t it advisable to go to
Copenhagen and personally present his memorial to the College of
Missions. He did so, and received the encouraging answer that the King
would "consider his matter."

Kings have a wonderful capacity for taking time to "consider matters"--
sometimes to the extent of passing out of time altogether, and leaving
the consideration to successors. But the King on this occasion was true
to his word. He gave Egede a private audience, and in 1719 sent orders
to the magistrates of Bergen to collect all the opinions and information
that could be gathered in regard to the trade with Greenland and the
propriety of establishing a colony there, with a statement of the
privileges that might be desired by adventurers wishing to settle in the
new land. But, alas! no adventurers wished to settle there; the royal
efforts failed, and poor Egede was left to fall back on his own
exertions and private enterprise.

For another year this indefatigable man vainly importuned the King and
the College of Missions. At last he prevailed on a number of
sympathisers to hold a conference. These, under his persuasive powers,
subscribed forty pounds a-piece towards a mission fund. Egede set a
good example by giving sixty pounds. Then, by begging from the bishop
and people of Bergen, he raised the fund to about two thousand pounds.
With this sum he bought a ship, and called it the _Hope_. Two other
vessels were chartered and freighted--one for the whale fishery, the
other to take home news of the colony. The King, although unable to
start the enterprise, appointed Egede missionary to the colony with a
salary of sixty pounds a year, besides a present of a hundred pounds for
immediate expenses, and finally, on the 12th May 1721, the indomitable
Hans, with his heroic wife and four children, set sail for "Greenland's
icy mountains," after an unprecedented ten years' conflict.

Dangers and partial disasters greeted them on their arrival, in July, at
Baal's River, latitude 64 degrees, where they established the colony of
Godhaab.

It would require a volume to tell of Hans Egede's difficulties, doings,
and sufferings in the new land. Suffice it to say that they were
_tremendous_, and that he acted as the pioneer to the interesting
missions of the Moravian Brethren to the same neighbourhood.

Hans Egede had been several years at his post when the meeting already
described took place between him and the northern Eskimos.