Hans Egede Saabye

Who was Hans Egede Saabye?

Hans Egede Saabye was a Danish priest and a missionary to Greenland.

He was born in July 1746 on the island Strynø in southern Denmark, the son of priest Jørgen Saabye and Petronella Egede. Petronella was one of the daughters of Hans Egede, the apostle of Greenland, whose Bergen Company had begun the Danish settlement there in 1721.

He graduated from Roskilde secondary school in 1764 and got a degree in theology in 1767. He married in April 1770 and in the same year went as a missionary to Claushavn and Christianshåb in Greenland. While there, he became an accomplished botanist. In 1779, he became a parish priest in Vålse on Falster in south-eastern Denmark and in 1811 moved to Udby on Funen, where he died on August 31, 1817.

The diary from his stay in Greenland was published in 1816 and received much attention among ethnographers as well as friends of the mission. It was translated to Swedish, German, Dutch, and English.