Professor Hardwigg and Hans

Professor Hardwigg and Hans are bound by an expeditionary relationship that begins as paid service and ends in mutual attachment. Hans keeps to his work through danger and deprivation, while the Professor relies on his guide’s steadiness; their final farewells reveal a debt that wages cannot settle and a friendship that survives separation.

Service and Mutual Dependence

Hans undertakes to serve the Professor for a stated weekly wage, and the terms remain strikingly simple even as the journey becomes extraordinary. The narrator observes that Hans does not complain about what befalls either his employer or himself, provided his pay arrives. His loyalty is therefore not presented as a formal vow or an explicit declaration of affection: it is made visible through continuing to do the work for which he was hired, whatever the expedition demands.

That arrangement is tested by hunger. When the explorers eat, the Professor eats mechanically, and the narrator can scarcely take pleasure in food despite his appetite. Hans, by contrast, swallows his portion as though it were an ordinary meal. The narrator does not claim that Hans is untouched by starvation; he judges that the guide is probably no more accustomed to it than the others. Rather, Hans’s hardy Icelandic nature has prepared him to endure suffering, and his composure makes him appear ready for either plenty or want. The contrast distinguishes the Professor’s distracted distress from the guide’s practical endurance without implying that Hans feels nothing.

Hans’s wages give that endurance a concrete measure: three rix-dollars every Saturday night. The detail keeps the relationship anchored in an agreed exchange even at moments when the explorers’ lives depend on him. His reliability is not described as disinterested self-sacrifice; it is a durable professional commitment, maintained through hardship so long as the bargain is honored. The Professor’s dependence on that commitment becomes all the more evident in the story’s eventual farewell.

Different Ways of Meeting the Unknown

The two men’s relationship also takes shape against the Professor’s confidence in his own scientific judgments. When the narrator argues that established teaching makes a journey toward the Earth’s interior impossible, the Professor replies that he cares nothing for theories. Later, discussing the danger of an eruption, he explains that the activity of vapor vents and the atmospheric conditions indicate whether an eruption is imminent, and insists that his scientific conclusion should be obeyed. These exchanges show the authority with which he speaks, but they do not establish that Hans shares his views or participates in the argument.

The expedition repeatedly puts the Professor’s explanations alongside observations that unsettle them. The narrator points to fossil traces on the walls and picks up a shell he identifies as evidence of ancient life; the Professor remains calm, identifying it as a trilobite shell. When the narrator invokes the scientific limit on the thickness of the Earth’s crust, the Professor does not dispute the stated limit, and the narrator later asks to draw a rigorous conclusion from the Professor’s calculations. These disputes belong to the Professor’s exchanges with the narrator, not to a recorded debate between Professor Hardwigg and Hans. Their relevance to the relationship is contextual: Hans serves within an expedition where confidence, observation, and uncertainty are repeatedly tested, and where his practical steadiness contrasts with the narrator’s and Professor’s preoccupation with explanation.

Wages, Gratitude, and Departure

After the return, the expedition’s practical contract reaches its final accounting. At the fort of San Vicenza, Hans demands the wages due for his thirteenth week of service. The Professor pays him and gives him many warm handshakes. The moment is both ordinary and charged: Hans asks for the compensation specified by the arrangement, while the Professor’s repeated handshakes express a gratitude far larger than the transaction itself.

The narrator makes clear that the Professor and his companions feel deeply attached to the Icelandic guide. Yet Hans will not allow them to pay the deeper debt they feel they owe him. Despite whatever the Professor says to the contrary, Hans leaves Hamburg, drawn by nostalgia and love for his Icelandic home. His departure is not a quarrel or a collapse of the relationship; it is a return to the place he longs for, even as it disappoints those who want to reward him and keep him near.

Hans’s farewell is compressed into one word, “Farval,” before he sets out for Reykjavik, which he reaches safely. The brevity of the leave-taking suits the restraint that has marked his conduct throughout: the narrative gives no elaborate declaration of feeling, but emphasizes the explorers’ attachment and their hope of seeing him again. The Professor’s payment, handshakes, and inability to hold Hans back together turn a wage-based service into a lasting bond, while leaving the guide’s Icelandic home—not the Professor’s gratitude—as the force that determines his return.