Books from Birlinn and Polygon

True North

Travels in Arctic Europe

By Gavin Francis

Extract from ‘Greenland: The Wild West’

The attempt to settle the New World lasted less than three years. It would be another five centuries before European culture would return to overwhelm it with gunpowder and disease. For Europe, throughout that time, the furthest settled land across the ocean would be Greenland, and the furthest outpost the Western Settlement.

In a late-night bar themed like a cowboy saloon I met a modern-day emigrant of the Western Settlement. He wore a casual leather jacket, a heavy gold chain, and the canthic folds of his eyes gave him an expression of perpetual merriment. His hair was styled to perfection and gleamed like a raven’s plumage. He told me he had once been a hairdresser. He had also been a policeman in Denmark. His name was Aqaluq, and now he had landed a high-ranking job in Nuuk he had come back to Greenland to stay.

It was after midnight. Outside, on the main street of the town, children played football in the dusky light.

‘I was ready to come back,’ he said, his eyes glinting in the half-light. ‘Denmark is a good country but Greenland is my home.’

His friend returned from the bar carrying three bottles of Danish lager. He too had lived overseas for many years, working the cod and shrimp ships that ploughed the heavy seas of the North Atlantic. Together we took a mental stroll around the harbours of Lerwick, Oslo and Leith.

A young man staggered to our table and sat down. His eyes were slow and heavy, and he was very drunk. After looking at each of us he turned towards me, obviously the foreigner, and said in slurred English:

‘You like Greenland?’

‘Yes, very much.’

‘It is a great country. It is wonderful. Beautiful. And we are GREENLANDIC!’ he said, with pride. I nodded.

‘NOT Eskimos!’ he added.

‘I wouldn’t dream of calling you that,’ I said.

‘But some people do,’ he replied. He steadied himself by gripping the table with both hands. ‘I have worked in Europe and in America, and people there have called me that.’

‘Well I can tell you that to me you will always be a Greenlander,’ I said.

‘You can say “Inuit”, I’ll allow you! It is better than Eskimo, but still wrong.’ He staggered to balance himself. ‘There are Canadian Inuit too. THIS is MY country!’

Emotion overwhelmed him. He lurched away from the table. Aqaluq smiled apologetically. Across the dance-floor a fight broke out. Two men took a couple of swings at one another before being bundled out of a hidden exit onto the street by two bouncers that I had not noticed. They lay on the pavement outside, blinking in the midnight sunlight. It did feel like the Wild West.

Within fifty years of the settlement’s foundation the new land was the talk of all northern Europe, not for its riches, but its dangers. The Meregarto, an Old German poem from the middle of the eleventh century, describes the horrors of the journey west through the ice:

There is a clotted sea in the western ocean

When the strong wind drives ships upon that course,

Then the skilled seamen have no defence against it,

But they must go into the very bosom of the sea.

Alas! Alas!

They never come out again

If God will not deliver them, they must rot there.

The Archbishopric of Trondheim had not yet been established, and the country was thought of as lying within the Archbishopric of Hamburg. For at least the first century of the settlement the Greenlanders did not care who their Archbishop was; if they were Christian at that early stage it was only with the thinnest veneer. The pagan traditions were still built into the foundations of the Norse world, and if they were rooted in Iceland, then they were rooted even more firmly in this frontier country settled by the defiantly pagan Eirik the Red. When Adam of Bremen wrote his ‘History of the Archbishopric of Hamburg’ in 1070 he did not know much about this new country in the west which was supposedly under the aegis of Hamburg, but he knew that it was a wild and dangerous land. Concerning it he wrote, ‘The people there are blue-green from the salt water; and from this the region takes its name. They live in a similar fashion to the Icelanders, except that they are more cruel and trouble seafarers by predatory attacks. To them also, as is reported, Christianity has lately been wafted.’

Greenland of the eleventh and twelfth century was the Wild West of Europe. To the youth of the day it was a fabled land filled with wonder and sorcery where men could win great wealth in the hunting fields of the north, but both getting there and living there involved significant risks. A few scattered descriptions of trading voyages of the era have survived, and they always depict it as a lawless place for those in search of adventure, a place in which young men could prove themselves and win renown. In Ólafs Saga Helga the hero Thorarin is told that if he has not yet been to Greenland, then it is high time that a traveller like him made his way there. In the saga of Ref the Sly the hero is hounded out of Iceland but builds himself a fortress deep in the fjords of northern Greenland where he lives protected by his skills in the black arts (and his residence in Greenland is all the more appropriate for that). One of the more reliable references concerns a simple trading mission.

In ‘The Tale of Audun from the Westfjords’ an Icelander sells everything he owns in order to sail to the Western Settlement and buy a polar bear cub. From other sources we know that this must have been a common enough thing to do (Iceland already had specific laws about the responsibilities of polar bear owners towards any damages their animals caused). Audun planned to give his bear to King Svein Ulfsson of Denmark, but the only ship available took him instead to Norway where Harald Har?rá?a offered to buy it for double what he had paid. The tale is set about 1061, and at the time Harald must have been starting to think of sailing for England. It would not be long before he took an arrow through the throat at the Battle of Stamford Bridge.

Audun refused to give the bear to anyone but King Svein, and Harald graciously allowed him to take it to his enemy, at Roskilde. When King Svein eventually received it he was so impressed with Audun that he rewarded him handsomely, giving him gold, clothes, money and a ship laden with goods worth many times what he had paid for the bear. So the gamble had paid off. Audun returned to Iceland a very wealthy man.

Greenland’s fame grew in the minds of those men who were determined to make their mark.