32 THE SETTLEMENT. 



nous building in the place. A shop and a lodging* 

 house for a few Danish employees stands next in im- 

 portance. Two or three less imposing structures of 

 the pitch and tar description, inhabited by Danes who 

 have married native women ; a few huts of stone and 

 turf, roofed with boards and overgrown with grass ; 

 about an equal number of like description, but with- 

 out the board roof, and a dozen seal-skin tents, all 

 pitched about promiscuously among the rocks, make 

 up the town. There is a blubber-house down by the 

 beach, and a stunted flag-staff on the hill, from which 

 the Danish Flag gracefully waving in the wind, gave 

 the place a show of dignity. The dignity of civiliza- 

 tion was further preserved by an old cannon which 

 lay on the grass under the flag, and whose rusty 

 throat made the welkin ring as our anchor touched 

 the Greenland rocks. 



The settlement, or Cohnien, as the Danes distinguish 

 it, dates back almost to the days of good old Hans 

 Egede, and its name, as nearly as can be interpreted, 

 signifies " Experiment ; " and, after the Greenland 

 fashion, a successful experiment it has been. Its peo- 

 ple live, chiefly, by hunting the seal ; and, of all the 

 northern colonies, few have been as prosperous. The 

 collections of oil and skins during some years are sufii- 

 cient to freight a brig of three hundred tons. 



The place bears ample evidence of the nature of 

 its business. Carcasses of seals and seal's offal lay 

 strewn along the beach, and over the rocks, and 

 among the huts, in every stage of decomposition ; and 

 this, added to every other conceivable accumulation 

 that could exhibit a barbarous contempt for the hu- 

 man nose, made the first few hours of our stay there 

 any thing but comfortable. 



