Smiley tells a haunting and plausible tale, but no one really knows what caused the end of the Norse colonies. Perhaps a sudden calamity—a contagious illness, a severe famine—wiped out the last generations of enfeebled Greenlanders. Their extinction might have been accelerated by the encroaching Inuit population. It is also conceivable that some of the last settlers sailed off to Labrador looking for a new start. But nothing has surfaced so far to reveal the chain of events that snuffed out a community of intrepid settlers that survived on the outer edge of the western world for five centuries. What is certain is that by AD 1500 the last Greenlanders had all but buried one another; nothing remained of the once prosperous colonies but crumbling farmsteads and a couple of old churches.
Smoky Mountain
ZICHMNI’S EXPEDITION reached the southwestern coast of Greenland “at the start of June,” Antonio reported. The fish were plentiful in the coves along the coastline and the sky was full of seabirds. The apprehension the men had felt during their approach was soon replaced by an eagerness to disembark and explore the rolling meadowlands. “The air was sweet and temperate. There was no one in sight and we began to think that this agreeable place was uninhabited. So we named the harbor Trin and the land that went out to sea Cape Trin.”
Trin was most probably shorthand for Trinity, a frequent choice of name among travelers. Holy Trinity, a religious feast established in 1334, occurs between mid-May and mid-June. It so happens that in 1398, the year in which the expedition allegedly took place, it fell on June 2, a date that fits well with Antonio’s statement about arriving in Greenland in early June. Where was Cape Trin? Nicolò the Younger placed it at the bottom tip of Greenland—today’s Cape Farvel. But nothing in the narrative indicates its location and, as far as I know, they could have landed anywhere along the southwest coast.
SHORTLY AFTER landing, Antonio went on to write, “We saw smoke coming out of a mountain in the great distance and this gave us hope that the place was inhabited after all.” Zichmni dispatched one hundred of his soldiers and told them to bring back news about the smoky mountain and the people who might be living in the region. Meanwhile, the rest of the army established a base camp and gathered supplies of water and driftwood. The famished men caught plenty of fish and seabirds in the nearby fjords and found large quantities of eggs on which “they immediately gorged themselves.”
After eight days, the soldiers returned, having reached the mountain and encountered many natives, “short creatures, half savage and fearful, who quickly retreated to their cavernous dwellings as soon as they saw our men.” Thule Inuit were hardly timorous people; on the contrary, they were brave, highly skilled fishermen and hunters who thought nothing of going out in their kayaks to chase a whale in freezing, turbulent waters. Nor were they encountering Europeans for the first time: they were used to bartering with the Norse settlers in the south. In fact, a retreat in the face of a hundred-strong detachment of fierce-looking, well-armed foreign soldiers sounded more like an act of prudence than one of cowardice. But it was a common enough view among geographers and cartographers of the sixteenth century that the skrælings in Greenland were a small and fearful people; or, as Bordone put it in his Isolario, “pusillanimous dwarfs no more than a cubit high.” Thus Nicolò the Younger may well have tinkered with Antonio’s description of the natives to make it fit with the contemporary image of the native Greenlanders. Indeed he may have made up the entire reference to the skrælings in order to make the narrative more credible. Sources of inspiration on that topic were certainly not lacking in Venice. In his Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus, the book of reference for the North Atlantic in Renaissance Europe, the Swedish prelate Olaus Magnus devoted an entire chapter to “pygmies” in Greenland (“De pygmaeis Gruntlandie”). In 1554, only four years before Nicolò the Younger came out with the Zen narrative, Gerard Mercator, the great Flemish cartographer, published his influential map of Europe. Across southern Greenland was the following inscription: “Hic habitant Pigmei vel Screlingen dicti”; “Here live pygmies, also known as skrælings.” In order to write about Greenland in an informed, up-to-date manner, Nicolò the Younger would have had to mention a description of the “pygmies” living there; even if Antonio had said nothing about them, he probably would have felt entitled to illuminate the reader by adding a few sentences himself on the matter.
More intriguing than the description of the pygmies, in my view, was the explanation the soldiers gave for the smoke billowing out of the mountain. “Inside was a great fire,” Antonio reported, “an incandescent fountain as it were, from which a dark, gurgling pitch-like substance oozed out of the mountainside and streamed down toward the sea.” The words were precise and carefully chosen. They were the result of on-the-ground observation, and they made it plain that what the soldiers were confronted with was not some sort of volcanic activity, as the reader might have been inclined to believe, but some other natural phenomenon. Indeed there are no volcanoes in Greenland—active or extinct. So what exactly did Zichmni’s men find on their reconnaissance mission?
The mystery of the smoky mountain baffled experts2 until the 1970s, when the director of the Geological Survey of Greenland, Knud Ellitsgaard-Rasmussen, came up with a possible explanation. Just north of Disko Bay, on the western coast of Greenland, there is a one-hundred-mile-long peninsula called Nugssuaq that stretches out into Baffin Bay in a southeast-northwest direction. Midway along the southern coast of the peninsula Ellitsgaard-Rasmussen located an area that the Inuit called Pujortoq—the smoky mountain.
Unlike the rest of Greenland, which is mostly made up of solid black basalt that is billions of years old, the Nugssuaq peninsula was formed by cretaceous and tertiary sediments only millions of years ago. The ground is still geologically young and unsettled. Just beneath the surface are layer upon layer of self-igniting bituminous shale. As some of the mountains along the fjord are very steep, the layers of shale continually slide and chafe against one another, generating intense heat and smoke.
Nuuk
I WENT TO GREENLAND hoping to find Pujortoq. In Copenhagen, I took the daily Air Greenland flight to Kangerlussuaq, a converted World War II U.S. Air Force base once known as Bluie West 8. A prop plane then flew me to the capital, Nuuk (population 15,000), a small town on the western coast with a big industrial harbor linked to the fish-processing plants and crowded with open-jawed Royal Arctic cargo ships.
Nuuk’s main street threads its way between round slabs of granite on which small wood-framed houses are perched precariously. I passed by a pizza parlor, a Chinese restaurant, a couple of clothes shops, a bank and a hotel. The largest building was the post office. The fishmonger’s shack was on the way out of town. Three wrinkled-faced Inuit women in fisherman’s boots, each with a cigarette dangling from her toothless mouth, hovered over the daily catch: a half dozen decapitated seals lying one next to the other like human corpses laid out after battle.
Beyond the town center were rows of spray-painted concrete tenement houses with broken doors and smashed windows. The tourist office found me a room with an elderly widow of mixed blood. She worked at the fisheries and spent the evenings at home sewing colorful Inuit ceremonial clothes for her granddaughters.
AFTER THE Norse colonies died out around 1500, Europeans ceased to come to Greenland, and for more than two centuries the Inuit had the place to themselves. The Danish kingdom, meanwhile, inherited the old Norse realm. In the eighteenth century, the Danes returned to Greenland to develop a whaling and fishing industry, and from 1721 onward they governed the island harshly.
After World War II a slow process of emancipation began. Greenland became part of the Danish Commonwealth in 1953 and home rule was granted in 1979. My brief stay in Nuuk coincided with a referendum on the issue of self-government, the next step in Greenland’s slow move to independence from Denmark. The population today is made up of some 58,000 Greenlanders, most of Thule or mixed extraction, like my landlady, and only 6,000 Danes. Still, Greenlanders
I spoke to told me they were hesitant about moving to full sovereignty. They liked the idea in principle and hoped their vast deposits of natural resources would bring them wealth. But they also feared the consequences of going their own way—chief among them the loss of Denmark’s 3.4 billion kroner yearly subsidy.
“Many of us are nervous about losing all that money,” Inga Dora Markussen, the young editor-in-chief of Atuagagdliutit, Greenland’s daily paper (circulation 2,800), conceded in her light-filled office above the post office. “I doubt that drilling and mining Greenland’s resources will lift Greenlanders out of chronic unemployment. The population is very sparse and scattered along the coast. The workforce has very little mobility—Greenlanders don’t like to leave their family or their village. We would simply be invaded by foreign workers.” Half Greenlandic and half Danish, Inga Dora said that, like most Greenlanders, she favored a cautious “no rush, no risk” approach to full emancipation. “We will become independent at our own pace, whenever we are ready.”3
According to Daniel Thorleifsen, the burly, soft-spoken director of the Greenland National Museum, the threat to the national heritage was a more pressing issue than independence. “We are the last products of the Thule culture and we still have a lot of archaeological work ahead of us if we want to understand the history of our people,” he explained to me when I visited the museum—a little red cottage in the old colonial harbor that the Danes built in the eighteenth century, when Nuuk was still known as Godthåb. Thorleifsen said the archaeological program was actually benefiting from rapid climate change because important Thule sites were becoming more accessible than in the past. But global warming was also making Greenland more attractive to large multinational oil and mining companies that were muscling their way into the country. “We are engaged in a race against time,” he warned. “And my concern is that we shall not be able to salvage the archaeological treasures that have yet to be mapped.”
I mentioned to Thorleifsen my own rather more improbable archaeological quest. He graciously conceded that he had never heard of the Zen voyages and directed me to Hans Lange, an archaeologist whose office was down the hall. Lange, a Greenlander from Ilulissat, in Disko Bay, knew nothing about the Zen brothers either. But he perked up when I told him I was looking for a place called Pujortoq. “Ah, the smoky mountain on Nugssuaq,” he said. “I have never seen it myself but I have heard about it.” Lange suggested I travel north to Ilulissat, an old whaling station formerly known as Jakobshavn, and then take the weekly post boat up to the Saqqaq settlement on Nugssuaq. “There you might find someone who can help you.”
To Pujortoq
THERE IS NO SCENIC Route 1 up the breathtaking coast of western Greenland. To reach the Disko Bay area from Nuuk one must either take the slow-going post boat or fly back to Bluie West 8 in Kangerlussuaq and wait for the next prop to Ilulissat. The Greenlandic winter was already in the air, time was running out and I had no choice but to fly. As I boarded the plane to Kangerlussuaq I recognized the pilot who had flown me into Nuuk a few days before. “Jens Larsen,” he said, shaking my hand. He was a friendly, jovial man, with a broad smile and just a hint of a swagger. He had come out from Copenhagen twenty years before to fly helicopters. “I’m still here,” he said, laughing.
Ilulissat turned out to be a small frontier town at the end of the Kangia Glacier. The view looking out to Disko Bay was breathtaking. Icebergs floated placidly in the silver-grey sea like sculptures in a water garden. Disko Island rose clearly to the west. The Nugssuaq Peninsula lay a hundred miles to the north and on a good day its outline was visible to the naked eye. The town of Ilulissat was formed by a collection of small bright red, blue, yellow and green houses built on hard, lichen-covered basalt. I found a room in the back of a saloon-type establishment at the main crossroads, with a melancholy view of a muddy back alley; I unpacked my few things and went for a walk. It was not long before I heard a booming voice coming out of a curio and travel shop. A man was yelling in Greenlandic, but the accent was distinctly Italian. I stepped in and peered into the back office. The voice belonged to a short, barrel-chested man with a thick black mustache; he was tapping furiously on his computer keyboard and shouting cooking instructions into the mike of his headset.
Silverio Scivoli was known to everyone in town as Silver. He had came to Ilulissat thirty years earlier as a pianola player touring Inuit country and had fallen in love with Marie, a native girl. He stayed on, they had four children, and he never went back to Italy—where he still had a wife and two sons.
Silver showed me a bag full of frozen caribou steak and chunks of arctic hare. “I never liked hunting in Italy,” he said, “but in Greenland I love going out into the wild with a gun.” As he spoke, it occurred to me that no matter how far one travels the odds are one will bump into an Italian, and he will be planning a meal.
Silver informed me I had just missed the weekly post boat that serviced the Disko Bay region. “Come back tomorrow,” he said. “I will find someone who will take you to Nugssuaq Peninsula.”
To my disappointment, he did not ask me to dinner.
Instead, I had coffee and a ham sandwich with Jens Larsen, the pilot. He and his family lived down in Nuuk but he still owned a small house by the water down at the old harbor of Ilulissat; he had purchased it back in the eighties, when he had come out as a very young pilot to fly Air Greenland’s Sikorskys to his heart’s content. “After work, when the weather was good, I would grab my fishing rod and fly my chopper to some beautiful, wild spot, fish some trout, make a fire and spend the night under the stars and be back for work early next morning.” Air Greenland no longer ran chopper flights up and down the coast and Larsen was stuck with prop planes on the Nuuk-Kangerlussuaq-Ilulissat route. But each summer he took his family on a flying trip to Europe in a refitted World War II bomber plane he kept in a hangar in Germany. “I pack the wife and kids and we take off on a random journey,” he said with a laugh. “The plane is heavy so we fly very low over beautiful countryside and scare the wits out of the cows and the sheep.”
Larsen had just returned from Europe and was happy to be back. “I love it out here,” he said. I asked him what he thought about Greenland’s slow march to independence. “I wish them good luck,” he answered wistfully.
THE NEXT day I packed a light lunch and went for a walk, following a trail out of Ilulissat that went over a hill and then sloped down toward the Kangia ice fjord, to the stone ruins of a three-thousand-year-old Dorset Inuit settlement. The stones were scattered in a natural amphitheater overlooking a bay of staggering beauty where celestial ice formations were on grand parade. Occasionally, the ceremonial silence was broken by the distant drone of a fishing boat or the startling crack of an iceberg.
I pulled out a tuna sandwich and a cool Greenlandic beer from my rucksack and settled down for a pleasant lunch among the Dorset ruins. The sun came out and the icebergs glittered in the bay. I could hear the gentle lapping of the sea on the pebble beach below so I walked down to the clear water and ran my fingers through it. I quickly took my clothes off and splashed about, gasping for air at the cold.
On the way back to town the fields were covered with gentians, angelica, wild rhododendron and beautiful arctic poppies. There were patches of sweet, succulent blueberries everywhere, and each time I knelt down to pick a handful I smelled the juniper and thyme that grew around the basalt outcroppings. It occurred to me they would have made good seasoning for Silver’s roast.
I heard the sound of children at play coming from the next valley, and when I reached the top of the hill I saw them scurrying about in their red and blue and yellow jackets. Their teacher had brought them out for the afternoon to pick berries for Christmas cakes and gather moss for the crèche. I pointed out that it was only mid-September. “Soon there will be snow on the ground and ice and it will be too late,” the teacher said. “We must think ahead.”
On the way home, I counted more than a hundred winter shacks spread out in the drab ou
tskirts of Ilulissat. Peeling sleds rested on the roofs; rows of cod hung from fish racks like dirty linen left out to dry. Around each shack, ten to twelve sad-looking sled dogs lay chained in the dust, longing for the first snowfall. There must have been at least a thousand dogs lying around, but I was not immediately aware of their number because they faded into the grey landscape. One pack of hounds got up and shook off their late-summer torpor, letting out a plaintive wail just as I passed by. Soon all the sled dogs in the valley joined in until the howl was so deafening I felt I had to quicken my pace.
“THIS MAN will take you north to Nugssuaq,” Silver said in his baritone voice when I checked into his shop. Christian was another Greenlander of mixed heritage—a Danish father and an Inuit mother from the village of Saqqaq, on the Nugssuaq Peninsula, where he still had a few relatives. He was a quiet man, unusually tall and broad for a Greenlander. His no-nonsense manner inspired confidence. We arranged to meet the next morning at the harbor.
The following day it was raining and the fog was low and I feared we would have to cancel our plans. But Christian, as promised, was down at the harbor filling up two extra tanks of gasoline for the hundred-mile journey up the coast to Nugssuaq. His boat was impressive: a Glastron Bowrider with a 300 horsepower Mercury outboard engine, which he had picked up in Nuuk and driven solo up the jagged coast of western Greenland. He threw me some extra-warm clothes, a wool hat and ear protection and I bundled up. Despite the rain, the sea was calm and the icebergs perfectly still. Ice floes were scattered as far as the eye could see. Christian zigzagged between them with great assurance.
Irresistible North Page 14
