Hans Egede, a Norwegian Lutheran pastor who sailed to Greenland in 1721 to find lost Norse Christian settlers, only to discover they had vanished and instead encountered the Inuit (Kalaallit) people... . . . A Norwegian pastor sailed for Greenland to find a Christian people that Europe had lost track of three centuries before. The last written word of the Norse Greenlanders was a wedding at Hvalsey Church in September 1408, recorded in letters from a priest and several Icelanders. After that the settlements fell silent. Hans Egede, a young pastor in northern Norway, was sure their descendants were still out there, either holding to the old Catholic faith or lost to Christianity altogether, and from 1711 he petitioned for royal permission to go find them. He was thirty-five when the king finally agreed. His wife, Gertrud Rask, was thirteen years older than he was, and she went with him. The ship Haabet, meaning The Hope, left Bergen on May 2, 1721, with two smaller vessels carrying the couple, their four children and about forty colonists. They landed on July 3 and built their station on an island at the mouth of a long fjord, which Egede named the Island of Hope. For months he searched for the Norse. He found only the Kalaallit, the Inuit people of that coast. So he set out to learn their language, and a story is told that his first try at the Lord's Prayer turned daily bread into a word meaning how delicious. Then winter came, and scurvy spread through the colony. Most of the colonists went home at the first chance. Egede stayed, with his family and a few others. In 1728 a royal expedition moved the colony to the mainland and built a fort called Godthåb, which grew into Nuuk, the capital of Greenland today. The king had backed the mission partly to reassert an old colonial claim, and it became the foundation of Danish rule over the island. In 1733 a returning ship brought smallpox, and the next year the epidemic spread through the Inuit communities near the colony. Gertrud Egede died of it in 1735. In 1736 Egede took her body back to Denmark for burial and left their son Poul in charge of the mission. He never found a single descendant of the Norse settlers he had come to save. His statue still stands in Nuuk, and in 2020 it was vandalized. #archaeohistories