“Every word found herein is altogether truthful”

One of the things that sets Munk’s expedition apart from others of the time is how much we know about it today thanks to the captain’s handwritten diary. Munk left a detailed record of the journey, the setbacks and the harsh winter spent near the mouth of the Churchill River. His descriptions of the geography they encountered, the mistakes they made and the provisions and clothing they should have had to survive the winter would provide a valuable roadmap for those that followed.

On the day the expedition was to depart, a worship service was held in Christian IV’s newly built church, the Holmens Kirke in Copenhagen, to bless the 63-member crew, Captain Munk and their families. There were some colourful, even odd characters amongst the crew, including chaplain Rasmus Jensen, described as a “sorry figure, unwashed, with a week’s growth of stubble on his chin, running eyes, and a wheezing voice.” The chaplain was on board to care for the crew, but was also likely part of the King’s plan to establish a settlement in newly discovered lands. In one of the perhaps unintended legacies of the Munk expedition, Rasmus Jensen became the first Lutheran pastor to set foot on Canadian soil and the first of any faith to hold a worship service in Western Canada.    

The ships left Copenhagen on May 9, 1619; one year later, Munk and a handful of remaining men were trapped by ice in Hudson Bay, having endured a winter of darkness, hunger and hopelessness.

After leaving Denmark in May, Munk was in position to see the western shore of Davis Strait in early July. However, ice and fog prevented him from approaching land. When the weather cleared, he sailed into Frobisher Bay, thinking it was the Hudson Strait. He followed the shore of the strait between ice and land, and at a place he called ‘Rinsund,’ according to his journal, he anchored and went ashore to talk to the natives and to shoot reindeer. After leaving Rinsund, Munk was caught in the ice for six days before getting to a small cove he called ‘Haresund,’ the modern location of which is not precisely known. By mid-August, he was sailing again towards Hudson Bay. Unfortunately, the English pilots on the ship miscalculated the route, which meant the expedition didn’t get to the ‘Big Sea’ (Hudson Bay) until September of 1619. By that time, the approaching winter made further progress impossible. It was also too late to make a return voyage to Denmark, so Munk and his crew were forced to overwinter in the Unicorn along the frozen shores of the bay. 

Munk’s account of the bay is the first to treat the inland sea as a whole, and his map is the first on which the whole of the bay is depicted. While wintering at what is now the town of Churchill, Man., Munk recorded a number of scientific observations and opinions. He wrote about the migrations of birds and an eclipse of the moon, and described the icebergs he had seen in the straits he had navigated.

But the Danes were totally unprepared for the full, unmitigated fury of an Arctic winter. Their clothes were insufficient for the cold, their food supply ran short, and malnutrition and illness ravaged their bodies. Munk’s diary became a litany of the dead and dying as man after man succumbed to scurvy, trichinosis (from eating tainted meat) and exposure.

By mid-February, only seven men remained healthy enough to fetch wood and water and complete everyday shipboard tasks.  

“When Laurids Bergen, one of the seamen died on 5 February, I sent an urgent message to the surgeon requesting in God’s name that he assist us with whatever medicine or good advice he might have to offer. Because he himself was very ill and weak at the time, I suggested that he might like to tell me what medicine or remedy would be used for the benefit of the crew. And again he replied, as he had earlier, that without the assistance of God he was helpless.” 

Passages such as the one above are interspersed with more hopeful notes about catching ptarmigan and the occasional hare to eat, but even these are tempered by Munk’s dismay that most of the surviving men “could not eat the meat because their mouths were so swollen and inflamed with scurvy.”

On June 4, 1620, believing himself to be the only expedition member still living, Munk, in a weakened, malnourished state and demoralized from the deaths of his crew, wrote something of a last will and testament:

“In as much as I no longer have any hope of living in this world I request for the sake of God if any Christian people should happen to come upon this place that they bury my poor body in the ground, along with the others who may be found here, receiving their reward from God in Heaven. And further that this my journal may be forwarded to my gracious Lord King (every word found herein is altogether truthful) in order that my poor wife and children may obtain some benefit from my great distress and miserable death. Herewith farewell to all the world and my soul into the hands of the Almighty.” 

Imagine Munk’s surprise when, four days later, he opened his eyes, realized he was still alive, ventured outside into the spring sunshine, and found he was not alone. “To my astonishment, I saw two men who were still on shore. I thought they too had died long ago.”

Return to Denmark

As spring finally came to the shores of Hudson Bay, Munk and the two surviving crew members were able to gather berries, hunt and fish. With their strength somewhat restored, they set about readying the Lamprey, a vessel meant to be sailed with a crew of 16, for a return voyage to Denmark with a crew of only three.

After a long 68 days at sea, sailing out of Hudson Bay and into Hudson Strait, east and south through Davis Strait, around the south of Greenland, and back across the North Atlantic, the three men sighted the coast of Norway on September 20, 1620. Munk’s bad luck continued once they landed in Bergen: the local governor, Knud Gyldenstjerne, was an old rival of Munk’s and had Munk thrown in jail after one of his crewmen caused a drunken scene in a parlour. However, rumours that Munk was alive had reached King Christian in Denmark, and the King himself demanded Munk’s release.  On December 20, 1620, Jens Munk was finally home in Denmark.

Munk didn’t exactly receive a hero’s welcome. In his absence his wife had taken a lover and the King initially demanded that Munk return to North America to fetch the Unicorn. The King also wanted Munk to take a group of settlers back to North America with him to establish a Danish colony. However, no potential settlers could be recruited to make the voyage, so the idea was abandoned. Ultimately, despite the unsuccessful search for the Northwest Passage, the tragedy of the expedition, and the failure to launch a second expedition, Christian was impressed enough with Munk to make him a captain in the royal fleet.

In 1625, Denmark entered the Thirty Years’ War, and Munk took part in battles at Fehmarn and at Kieler Förde in March and April 1628. Munk died on June 26, 1628, probably from wounds sustained in battle.  A French scientist, Isaac de la Peyrère, who served as a legate at the French embassy in Copenhagen, told a rather more imaginative story about the explorer’s end: he claimed Munk died from injuries inflicted by King Christian, who attacked him with a stick during a dispute. If true, it is a sad end indeed to the partnership between the ambitious King and the seafarer who almost conquered the Northwest Passage. Munk is buried at St. Nikolai Lutheran Church in Copenhagen.

Munk’s legacy

Nearly 100 years after Munk and his two surviving crewmen left Churchill, British explorer James Knight arrived at the harbour where the ships had been trapped. Knight found the unburied bones of many of the Danish crew, consistent with Munk’s testimony in his diary that by the end of the winter, the surviving expedition members had been too sick and weak to even bury their dead.

In 1964, a couple of cannon balls and a piece of iron were unearthed during an expedition by the writer Thorkild Hansen to the mouth of the Churchill River, which is believed to be where Munk’s Nova Dania (New Denmark) was located. Hansen wrote about the Munk expedition and the discovery of the remains of the Unicorn in the tidal flats of the Churchill River in a book entitled The Way to Hudson Bay: The Life and Times of Jens Munk. The location near Churchill was discovered in part due to old maps and the information in Munk’s diary.