope bound him with heavy oaths never to
return to Denmark, and made him come to Italy so that he could keep
an eye on him himself. But two years had not passed before he broke
his oath, and fled to Bremen, where the people elected him to the
vacant archbishopric and its great political power. Forthwith he
began plotting against his native land.

In the bitter feud between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines he found
his opportunity. One of the rival emperors marched an army north
to help the perjured priest. King Valdemar hastened to meet them,
but on the eve of battle the Emperor was slain by one of his own
men. On Sunday, when the archbishop was saying mass in the Bremen
cathedral, an unknown knight, the visor of whose helmet was closed
so that no one saw his face, strode up to the altar, and laying a
papal bull before him, cried out that he was accursed, and under
the ban of the church. The people fled, and forsaken by all, the
wretched man turned once more to Rome in submission. But though the
Pope forgave him on condition that he meddle no more with politics,
war, or episcopal office, another summer found him wielding sword
and lance against the man he hated, this time under the banner of
the Guelphs. The Germans had made another onset on Denmark, but
again King Valdemar defeated them. The bishop intrenched himself in
Hamburg, and made a desperate resistance, but the King carried the
city by storm. The beaten and hopeless man fled, and shut himself
up in a cloister in Hanover, where daily and nightly he scourged
himself for his sins. If it is true that “hell was fashioned by the
souls that hated,” not all the penance of all the years must have
availed to save him from the torments of the lost.

Denmark now had peace on its southern border. Dagmar was dead, and
Valdemar, whose restless soul yearned for new worlds to conquer,
turned toward the east where the wild Esthland tribes were guilty
of even worse outrages than the Wends before Absalon tamed them.
The dreadful cruelties practised by these pagans upon christian
captives cried aloud to all civilized Europe, and Valdemar took the
cross “for the honor of the Virgin Mary and the absolution of his
sins,” and gathered a mighty fleet, the greatest ever assembled in
Danish waters. With more than a thousand ships he sailed across
the Baltic. The Pope sped them with his apostolic blessing, and
took king and people into his especial care, forbidding any one to
attack the country while they were away converting the heathen.
Archbishop Anders led the crusade with the king. As the fleet
approached the shore they saw it covered with an innumerable host
of the enemy. So great was their multitude that the crusaders
quailed before the peril of landing; but the archbishop put heart
into them, and led the fleet in fervent prayer to the God of
battle. Then they landed without hindrance.

There was an old stronghold there called Lyndanissa that had
fallen into decay. The crusaders busied themselves for two days
with building another and better fort. On the third day, being St.
Vitus’ Day, they rested, fearing no harm. The Esthlanders had not
troubled them. Some of their chiefs had even come in with an offer
of surrender. They were willing to be converted, they said, and
the priests were baptizing them after vespers, while the camp was
making ready for the night, when suddenly the air was filled with
the yells of countless savages. On every side they broke from the
woods, where they had been gathering unsuspected, and overwhelmed
the camp. The guards were hewn down, the outposts taken, and the
King’s men were falling back in confusion, their standard lost,
when Prince Vitislav of Rügen who had been camping with his men in
a hollow between the sand-hills, out of the line of attack, threw
himself between them and the Esthlanders, and gave the Danes time
to form their lines.

In the twilight of the June evening the battle raged with great
fury. With the King at their head, who had led them to victory on
so many hard-fought fields, the Danes drove back their savage foes
time after time, literally hewing their way through their ranks
with sword and battle-axe. But they were hopelessly outnumbered.
Their hearts misgave them as they saw ten heathen spring out of the
ground for every one that was felled. The struggle grew fiercer as
night came on. The Christians were fighting for life; defeat meant
that they must perish to a man, by the sword or upon pagan altars;
escape there was none. Upon the cliff overlooking the battle-field
the archbishop and his priests were praying for success to the
King’s arms. Tradition that has been busy with this great battle
all through the ages tells how, while the aged bishop’s hands were
raised toward heaven, victory leaned to the Danes; but when he
grew tired, and let them fall, the heathen won forward, until the
priests held up his hands and once more the tide of battle rolled
back from the shore, and the Christian war-cry rose higher.

Suddenly, in the clash of steel upon steel and the wild tumult of
the conflict, there arose a great and wondering cry “the banner!
the banner! a miracle!” and Christian and pagan paused to listen.
Out of the sky, as it seemed, over against the hill upon which the
priests knelt, a blood-red banner with a great white cross was
seen falling into the ranks of the Christian knights, and a voice
resounded over the battle-field, “Bear this high, and victory
shall be yours.” With the exultant cry, “For God and the King,”
the crusaders seized it, and charged the foe. Terror-stricken,
the Esthlanders wavered, then turned, and fled. The battle became
a massacre. Thousands were slain. The chronicles say that the
dead lay piled fathom-high on the field that ran red with blood.
Upon it, when the pursuit was over, Valdemar knelt with his men,
and they bowed their heads in thanksgiving, while the venerable
archbishop gave praise to God for the victory.

That is the story of the Dannebrog which has been the flag of the
Danes seven hundred years. Whether the archbishop had brought it
with him intending to present it to King Valdemar, and threw it
down among the fighting hordes in the moment of extreme peril,
or whether, as some think, the Pope himself had sent it to the
crusaders with a happy inspiration, the fact remains that it came
to the Danes in this great battle, and on the very day which,
fifty years before, had seen the fall of Arcona, and the end of
idol-worship among the western Slavs. Three hundred years the
standard flew over the Danes fighting on land and sea. Then it was
lost in a campaign against the Holstein counts and, when recovered
half a century later, was hung up in the cathedral at Slesvig,
where gradually it fell to pieces. In the first half of the
Nineteenth Century, when national feeling and national pride were
at their lowest ebb, it was taken down with other moth-eaten old
banners, one day when they were cleaning up, and somebody made a
bonfire of them in the street. Such was the fate of “the flag that
fell from heaven,” the sacred standard of the Danes. But it was
not the end of it. The Dannebrog flies yet over the Denmark of the
Valdemars, no longer great as then, it is true, nor master of its
ancient foes; but the world salutes it with respect, for there was
never blot of tyranny or treason upon it, and its sons own it with
pride wherever they go.

King Valdemar knighted five and thirty of his brave men on the
battle-field, and from that day the Order of the Dannebrog is said
to date. It bears upon a white crusader’s cross the slogan of the
great fight “For God and the King,” and on its reverse the date
when it was won, “June 15, 1219.” The back of paganism was broken
that day, and the conversion of all Esthland followed soon. King
Valdemar built the castle he had begun before he sailed home, and
called it Reval, after one of the neighboring tribes. The Russian
city of that name grew up about it and about the church which
Archbishop Anders reared. The Dannebrog became its arms, and its
people call it to this day “the city of the Danes.”

Denmark was now at the height of her glory. Her flag flew over all
the once hostile lands to the south and east, clear into Russia.
The Baltic was a Danish inland sea. King Valdemar was named
“Victor” with cause. His enemies feared him; his people adored him.
In a single night foul treachery laid the whole splendid structure
low. The King and young Valdemar, Dagmar’s son, with a small suite
of retainers had spent the day hunting on the little island of Lyö.
Count Henrik of Schwerin,—the Black Count they called him,—who had
just returned from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, was his guest.
The count hated Valdemar bitterly for some real or fancied injury,
but he hid his hatred under a friendly bearing and smooth speech.
He brought the King gifts from the Holy Sepulchre, hunted with
him, and was his friend. But by night, when the King and his son
slept in their tent, unguarded, since no enemy was thought to be
near, he fell upon them with his cutthroats, bound and gagged them
despite their struggles, and gathering up all the valuables that
lay around, to put the finishing touch upon his villainy, fled
with his prisoners “in great haste and fear,” while the King’s
men slept. When they awoke, and tried to follow, they found their
ships scuttled. The count’s boat had been lying under sail all day,
hidden in a sheltered cove, awaiting his summons.

Germany at last had the lion and its whelp in her grasp. In chains
and fetters they were dragged from one dungeon to another. The
traitors dared not trust them long in any city, however strong. The
German Emperor shook his fist at Count Henrik, but secretly he was
glad. He would have liked nothing better than to have the precious
spoil in his own power. The Pope thundered in Rome and hurled his
ban at the thugs. But the Black Count’s conscience was as swarthy
as his countenance; and besides, had he not just been to the Holy
Land, and thereby washed himself clean of all his sins, past and
present?

Behind prison walls, comforted only by Dagmar’s son, sat the King,
growing old and gray with anger and grief. Denmark lay prostrate
under the sudden blow, while her enemies rose on every side. Day by
day word came of outbreaks in the conquered provinces. The people
did not know which way to turn; the strong hand that held the helm
was gone, and the ship drifted, the prey of every ill wind. It
was as if all that had been won by sixty years of victories and
sacrifice fell away in one brief season. The forests filled with
out-laws; neither peasant nor wayfarer, nor yet monk or nun in
their quiet retreat, was safe from outrage; and pirates swarmed
again in bay and sound, where for two generations there had been
peace. The twice-perjured Bishop Valdemar left his cloister cell
once more and girt on the sword, to take the kingdom he coveted by
storm.

He was met by King Valdemar’s kinsman and friend, Albert of
Orlamunde, who hastened to the frontier with all the men he could
gather. They halted him with a treaty of peace that offered to set
Valdemar free if he would take his kingdom as a fief of the German
crown. He, Albert, so it was written, was to keep all his lands and
more, would he but sign it. He did not stop to hear the rest, but
slashed the parchment into ribbons with his sword, and ordered an
instant advance. The bishop he made short work of, and he was heard
of no more. But in the battle with the German princes Albert was
defeated and taken prisoner. The door of King Valdemar’s dungeon
was opened only to let his friend in.

After two years and a half in chains, Valdemar was ransomed by his
people with a great sum of gold. The Danish women gave their rings
and their jewels to bring back their king. They flocked about him
when he returned, and received him like the conqueror of old; but
he rode among them gray and stern, and his thoughts were far away.

They had made him swear on oath upon the sacrament, and all
Denmark’s bishops with him, before they set him free, that he
would not seek revenge. But once he was back in his own, he sent
to Pope Gregory, asking him to loose him from an oath wrung from
him while he was helpless in the power of bandits. And the Pope
responded that to keep faith with traitors was no man’s duty. Then
back he rode over the River Eider into the enemy’s land—for they
had stripped Denmark of all her hard-won possessions south of
the ancient border of the kingdom, except Esthland and Rügen—and
with him went every man who could bear arms in all the nation.
He crushed the Black Count who tried to block his way, and at
Bornhöved met the German allies who had gathered from far and
near to give him battle. Well they knew that if Valdemar won, the
reckoning would be terrible. All day they fought, and victory
seemed to lean toward the Danes, when the base Holsteiners, the
Danish rear-guard whom the enemy had bought to betray their king,
turned their spears upon his army, and decided the day. The battle
ended in utter rout of Valdemar’s forces. Four thousand Danish men
were slain. The King himself fell wounded on the field, his eye
pierced by an arrow, and would have fallen into the hands of the
enemy once more but for an unknown German knight, who took him upon
his horse and bore him in the night over unfrequented paths to
Kiel, where he was safe.

“But all men said that this great hurt befell the King because that
he brake the oath he swore upon the sacred body of the Lord.”

The wars of Valdemar were over, but his sorrows were not. Four
years later the crushing blow fell when Dagmar’s son, who was
crowned king to succeed him, lost his life while hunting. With him,
says the folk-song, died the hope of Denmark. The King had other
sons, but to Dagmar’s boy the people had given their love from
the first, as they had to his gentle mother. The old King and his
people grieved together.

But Valdemar rose above his sorrows. Great as he had been in the
days of victory, he was greater still in adversity. The country
was torn by the wars of three-score years, and in need of rest.
He gave his last days to healing the wounds the sword had struck.
Valdemar, the Victor, became Valdemar, the Law-giver. The laws of
the country had hitherto made themselves. They were the outgrowths
of the people’s ancient customs, passed down by word of mouth
through the generations, and confirmed on Thing from time to time.
King Valdemar gave Denmark her first written laws that judged
between man and man, in at least one of her provinces clear down
into our day. “With law shall land be built” begins his code. “The
law,” it says, “must be honest, just, reasonable, and according to
the ways of the people. It must meet their needs, and speak plainly
so that all men may know and understand what the law is. It is not
to be made in any man’s favor, but for the needs of all them who
live in the land.” That is its purpose, and “no man shall judge
(condemn) the law which the King has given and the country chosen;
neither shall he (the King) take it back without the will of the
people.” That tells the story of Valdemar’s day, and of the people
who are so near of kin with ourselves. They were not sovereign
and subjects; they were a chosen king and a free people, working
together “with law land to build.”

King Valdemar was married twice. The folk-song represents Dagmar as
urging the King with her dying breath

  “that Bengerd, my lord, that base bad dame you never to wife
  will take.”

Bengerd, or Berengaria, was a Portuguese princess whom Valdemar
married in spite of the warning, two years later. As the people had
loved the fair Dagmar, so they hated the proud Southern beauty,
whether with reason or not. The story of her “morning gift,” as it
has come down to us through the mists of time, is very different
from the other. She asks the King, so the ballad has it, to give
her Samsö, a great and fertile island, and “a golden crown[9] for
every maid,” but he tells her not to be quite so greedy:

  There be full many an honest maid with not dry bread to eat.

Undismayed, Bengerd objects that Danish women have no business
to wear silken gowns, and that a good horse is not for a peasant
lad. The King replies patiently that what a woman can buy she may
wear for him, and that he will not take the lad’s horse if he can
feed it. Bengerd is not satisfied. “Let bar the land with iron
chains” is her next proposal, that neither man nor woman enter
it without paying tax. Her husband says scornfully that Danish
kings have never had need of such measures, and never will. He is
plainly getting bored, and when she keeps it up, and begrudges the
husbandman more than “two oxen and a cow,” he loses his temper, and
presumably there is a matrimonial tiff. Very likely most of this is
fiction, bred of the popular prejudice. The King loved her, that
is certain. She was a beautiful high-spirited woman, so beautiful
that many hundreds of years after, when her grave was opened, the
delicate oval of her skull excited admiration yet. But the people
hated her. Twenty generations after her death it was their custom
when passing her grave to spit on it with the exclamation “Out upon
thee, Bengerd! God bless the King of Denmark”; for in good or evil
days they never wavered in their love and admiration for the king
who was a son of the first Valdemar, and the heir of his greatness
and of that of the sainted Absalon. Tradition has it that Bengerd
was killed in battle, having gone with her husband on one of his
campaigns. “It was not heard in any place,” says the folk-song
wickedly, “that any one grieved for her.” But the King mourned for
his beautiful queen to the end of his days.

Bengerd bore Valdemar three sons upon whom he lavished all the
affection of his lonely old age. Erik he chose as his successor,
and to keep his brothers loyal to him he gave them great fiefs and
thus, unknowing, brought on the very trouble he sought to avoid,
and set his foot on the path that led to Denmark’s dismemberment
after centuries of bloody wars. For to his second son Abel he gave
Slesvig, and Abel, when his brother became king, sought alliance
with the Holstein count Adolf,[10] the very one who had led the
Germans at the fatal battle of Bornhöved. The result was a war
between the brothers that raged seven years, and laid waste the
land. Worse was to follow, for Abel was only “Abel in name, but
Cain in deed.” But happily the old King’s eyes were closed then,
and he was spared the sight of one brother murdering the other for
the kingdom.

Some foreboding of this seems to have troubled him in his last
years. It is related that once when he was mounting his horse to go
hunting he fell into a deep reverie, and remained standing with his
foot in the stirrup a long time, while his men wondered, not daring
to disturb him. At last one of them went to remind him that the
sun was low in the west. The King awoke from his dream, and bade
him go at once to a wise old hermit who lived in a distant part of
the country. “Ask him,” he said, “what King Valdemar was thinking
of just now, and bring me his answer.” The knight went away on his
strange errand, and found the hermit. And this was the message he
brought back: “Your lord and master pondered as he stood by his
horse, how his sons would fare when he was dead. Tell him that war
and discord they shall have, but kings they will all be.” When the
King heard the prophecy he was troubled in mind, and called his
sons and all his great knights to a council at which he pleaded
with them to keep the peace. But though they promised, he was
barely in his grave when riot and bloodshed filled the land. The
climax was reached when Abel inveigled his brother to his home with
fair words and, once he had him in his power, seized him and gave
him over to his men to do with “as they pleased.” They understood
their master only too well, and took King Erik out on the fjord in
an open boat, and killed him there, scarce giving him time to say
his prayers. They weighted his body with his helmet, and sank it in
the deep.

Abel made oath with four and twenty of his men that he was innocent
of his brother’s blood, and took the crown after him. But the foul
crime was soon avenged. Within a few years he was himself slain
by a peasant in a rising of his own people. For a while his body
lay unburied, the prey of beast and bird, and when it was interred
in the Slesvig cathedral there was no rest for it. “Such turmoil
arose in the church by night that the monks could not chant their
vigils,” and in the end they took him out, and buried him in a
swamp, with a stake driven through the heart to lay his ghost. But
clear down to our time when people ceased to believe in ghosts, the
fratricide was seen at night hunting through the woods, coal-black
and on a white horse, with three fiery dogs trailing after; and
blue flames burned over the sea where they vanished. That was how
the superstition of the people judged the man whom the nobles and
the priests made king, red-handed.

Christopher, the youngest of the three brothers, was king last.
His end was no better than that of the rest. Indeed, it was worse.
Hardly yet forty years old, he died—poisoned, it was said, by the
Abbot Arnfast, in the sacrament as he knelt at the altar-rail
in the Ribe cathedral. He was buried in the chancel where the
penitents going to the altar walk over his grave. So, of all
Valdemar’s four sons, not one died a peaceful, natural death. But
kings they all were.

Valdemar was laid in Ringsted with his great father. He sleeps
between his two queens. Dagmar’s grave was disturbed in the late
middle ages by unknown vandals, and the remains of Denmark’s
best-loved queen were scattered. Only a golden cross, which she
had worn in life, somehow escaped, and found its way in course of
time into the museum of antiquities at Copenhagen, where it now is,
its chief and priceless treasure. There also is a braid of Queen
Bengerd’s hair that was found when her grave was opened in 1855.
The people’s hate had followed her even there, and would not let
her rest. The slab that covered her tomb had been pried off, and a
round stone dropped into the place made for her head. Otherwise her
grave was undisturbed.

“Truly then fell the crown from the heads of Danish men,” says
the old chronicle of King Valdemar’s death, and black clouds were
gathering ominously even then over the land. But in storm and
stress, as in days that were fair, the Danish people have clung
loyally to the memory of their beloved King and of his sweet Dagmar.


Footnotes:

[7] Pronounced as Strangle, with the l left out.

[8] Pronounced Reebe, in two syllables.

[9] A coin, probably.

[10] That was the beginning of the Slesvig-Holstein question that
troubled Europe to our day; for the fashion set by Abel other
rulers of his dukedom followed, and by degrees Slesvig came to
be reckoned with the German duchies, whereas up till then it had
always been South-Jutland, a part of Denmark proper.




HOW THE GHOST OF THE HEATH WAS LAID


On the map of Europe the mainland of Denmark looks like a beckoning
finger pointing due north and ending in a narrow sand-reef, upon
which the waves of the North Sea and of the Kattegat break with
unceasing clamor and strife. The heart of the peninsula, quite
one-fourth of its area, was fifty years ago a desert, a barren,
melancholy waste, where the only sign of life encountered by the
hunter, gunning for heath-fowl and plover, was a rare shepherd
tending a few lonesome sheep, and knitting mechanically on his
endless stocking. The two, the lean sheep and the long stocking,
together comprised the only industries which the heath afforded and
was thought capable of sustaining. A great change has taken place
within the span of a single life, and it is all due to the clear
sight and patient devotion of one strong man, the Gifford Pinchot
of Denmark. The story of that unique achievement reads like the
tale of the Sleeping Beauty who was roused from her hundred years’
sleep by the kiss of her lover prince. The prince who awoke the
slumbering heath was a captain of engineers, Enrico Dalgas by name.

[Illustration: THE HEATH AS IT WAS FIFTY YEARS AGO]

Not altogether fanciful is the conceit. Barren, black, and
desolate, the great moor gripped the imagination as no smiling
landscape of field and forest could—does yet, where enough of it
remains. Far as eye reaches the dun heather covers hill and plain
with its sombre pall. Like gloomy sentinels, furry cattails nod in
the bog where the blue gentian peeps timidly into murky pools; the
only human habitation in sight some heath boer’s ling-thatched hut,
flanked by rows of peat stacks in vain endeavor to stay the sweep
of the pitiless west wind. On the barrows where the vikings sleep
their long sleep, the plover pipes its melancholy lay; between
steep banks a furtive brook steals swiftly by as if anxious to
escape from the universal blight. Over it all broods the silence of
the desert, drowsy with the hum of many bees winging their swift
way to the secret feeding-places they know of, where mayflower and
anemone hide under the heather, witness that forests grew here in
the long ago. In midsummer, when the purple is on the broom, a
strange pageant moves on the dim horizon, a shifting mirage of sea
and shore, forest, lake, and islands lying high, with ships and
castles and spires of distant churches—the witchery of the heath
that speaks in the tales and superstitions of its simple people.
High in the blue soars the lark, singing its song of home and
hope to its nesting mate. This is the heath which, denying to the
hardest toil all but the barest living, has given of its poetry to
the Danish tongue some of its sweetest songs.

But in this busy world day-dreams must make way for the things that
make the day count, castles in the air to homes upon the soil. The
heath had known such in the dim past. It had not always been a
desert. The numberless cairns that lie scattered over it, sometimes
strung out for miles as if marking the highways of the ancients,
which they doubtless do, sometimes grouped where their villages
stood, bear witness to it. Great battles account for their share,
and some of them were fought in historic times. On Grathe Heath the
young King Valdemar overcame his treacherous rival Svend. Alone
and hunted, the beaten man sought refuge, Saxo tells us, behind a
stump, where he was found and slain by one of the King’s axemen. A
chapel was built on the spot. More than seven centuries later (in
1892) they dug there, and found the bones of a man with skull split
in two.

The stump behind which the wretched Svend hid was probably the last
representative of great forests that grew where now is sterile
moor. In the bogs trunks of oak and fir are found lying as they
fell centuries ago. The local names preserve the tradition, with
here and there patches of scrub oak that hug the ground close, to
escape the blast from the North Sea. There is one such thicket
near the hamlet of Taulund—the name itself tells of long-forgotten
groves—and the story runs among the people yet that once squirrels
jumped from tree to tree without touching ground all the way from
Taulund to Gjellerup church, a stretch of more than five miles to
which the wild things of the woods have long been strangers. In the
shelter of the old forests men dwelt through ages, and made the
land yield them a living. Some cairns that have been explored span
over more than a thousand years. They were built in the stone age,
and served the people of the bronze and iron ages successively as
burial-places, doubtless the same tribes who thus occupied their
homesteads from generation to generation. That they were farmers,
not nomads, is proved by the clear impression of grains of wheat
and barley in their burial urns. The seeds strayed into the clay
and were burned away, but the impression abides, and tells the
story.

Clear down to historic times there was a thrifty population in many
of the now barren spots. But a change was slowly creeping over
the landscape. The country was torn by long and bloody wars. The
big men fought for the land and the little ones paid the score,
as they always do. They were hunted from house and home. Next the
wild hordes of the Holstein counts overran Jutland. Its towns were
burned, the country laid waste. Great fires swept the forests.
What ravaging armies had left was burned in the smelteries. In the
sandy crust of the heath there is iron, and swords and spears were
the grim need of that day. The smelteries are only names now. They
went, but they took the forests with them, and where the ground was
cleared the west wind broke through, and ruin followed fast. Last
of all came the Black Death, and set its seal of desolation upon
it all. When it had passed, the country was a huge graveyard. The
heath had moved in. Rovers and smugglers found refuge there; honest
folk shunned it. Under the heather the old landmarks are sometimes
found yet, and deep ruts made by wheels that long since ceased to
turn.

In the Eighteenth Century men began to think of reclamation. A
thousand German colonists were called in and settled on the heath,
but it was stronger than they, and they drifted away until scarce
half a hundred families remained. The Government tried its hand,
but there was no one who knew just how, and only discouragement
resulted. Then came the war with Germany in 1864, that lost to
Denmark a third of her territory. The country lay prostrate under
the crushing blow. But it rose above defeat and disaster, and once
more expectant eyes were turned toward the ancient domain that had
slipped from its grasp. “What was lost without must be won within”
became the national slogan. And this time the man for the task was
at hand.

Enrico Mylius Dalgas was by the accident of birth an Italian, his
father being the Danish consul in Naples; by descent a Frenchman;
by choice and training a Dane, typical of the best in that people.
He came of the Huguenot stock that left France after the repeal of
the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and scattered over Europe, to the great
good of every land in which it settled. They had been tillers of
the soil from the beginning, and at least two of the family, who
found homes in Denmark, made in their day notable contributions to
the cause of advanced, sensible husbandry. Enrico’s father, though
a merchant, had an open eye for the interests which in later years
claimed the son’s life-work. In the diary of a journey through
Sweden he makes indignant comment upon the reckless way in which
the people of that country dealt with their forests. That he was
also a man of resolution is shown by an incident of the time when
Jew-baiting was having its sorry day in Denmark. An innkeeper
mistook the dark-skinned little man for a Jew, and set before him
a spoiled ham, retorting contemptuously, when protest was made,
that it was “good enough for a Sheeny.” Without further parley
Mr. Dalgas seized the hot ham by its shank and beat the fellow
with it till he cried for mercy. The son tells of the first school
he attended, when he was but five years old. It was kept by the
widow of one of Napoleon’s generals, a militant lady who every
morning marshalled the school, a Lilliputian army with the teachers
flanking the line like beardless sergeants in stays and petticoats,
and distributed rewards and punishments as the great Emperor was
wont to do after a battle. For the dunces there was a corner strewn
with dried peas on which they were made to kneel with long-eared
donkey caps adorning their luckless heads. Very likely it was after
an insult of this kind that Enrico decided to elope to America with
his baby sister. They were found down by the harbor bargaining
with some fishermen to take them over to Capri _en route_ for the
land of freedom. The elder Dalgas died while the children were yet
little, and the widow went back to Denmark to bring up her boys
there.

They were poor, and the change from the genial skies of sunny Italy
to the bleak North did not make it any easier for them. Enrico’s
teacher saw it, and gave him his overcoat to be made over. But
the boys spotted it and squared accounts with their teacher by
snowballing the wearer of the big green plaid until he was glad to
leave it at home, and go without. He was in the military school
when war broke out with Germany in 1848. Both of his brothers
volunteered, and fell in battle. Enrico was ordered out as
lieutenant, and put on the shoulder-straps joyfully, to the great
scandal of his godfather in Milan, who sympathized with the German
cause. When the young soldier refused to resign he not only cut him
off in his will, but took away a pension of four hundred kroner
he had given his mother in her widowhood. If he had thoughts of
bringing them over by such means, he found out his mistake. Mother
and son were made of sterner stuff. Dalgas fought twice for his
country, the last time in 1864, as a captain of engineers.

It was no ordinary class, the one of 1851 that resumed its studies
in the military high school. Two of the students did not answer
roll-call; their names were written among the nation’s heroic dead.
Some had scars and wore the cross for valor in battle. All were
first lieutenants, to be graduated as captains. Dalgas had himself
transferred from the artillery to the engineers, and was detailed
as road inspector. So the opportunity of his life came to him.

There were few railways in those days; the highways were still the
great arteries of traffic. Dalgas built roads that crossed the
heath, and he learned to know it and the strong and independent,
if narrow, people who clung to it with such a tenacious grip. He
had a natural liking for practical geology and for the chemistry
of the soil, and the deep cuts which his roads sometimes made gave
him the best of chances for following his bent. The heath lay as
an open book before him, and he studied it with delight. He found
the traces of the old forests, and noted their extent. Occasionally
the pickaxe uncovered peat deposits of unsuspected depth and
value. Sometimes the line led across the lean fields, and damages
had to be discussed and assessed. He learned the point of view
of the heath farmer, sympathized with his struggles, and gained
his confidence. Best of all, he found a man of his own mind, a
lawyer by the name of Morville, himself a descendant of the exiled
Huguenots. It is not a little curious that when the way was cleared
for the Heath Society’s great work, in its formal organization with
M. Mourier-Petersen, a large landowner, as their associate in its
management, the three men who for a quarter of a century planned
the work and marked out the groove in which it was to run were
all of that strong stock which is by no means the most common in
Denmark.

With his lawyer friend Captain Dalgas tramped the heath far and
wide for ten years. Then their talks had matured a plan. Dalgas
wrote to the Copenhagen newspapers that the heath could be
reclaimed, and suggested that it should be done by the State. They
laughed at him. “Nothing better could have happened,” he said in
after years, “for it made us turn to the people themselves, and
that was the road to success, though we did not know it.” In the
spring of 1866 a hundred men, little and big landowners most of
them, met at his call, and organized the Heath Society[11] with the
object of reclaiming the moor. Dalgas became its managing director.

To restore to the treeless waste its forest growth was the
fundamental idea, for until that was done nothing but the heather
could grow there. The west wind would not let it. But the heath
farmer shook his head. It would cost too much, and give too little
back. What he needed was water and marl. Could the captain help
them to these?—that was another matter. The little streams that
found their way into the heath and lost it there, dire need had
taught them to turn to use in their fields; not a drop escaped. But
the river that ran between deep banks was beyond their reach. Could
he show them how to harness that? Dalgas saw their point. “We are
working, not for the dead soil, but for the living men who find
homes upon it,” he told his associates, and tree planting was put
aside for the time. They turned canal diggers instead. Irrigation
became their aim and task; the engineer was in his right place.
The water was raised from the stream and led out upon the moor,
and presently grass grew in the sand which the wiry stems of the
heather had clutched so long. Green meadows lined the water-runs,
and fragrant haystacks rose. To the lean sheep was added a cow,
then two. The farmer laid by a little, and took in more land
for cultivation. That meant breaking the heath. Also, it meant
marl. The heath is lime-poor; marl is lime in the exact form in
which it best fits that sandy soil. It was known to exist in some
favored spots, but the poor heath farmer could not bring it from a
distance. So the marl borer went with the canal digger. Into every
acre he drove his auger, and mapped out his discoveries. At last
accounts he had found marl in more than seventeen hundred places,
and he is not done yet. Where there was none, Dalgas’s Society
built portable railways into the moor far enough to bring it to
nearly every farmer’s door.

It was as if a magic wand had been waved over the heath. With
water and marl, the means were at hand for fighting it and winning
out. Heads that had drooped in discouragement were raised. The
cattle keep increased, and with it came the farmer’s wealth. Marl
changes the character of the heath soil; with manure to fertilize
it there was no reason why it should not grow crops—none, except
the withering blast of the west wind. The time for Dalgas to preach
tree planting had come.

While the canal digger and marl seeker were at work, there had been
neighborhood meetings and talks at which Captain Dalgas did the
talking. When he spoke the heath boer listened, for he had learned
to look upon him as one of them. He wore no gold lace. A plain man
in every day gray tweeds, with his trousers tucked into his boots,
he spoke to plain people of things that concerned them vitally, and
in a way they could understand. So when he told them that the heath
had once been forest-clad, at least a large part of it, and pointed
them to the proofs, and that the woods could be made to grow again
to give them timber and shelter and crops, they gave heed. It was
worth trying at any rate. The shelter was the immediate thing. They
began planting hedges about their homesteads; not always wisely,
for it is not every tree that will grow in the heath. The wind
whipped and wore them, the ahl cramped their roots, and they died.
The ahl is the rusty-red crust that forms under the heather in the
course of the ages where the desert rules. Sometimes it is a loose
sandstone formation; sometimes it carries as much as twenty per
cent of iron that is absorbed from the upper layers of the sand. In
any case, it must be broken through; no tree root can do it. The
ahl, the poverty of the sand, and the wind, together make the “evil
genius” of the heath that had won until then in the century-old
fight with man. But this time he had backing, and was not minded to
give up. The Heath Society was there to counsel, to aid. And soon
the hedges took hold, and gardens grew in their shelter. There is
hardly a farm in all west Jutland to-day that has not one, even if
the moor waits just beyond the gate.

Out in the desert the Society had made a beginning with plantations
of Norway spruce. They took root, but the heather soon overwhelmed
the young plants. Not without a fight would this enemy let go its
grip upon the land. It had smothered the hardy Scotch pine in days
past, and now the spruce was in peril. Searching high and low for
something that would grow fast and grow green, Dalgas and his
associates planted dwarf pine with the spruce. Strangely, it not
only grew itself, but proved to be a real nurse for the other. The
spruce took a fresh start, and they grew vigorously together—for a
while. Then the pine outstripped its nursling, and threatened to
smother it. The spruce was the more valuable; the other was at best
little more than a shrub. The croaker raised his voice: the black
heath had turned green, but it was still heath, of no value to any
one, then or ever.

He had not reckoned with Dalgas. The captain of engineers could use
the axe as well as the spade. He cut the dwarf pine out wherever
the spruce had got its grip, and gave it light and air. And it grew
big and beautiful. The Heath Society has now over nineteen hundred
plantations that cover nearly a hundred thousand acres, and the
State and private individuals, inspired by the example it set, have
planted almost as large an area. The ghost of the heath has been
laid for all time.

Go now across the heath and see the change forty years have
wrought. You shall seek in vain the lonely shepherd with his
stocking. The stocking has grown into an organized industry. In
grandfather’s day the farmer and his household “knitted for the
taxes”; if all hands made enough in the twelvemonth to pay the
tax-gatherer, they had done well. Last year the single county of
Hammerum, of which more below, sold machine-made underwear to the
value of over a million and a half kroner. The sheep are there,
but no longer lean; no more the ling-thatched hut, but prosperous
farms backed by thrifty groves, with hollyhock and marigold in the
dooryards, heaps of gray marl in the fields, tiny rivulets of water
singing the doom of the heath in the sand; for where it comes the
heather moves out. A resolute, thrifty peasantry looks hopefully
forward. Not all of the heath is conquered yet. Roughly speaking,
thirty-three hundred square miles of heath confronted Dalgas in
1866. Just about a thousand remain for those who come after to
wrestle with; but already voices are raised pleading that some of
it be preserved untouched for its natural beauty, while yet it is
time.

Meanwhile the plow goes over fresh acres every year—once, twice,
then a deeper plowing, this time to break the stony crust, and the
heath is ready for its human mission. From the Society’s nurseries
that are scattered through the country come thousands of tiny
trees, and are set out in the furrows, two of the spruce for each
dwarf pine till the nurse has done her work. Then she is turned
into charcoal, into tar, and a score of other things of use. The
men who do the planting in summer find chopping to do in winter
in the older plantations, at good wages. Money is flowing into
the moor in the wake of the water and the marl. Roads are being
made, and every day the mail-carrier comes. In the olden time a
stranger straying into the heath often brought the first news of
the world without for weeks together. Game is coming, too,—roebuck
and deer,—in the young forests. The climate itself is changing;
more rain falls in midsummer, when it is needed. The sand-blast has
been checked, the power of the west wind broken. The shrivelled
soil once more takes up and holds the rains, and the streams will
deepen, fish leap in them as of yore. Groves of beech and oak are
springing up in the shelter of their hardier evergreen kin. “Make
the land furry,” Dalgas said, with prophetic eye beholding great
forests taking the place of sand and heather, and in his lifetime
the change was wrought that is transforming the barren moor into
the home-land of a prosperous people.

To the most unlikely of places, through the very prison doors,
his gospel of hope has made its way. For the last dozen years the
life prisoners in the Horsens penitentiary have been employed in
breaking and reforesting the heath, and their keepers report that
the effect upon them of the hard work in the open has been to
notably cheer and brighten them. The discipline has been excellent.
There have been few attempts at escape, and they have come to
nothing through the vigilance of the other prisoners.

While the population in the rest of Denmark is about stationary, in
west Jutland it grows apace. The case of Skåphus farm in the parish
of Sunds shows how this happens. Prior to 1870 this farm of three
thousand acres was rated the “biggest and poorest” in Denmark. Last
year it had dwindled to three hundred and fifty acres, but upon
its old land thirty-three homesteads had risen that kept between
them sixty-two horses and two hundred and fifty-two cows, beside
the sheep, and the manor farm was worth twice as much as before.
The town of Herning, sometimes called “the Star of the Heath,” is
the seat of Hammerum county, once the baldest and most miserable on
the Danish mainland. In 1841 twenty-one persons lived in Herning.
To-day there are more than six thousand in a town with handsome
buildings, gas, electric lighting, and paved streets. The heath is
half a dozen miles away. And this is not the result of any special
or forced industry, but the natural, healthy growth of a centre for
an army of industrious men and women winning back the land of their
fathers by patient toil. All through the landscape one sees from
the train the black giving way to the green. Churches rear their
white gables; bells that have been silent since the Black Death
stalked through the land once more call the people to worship on
the old sites. More churches were built in the reign of “the good
King Christian,” who has just been gathered to his fathers, than in
all the centuries since the day of the Valdemars.

Bog cultivation is the Heath Society’s youngest child. The heath
is full of peat-bogs that only need the sand, so plentiful on the
uplands, to make their soil as good as the best, the muck of the
bog being all plant food, and they have a surplus of water to give
in exchange. With hope the keynote of it all, the State has taken
up the herculean task of keeping down the moving sands of the North
Sea coast. All along it is a range of dunes that in the fierce
storms of that region may change shape and place in a single night.
The “sand flight” at times reached miles inland, and threatened to
bury the farmer’s acres past recovery. Austrian fir and dwarf pine
now grow upon the white range, helping alike to keep down the sand
and to bar out the blast.

With this exception, the great change has been, is being, wrought
by the people themselves. It was for their good, in the apathy
that followed 1864, that it should be so, and Dalgas saw it. The
State aids the man who plants ten acres or more, and assumes
the obligation to preserve the forest intact; the Heath Society
sells him plants at half-price, and helps him with its advice. It
disposes annually of over thirteen million young trees. The people
do the rest, and back the Society with their support. The Danish
peasant has learned the value of coöperation since he turned dairy
farmer, and associations for irrigation, for tree planting, and
garden planting are everywhere. They even reach across the ocean.
This year a call was issued to sons of the old soil, who have found
a new home in America, to join in planting a Danish-American forest
in the desert where hill and heather hide a silvery lake in their
deep shadows and returning wanderers may rest and dream of the long
ago.

[Illustration: THE HEATH TRANSFORMED IN TWENTY-ONE YEARS]

Soldier though he was, Enrico Dalgas’s pick and spade brigade won
greater victories for Denmark than her armies in two wars. He
literally “won for his country within what she had lost without.” A
natural organizer, a hard worker who found his greatest joy in his
daily tasks, a fearless and lucid writer who yet knew how to keep
his cause out of the rancorous politics that often enough seemed
to mistake partisanship for patriotism, he was the most modest of
men. Praise he always passed up to others. At the “silver wedding”
of the Society he founded they toasted him jubilantly, but he sat
quiet a long time. When at last he arose, it was to make this
characteristic little speech:

“I thank you very much. His Excellency the Minister of the
Interior, who is present here, will see from this how much you
think of me, and possibly my recommendation that the State
make a larger contribution to the Heath Society’s treasury may
thereby acquire greater weight with him. I drink to an increased
appropriation.”

On the heath Dalgas was prophet, prince, and friend of the people.
In the crowds that flocked about his bier homespun elbowed gold
lace in the grief of a common loss. Boughs of the fragrant spruce
decked his coffin, the gift of the heath to the memory of him who
set it free.

To Dalgas apply the words of the seer with which he himself
characterized the Society that was the child of his heart and
brain: “The good men are those who plant and water,” for they add
to the happiness of mankind.


Footnotes:

[11] Danske Hedeselskab.




KING CHRISTIAN IV


[Illustration:

      King Christian stood by loft - y mast In mist and
      smoke; His sword was ham - mer - ing so fast, Thro’
      Goth -ic helm and brain it passed; Then sank each hos-tile
      hulk and mast. In mist and smoke. “Fly,”
      shout-ed they, “fly, he who can! Who braves of Denmark’s
      Christ- i -an, Who braves of Denmark’s Christian The stroke?”]

Deep in the beech-woods between Copenhagen and Elsinore, upon
the shore of a limpid lake, stands Frederiksborg, one of the
most beautiful castles in Europe. In its chapel the Danish kings
were crowned for two centuries, and here was born on April 12,
1577, King Christian of the Danish national hymn which Longfellow
translated into our tongue. No Danish ruler since the days of the
great Valdemars made such a mark upon his time; none lives as he
in the imagination of the people. He led armies to war and won
and lost battles; indeed, he lost more than he won on land when
matched against the great generals of that fighting era. On the sea
he sailed his own ship and was the captain of his own fleet, and
there he had no peer. He made laws in the days of peace and reigned
over a happy, prosperous land. In his old age misfortune in which
he had no share overwhelmed Denmark, but he was ever greatest in
adversity, and his courage saved the country from ruin. The great
did not love him overmuch; but to the plain people he was ever,
with all his failings, which were the failings of his day, a great,
appealing figure, and lives in their hearts, not merely in the dry
pages of musty books.

He was eleven years old when his father died, and until he came of
age the country was governed by a council of happily most able men
who, with his mother, gave him such a schooling as few kings have
had. He not only became proficient in the languages, living and
dead, and in mathematics which he put to such practical use that
he was among the greatest of architects and ship-builders; he was
the best all-round athlete among his fellows as well, and there was
some sense in the tradition that survives to this day that whoever
was touched by him in wrath did not live long, for he was very tall
with a big, strong body, and when he struck, he struck hard. He was
a dauntless sailor who knew as much about sailing a ship as any one
of his captains, and much more about building it. Danger appealed
to him always. When the spire on the great cathedral in Copenhagen
threatened to fall, he was the one who went up in it alone and gave
orders where and how to brace it.

As he grew, he sat in the council of state, learning kingcraft, and
showed there the hard-headed sense of fairness and justice that
went with him through life. He was hardly fourteen when the case
of three brothers of the powerful Friis family came before the
council. They had attacked another young nobleman in the street,
struck off one of his hands, and crippled the other. Because of
their influence, the council was for being lenient, atrocious as
the crime was. A fine was deemed sufficient. The young prince
asked if there were not some law covering the case with severer
punishment, and was told that in the province of Skaane there was
such a law that applied to serfs. But the assault had not been
committed in Skaane, and these were high noblemen.

“All the worse for them,” said the prince. “Is then a serf in
Skaane to have more rights under the law than a nobleman in the
rest of Denmark? Let the law for the serf be theirs.” And the
judgment stood.

He had barely attained his majority, when the young king was called
upon to judge between another great noble and a widow whom he sued
for 9000 daler, money he claimed to have lent to her husband. In
proof he laid before the judges two bonds bearing the signatures of
husband and wife. The widow denounced them as forgeries, but the
court decided that she must pay. She went straight to the King with
her story, assuring him that she had never heard of the debt. The
King sent for the bonds and upon close scrutiny discovered that one
of them was on paper bearing the water-mark of a mill that was not
built till two years after the date written in the bond. The noble
was arrested and the search of his house brought to light several
similar documents waiting their turn. He went to the scaffold. His
rank only aggravated his offence in the eyes of the King. No wonder
the fame of this judge spread quickly through the land.

A dozen contented years he reigned in peace, doing justice between
man and man at home. Then the curse of his house gripped him. In
two centuries, since the brief union between the three Scandinavian
kingdoms was broken by the secession of Sweden, only two of sixteen
kings in either country had gone to their rest without ripping
up the old feud. It was now Christian’s turn. The pretext was of
little account: there was always cause enough. Gustav Adolf, whose
father was then on the throne of Sweden, said in after years that
there was no one he had such hearty admiration for and whose friend
he would like so well to be as Christian IV: “The mischief is that
we are neighbors.” King Christian crossed over into Sweden and laid
siege to the strong fortress of Kalmar where he first saw actual
war and showed himself a doughty campaigner of intrepid courage.
It came near costing him his life when a cannoneer with whom he
had often talked on his rounds deserted to the enemy and picked
the King out as his especial target. Twice he killed an officer
attending upon him, but the King he never hit. It is almost a
pleasure to record that when he tried it again, in another fight,
Christian caught him and dealt with him as the traitor he was,
though the rough justice of those days is not pleasant to dwell on.
The besieged tried to create a diversion by sneaking into camp at
night and burying wax images of the King and his generals in the
earth, where they were afterwards found and spread consternation
through the army; for such things were believed to be wrought by
witchcraft and to bring bad luck to those whom they represented.

However, neither the real courage of the defenders, nor their
dallying with the black art, helped them any. King Christian
stormed the town at the head of his army and took it. The
burgomaster hid in the church, disguised as a priest, and pretended
to be shriving some women when the crash came, but it did not save
him. When the Swedish king came with a host twice the size of his
own, there was a battle royal, but Christian drove him off and laid
siege to the castle where dissension presently arose between the
garrison and its commander who was for surrendering. In the midst
of their noisy quarrel, King Christian was discovered standing upon
the wall, calmly looking on. He had climbed up alone on a rope
ladder which the sentinel let down at his bidding. At the sight
they gave it up and opened the gates, and the King wrote home,
proudly dating his letter from “our castle Kalmar.”

Its loss so angered the Swedish king who was old and sick, that he
challenged Christian to single combat, without armor. The letters
that passed between them were hardly kingly. King Christian wrote
that he had other things to do: “Better catch a doctor, old man,
and have your head-piece looked after.” Helpless anger killed Karl,
and Gustav Adolf, of whom the world was presently to hear, took the
command and the crown. After that Christian had a harder road to
hoe.

A foretaste of it came to him when he tried to surprise the
fortress of Gullberg near the present Götaborg. Its commander
was wounded early in the fight, but his wife who took his place
more than filled it. She and her women poured boiling lye upon
the attacking Danes until they lay “like scalded pigs” under the
walls. Their leader knew when he had enough and made off in haste,
with the lady commandant calling after him, “You were a little
unexpected for breakfast, but come back for dinner and we will
receive you properly.” She would not even let them take their
dead away. “Since God gave us luck to kill them,” she said, “we
will manage to bury them too.” They were very pious days after
their own fashion, and God was much on the lips of his servants.
Troubles rarely come singly. Soon after, King Christian met the
enemy unexpectedly and was so badly beaten that for the second time
he had to run for it, though he held out till nearly all his men
had fallen. His horse got mired in a swamp with the pursuers close
behind. The gay and wealthy Sir Christen Barnekow, who had been
last on the field, passed him there, and at once got down and gave
him his horse. It meant giving up his life, and when Sir Christen
could no longer follow the fleeing King he sat down on a rock with
the words, “I give the King my horse, the enemy my life, and God my
soul.” The rock is there yet and the country folk believe that the
red spots in the granite are Christen Barnekow’s blood which all
the years have not availed to wash out.

They tired of fighting at last and made it up. Sweden paid Denmark
a million daler; for the rest, things stayed as they had been
before. King Christian had shown himself no mean fighter, but the
senseless sacking and burning of town and country that was an ugly
part of those days’ warfare went against his grain, and he tried to
persuade the Swedes to agree to leave that out in future. Gustav
Adolf had not yet grown into the man he afterward became. “As to
the burning,” was his reply, “seeing that it is the usage of war,
and we enemies, why we will each have to do the best we can,” which
meant the worst. Had the two kings, who had much in common, got
together in the years of peace that followed, much misery might
have been saved Denmark, and a black page of history might read
very differently. For those were the days of the Thirty Years’ War,
in which together they might have dictated peace to harassed Europe.

Now King Christian’s ambition, his piety, for he was a sincerely
religious man, as well as his jealousy of his younger rival and of
the growing power of Sweden—so mixed are human motives—made him
yield to the entreaties of the hard-pressed Protestant princes to
take up alone their cause against the German Emperor. He had tried
for half a dozen years to make peace between them. At last he drew
the sword and went down to force it. After a year of fighting Tilly
and Wallenstein, the Emperor’s great generals, he met the former
in a decisive battle at Lutter-am-Baremberg. King Christian’s army
was beaten and put to rout. He himself fled bareheaded through the
forests of the Hartz Mountains, pursued by the enemy’s horsemen.
It was hardly necessary for the Emperor to make him promise as
the price of peace to keep out of German affairs thenceforth. His
allies had left him to fight it out alone. All their fine speeches
went for nothing when it came to the test, and King Christian rode
back to Denmark, a sadder and wiser man. It was left to Gustav
Adolf, after all, to teach the German generals the lesson they
needed.

In the years of peace before that unhappy war, Danish trade and
Danish culture had blossomed exceedingly, thanks to the wisdom,
the clever management, and untiring industry of the King. He
built factories, cloth-mills, silk-mills, paper-mills, dammed the
North Sea out from the rich marshlands with great dikes, taught
the farmers profitable ways of tilling their fields; for he was a
wondrous manager for whom nothing was too little and nothing too
big. He kept minute account of his children’s socks and little
shirts, and found ways of providing money for his war-ships and
for countless building schemes he had in hand both in Denmark and
Norway. For many of them he himself drew the plans. Wherever one
goes to this day, his monogram, which heads this story, stares
at him from the splendid buildings he erected. The Bourse in
Copenhagen and the Round Tower, the beautiful palace of Rosenborg,
a sort of miniature of his beloved Frederiksborg which also he
rebuilt on a more magnificent scale—these are among his works
which every traveller in the North knows. He built more cities
and strongholds than those who went before or came after him for
centuries. Christiania and Christiansand in Norway bear his name.
He laid out a whole quarter of Copenhagen for his sailors, and
the quaint little houses still serve that purpose. Regentsen, a
dormitory for poor students at the university, was built by him.
He created seven new chairs of learning and saw to it that all
the professors got better pay. He ferreted out and dismissed in
disgrace all the grafting officials in Norway, and administered
justice with an even hand. At the same time he burned witches
without end, or let it be done for their souls’ sake. That was
the way of his time; and when he needed fireworks for his son’s
wedding (he made them himself, too), he sent around to all the old
cloisters and cathedral churches for the old parchments they had.
Heaven only knows what treasures that can never be replaced went up
in fire and smoke for that one night’s fun.

King Christian founded a score of big trading companies to
exploit the East, taking care that their ships should have their
bulwarks pierced for at least six guns, so that they might serve
as war-ships in time of need. He sent one expedition after another
to the waters of Greenland in search of the Northwest Passage.
It was on the fourth of these, in 1619, that Jens Munk with two
ships and sixty-four sailors was caught in the ice of Hudson Bay
and compelled to winter there. One after another the crew died of
hunger and scurvy. When Jens Munk himself crept o

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