Greenland: History

Pre-20th-Century History

Greenland's history would read something like this: 'Nothing much happened, nothing much happened, nothing much happened. A couple of blokes arrived but left pretty much straight away. Several decades went past - nothing much happened - and then another bloke with red hair arrived and stayed a bit longer but then after that, for about four centuries, things got really quiet and nothing much happened.' As an historical entity Greenland lacks the Grand Narratives: it's light on when it comes to all-out bloody wars, pukka colonels with muttonchop whiskers, tinpot dictators, throne-wrestling and other Shakespearian dramas. This can be put down to two things: a minuscule population spread over a vast area, and the effort of surviving under hostile conditions that left precious little time for politicking.

Greenlandic history is a slippery beast, an amalgam of legendary sagas, anecdotal evidence, scientific fact and supposition. Best guesses are that, 5000 years ago, there were two distinct tribes that either melted into each other or sequentially died out, although not much is known about either of them. They were followed by the Saqqaq tribe, who kindly left behind a plethora of artefacts that were subsequently dug up and fussed over by the archaeologists. Scientific data and hypotheses have failed to explain why they also died out.

Time passed...and then a bit more time passed...and then in the 10th century Greenlandic history lumbered to its feet again when the Thule culture arrived on the scene and rapidly spread eastward. This is when, culturally and historically speaking, things really got going. The Thule were relatively sophisticated, responsible for introducing those two Greenland icons, the qajaq (kayak) and the dogsled, and it was probably these two inventions that saved them from going the same way as the hapless tribes before them. The Thule are direct ancestors of the modern-day Greenlandic Inuit.

Greenland did not have sustained contact with Europeans until Eric the Red, the legendary Viking turned up. With a black temper and a dangerous sword he'd already been kicked out of Norway and Iceland and had nowhere else left to run. It was Eric the Red who called the country Greenland as a marketing gimmick to persuade a gang of fellow settlers to follow him voluntarily to his land of exile. Of course the name proved to be more lyrical than factual; most of the time Greenland was anything but. But the trick work and boatloads of Icelanders promptly set about colonising the grassy fringes along the western coast. For a couple of centuries the colonists herded, farmed and hunted while the country slipped back into its usual comatose state. Norway got around to annexing the Greenland in 1261, but it was a futile attempt at control; 130 years later a big chill set in and by the time the country thawed out and the outside world made contact again, the colonists had disappeared, either fully acculturated into, or killed by, the Thule.

Greenland slipped out of mind for another three hundred years until a combination of interest in a passage between Europe and the Far East, the lure of money to be made in whaling and missionary zeal put it back on the map. The conversion rate for the missionaries was fairly high: to the ice-suffering Inuit any religion that punished wrongdoers with heat surely had a lot going for it.

Norway had lost its claim on Greenland in 1605, when Denmark sent an expedition to claim the country in the king's name. Shortly after this it became the focal point for mad dogs, Englishman and Americans, as every explorer worth his salt raced toward the farthest point north. The history books record American overachiever Robert Peary as the first person to reach the North Pole, although his claim remains largely unsubstantiated, and there is enough doubt about the veracity of the trip to suggest that Frederick Cook may have beaten him to it. The Inuit reserve their admiration for a Greenland-born expeditionist by the name of Knud Rasmussen. Not only was he a skilled explorer possessed of enormous stamina and survival skills, he was genuinely attached to the Inuit and their culture.

Modern History

Although Danish sovereignty was established in the 1600s, in 1924 Norway made an ambitious claim for Greenland based on the Icelandic colonists of the second century. The claim was lost and in 1953 the international court ratified Denmark's sovereignty over Greenland. This state of affairs lasted for another 20 years before Greenland agitated for, and received, more autonomy.

While the territory's status was unravelling as fast as an avalanche tobogganing down a mountainside, Greenland unwittingly became a pawn in the Cold War. US bases established in WWII became permanent within the framework of Denmark's membership of NATO, and when the Danes joined the EU, so too did the Greenlanders, even though they'd voted against doing so.

In 1979 the Danish parliament granted Greenland home rule, and in 1985 Greenland pulled out of the EU, a vital move for keeping pesky German, Spanish and British fishing fleets from scooping up the island's greatest asset - fish. Internationally, most of Greenland's political energies have been focused on gaining economic independence from Denmark who for now still pays roughly half of the housekeeping.

Recent History

The coalition government is vigorously pro-independence, but faces the uncomfortable truth that without Danish assistance the country would be effectively bankrupt. But fishing, the biggest money-spinner, is notoriously fickle. So the search is on for new sources of income. Figures weren't widely published, but doubtless budgetary incentives encouraged Greenland to extend the US military's lease on the Thule air base in 2004, despite the very belated admission that the US had somehow 'lost' a hydrogen bomb in nearby fjord. Whoops, cancer, sorry! Meanwhile exploration for valuable minerals and oil continues: a gold mine has opened in the beautiful Kirkespirdalen near Nanortalik but pollution-fearing locals have managed to stop anyone returning to dig uranium from a source at Narsaq. More eccentric money-spinning ideas have included tapping the island's most obvious resource: ice. The heart of its glaciers are centuries old and dateable. One day consumers might pay a premium to chill their cocktails on millennium-old cubes. Or misguided Christian millionaires might pay to baptise their kids in defrosted water that had been preserved from the time of Jesus' life. Well, maybe.

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