The Viking explorer Erik the Red pulled an epic branding stunt in the 9th century when he named Greenland “Grœnland” to entice more Norsemen to its definitely-not-green shores from Iceland. Green it is not: save for a few meager patches of vegetation that struggle to survive along the southern coast in the short summer months.
As our President heads to Europe flexing his imperial ambitions to take Greenland away from the Danes, it’s worth revisiting the island’s history with America and revisiting Sloan Wilson’s great novel, Ice Brothers, about his experiences patrolling the frozen coast during World War II.
Colonialism and American Claims
One thing to note about the prehistoric settlement of the island is that the first settlements (which didn’t survive) were made by people migrating from North America. Also worth noting is that the present population of Inuits migrated east across the Northwest Passage in 1200, after Erik the Red established the first Norse settlements.
Those Viking settlements died out and it wasn’t until the early 1700s that the Danes sent missionaries to Greenland to convert whatever Norse people were living there from their pagan ways to Christianity. Finding no surviving Norse, the missionaries baptised the Inuit, set up some coastal trading stations and other than European whalers working in the Davis Strait, the place moldered until the 19th century when Danish interest intensified.
American made territorial claims on northern Greenland in the late 19th century when the Arctic explorer Robert Peary explored the coast and established for the first time that the landmass did not extend all the way to the North Pole. In 1917 the US conceded its claims to Greenland when it bought the Virgin Islands from Denmark.
World War II
Greenland first gained strategic importance during the Battle of the Atlantic. Henrik Kaufman, Danish minister to the United States, signed a treaty with the USA permitting the building of stations and bases on Greenland. Apparently Kaufman didn’t tell anyone in the Danish government about his concession and he was accused of “high treason” and fired. The Americans built 14 bases on Greenland in WWII, using them to ferry aircraft to Europe and as naval bases to counter the threat of German U-Boats.
The Germans also established weather stations on the east coast to provide them with early forecasts of weather systems moving across the Atlantic in what has been termed the “North Atlantic Weather War.” Sloan Wilson’s 1979 Ice Brothers is a fictional account of Wilson’s experiences with the U.S. Coast Guard and the cat-and-mouse game that took place between the Americans and Germans during the war.
I can’t, and won’t opine on President Trump’s designs on Greenland aside from pointing out the U.S. has enjoyed, for more than a century, a history of territorial claims, military bases, and a record of patrolling and supporting its frozen neighbor to the northeast.
I’ll end with Rockwell Kent’s painting, Early November, North Greenland, 1933
