An Account of the Greenland Mission

May 1721. A Norwegian pastor sails from Bergen on a ship named Hope, with his wife and four children, to seek out at the end of the world Christians who vanished centuries ago.

Since 1708, in his parish of Vågan, in the Lofoten Islands, Hans Egede has thought of nothing else: the descendants of the Norse settlers of Greenland, whom he believes have fallen back into paganism. It takes him ten years of stubborn effort, against the wishes of his family and the indifference of the merchants, to obtain the order of King Frederick IV. On 3 July, after the pack ice and the storm, he makes landfall at 64 degrees north.

He finds no Norsemen, only ruins. He finds a people who watch him with suspicion, a language that must be learned word by word, angekoks who contend with him for souls, winters of hunger and ships awaited for weeks while he scans the horizon. Day after day, for fifteen years, he writes everything down: the fjords explored, the children taken in, the king's fleet, the soldiers' plot, the order to abandon the colony that he refuses to obey, then the smallpox from Copenhagen that empties the islands.

This journal of a man alone in the face of an immense land is the founding record of the town known today as Nuuk. It is also a rare and unvarnished testimony of an encounter that changed Greenland forever. At what cost?