Hans And Gertrude Egede Loved Greenlanders For Christ
FOR OVER A THOUSAND YEARS ships have sailed from the important port and trade center of Bergen, Norway. But on this day, 12 May 1721, three ships sailed from the port with an unusual mission in mind. Their goal was to re-establish contact with Norwegian settlers on Greenland, contact broken centuries earlier. Aboard the largest vessel, the Hope, was the man who had inspired this mission. His name was Hans Egede.
Thirteen years earlier, when Egede was the newly-installed Lutheran minister in the town of Vogen, Norway, he heard tales of Greenland that captured his imagination. The last bishop who attempted to reach the island had been forced to turn back because ice blocked the seas. Surely any survivors of the colony would need spiritual teaching. He suggested as much to his bishop and to a leading bishop in Copenhagen. Without his wife Gertrude’s knowledge, he even volunteered to go himself.
No one was interested. His wife and her family were furious. How dare he consider taking her and their children to such a forbidding land! Egede said he would abandon the idea, but God put him under such conviction that he could not. In time and through God’s grace, Gertrude came around to Hans’s way of thinking.
At the time, Denmark still ruled Norway. Egede resigned his pastorate and lobbied for the mission in Copenhagen and Bergen. Eventually, King Frederick IV was convinced to support the project, which was also backed by a Bergen association interested in trade with Greenland. Accompanying Egede were Gertrude and their four children.
The voyage was harrowing, and the ships were nearly crushed in ice on their arrival. Explorations later revealed that the earlier European settlement had perished. Meanwhile, in 1722, Egede founded a little colony on the coast and named it Godthåb. (Renamed Nuuk later, it became capital of the nation.) From this base, Egede explored and preached to the Inuit (Eskimos) but had little success. Egede found the Inuit language difficult and lacking in key spiritual concepts, but attempted to translate the New Testament into it. Harsh and overbearing in temperament, he did not succeed in conveying love to the Eskimos.
That changed in 1733 when a fatal wave of smallpox swept through the island. The Egedes took the dying Greenlanders into their own house and nursed them around the clock. “You have been kinder to us than we have been to one another,” exclaimed one. Gertrude so exhausted herself in the effort that she died a short time later. Egede returned to Denmark in 1736 where he founded a mission school and trained new workers to follow in his steps.
His son Paul, raised among the Inuit and a master of the language, took over the work and completed his father’s Bible translation. Working alongside Moravian missionaries, he witnessed a revival that brought most Greenlanders into the fold of the church. Egede’s vision had been fulfilled.
—Dan Graves
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The Moravians took over and extended the work of the Egede's. The beginning of Moravian missions is told in the drama First Fruits.
First Fruits can be purchased at Vision Video