Hans Poulsen Egede (31 January 1686 – 5 November 1758) was a Norwegian Lutheran priest and missionary who launched mission efforts to Greenland, which led him to be styled the Apostle of Greenland. He established a successful mission among the Inuit and is credited with revitalizing Danish-Norwegian interest in the island after contact had been broken for about 300 years. He founded Greenland's capital Godthåb, now known as Nuuk.
Background Hans Egede was born into the home of a Danish-born civil servant, the priest son Povel Hansen Egede, and the Norwegian-born Kirsten Jensdatter Hind, daughter of a local merchant, in Harstad, Norway, nearly 150 miles (240 km) north of the Arctic Circle. His paternal grandfather had been a vicar in Vester Egede on southern Zealand, Denmark. Egede was schooled by an uncle, a clergyman in a local Lutheran Church. In 1704 he travelled to Copenhagen to enter the University of Copenhagen, where he earned a bachelor's degree in theology. He returned to Hinnøya Island after graduation, and on 15 April 1707 he was ordained and assigned to a parish on the equally remote archipelago of Lofoten. Also in 1707, he married Gertrud Rasch (or Rask). At the time he was about 21, while Rasch was 13 years his senior at 34. Four children were born to the marriage – two boys and two girls.
Greenland At Lofoten, Egede heard stories about the old Norse settlements on Greenland, with which contact had been lost centuries before. Beginning in 1711, he sought permission from Frederick IV of Denmark–Norway to search for the colony and establish a mission there, presuming that it had either remained Catholic after the Danish–Norwegian Reformation or been lost to the Christian faith altogether. Frederick gave consent at least partially to re-establish a colonial claim to the island. Egede established the Bergen Greenland Company (Det Bergen Grønlandske Compagnie) with $9,000 in capital from Bergen merchants, $200 from Frederick IV of Denmark, and a $300 annual grant from the Royal Mission College. The company was granted broad powers to govern Greenland, which was then believed to be a peninsula. It could raise its own army and navy, collect taxes, and administer justice. The king and his council, however, refused to grant the company monopoly rights to whaling and trade in Greenland, fearing this would antagonize the Dutch.
Haabet ("The Hope") and two smaller ships departed Bergen on 2 May 1721 bearing Egede, his wife and four children, and forty other colonists. On 3 July they reached Nuup Kangerlua and established Hope Colony (Haabets Colonie) with the erection of a portable house on Kangeq Island, which Egede christened the Island of Hope (Haabets Ø). Searching for months for descendants of the old Norse colonists, he found only the local Kalaallit people and began studying their language.
By the end of the first winter, many of the colonists had been stricken with scurvy and most returned home as soon as they could. Egede and his family remained with a few others and in 1722 welcomed two supply ships the king had funded with the imposition of a new tax. His explorations, now carried out by ship, found no Norse survivors along Greenland's western shore. Like many Europeans of his time, however, Egede was guided by two mistaken assumptions. One was that the lost Eastern Settlement lay on Greenland's east coast, though it was later shown to have been located among the fjords of the island's far southwest. The other was the belief that a strait connected the eastern and western sides of the island. In fact, his 1723 expedition found the churches and ruins of the Eastern Settlement, but he considered them to be those of the Western. At the end of the year, he turned north and helped establish a whaling station on Nipisat Island. In 1724 he baptized his first child converts, two of whom would travel to Denmark and there inspire Count Zinzendorf to begin the Moravian missions. In 1728, a royal expedition under Major Claus Paarss arrived with four supply ships and moved the Kangeq colony to the mainland opposite, establishing a fort named Godt-Haab ("Good Hope"), the future Godthåb. The extra supplies also allowed Egede to build a proper chapel within the main house. More scurvy led to forty deaths and abandonment of the site not only by the Danes but by the Inuit as well. Egede's book The Old Greenland's New Perlustration (Norwegian: Det gamle Grønlands nye Perlustration) appeared in 1729 and was translated into several languages, but King Frederick had lost patience and recalled Paarss's military garrison from Greenland the next year. Egede, encouraged by his wife Gertrud, remained with his family and ten sailors. A supply ship in 1733 brought three missionaries and news that the king had granted 2,000 rixdollars a year to establish a new company for the colony under Jacob Severin. The Moravians, led by Christian David, established a station at Neu-Herrnhut. It later became the nucleus of modern Nuuk, Greenland's capital, and the Moravians went on to establish a string of missions along the island's west coast. The ship also returned one of Egede's convert children with a case of smallpox. By the next year, the epidemic was raging among the Inuit and in 1735 it claimed Gertrud Egede. Egede carried her body back to Denmark for burial the next year, leaving his son Poul to carry on his work. In Copenhagen, he was named Superintendent of the Greenland Mission Seminary (Seminarium Groenlandicum) and in 1741 the Lutheran Bishop of Greenland. He died on 5 November 1758 at the age of 72 in Stubbekøbing at Falster, Denmark.
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