Sixty Degrees North

by Malachy Tallack

  That picture hangs above my desk as I write. A blanket of shattered ice leads out to the horizon, swollen by a blue-black bruise reflecting the clear water beyond. I return to the image over and over, as if searching for something that I know is there but cannot seem to focus upon. Framed within that photograph is the very thing I came to Greenland to see. It is an image of the north: bright and brittle, terrifying and intensely beautiful. Looking back on it now, the distance between myself and that ice-laden image stretches out and becomes an unimaginable gulf. I have tried to forge a connection, a bridge between, but the picture remains shocking, long after I hung it there.

  The helicopter came to rest on the rough landing strip at Nanortalik, the southernmost of Greenland’s main settlements. The village is decked out in northern Scandinavian uniform, its wooden houses red, yellow, purple, green, even pink – some pastel pale, others vivid as children’s paint. The village is home to around 1,300 people, with a few smaller hamlets scattered through the surrounding fjords. It sits on one of the many islands that pepper this coast, but is no more isolated for that. The hostel where I was to stay was at the other side of town from the heliport, beyond the houses and the main street, at the old harbour with its white wooden church and timber cottages. Most of the buildings around the harbour were occupied by the town museum, but one little red bungalow served as a hostel, in which I was the only guest.

  I threw my bag into the living room, where two bunk beds huddled around a gas fire, and went back outside to sit on the front step. The morning had cleared and warmed a little, though there was a bitter breeze lifting off the sea. The bay in front of the hostel was loosely cluttered with ice, just clear enough for boats to make their way in and out of the harbour. There was a slow shifting of everything, almost discernible as I sat watching, and now and then a booming crack and splash as an iceberg split and collapsed into the water. The view from the doorway was southwestward, out to sea, but took in the hunched bulk of Qaqqarsuasik, the island’s highest point. From the step I could see ravens swoop and wheel around the dark slopes, silhouetted as they rose above the peak, then almost hidden against the blackness of the rock. Their caws, clicks and splutters echoed around the bay, puncturing the silence as they punctured the air with their flight. A flurry of sounds – manic gulps and underwater barks – rained down on me as I sat, listening, watching, until hunger persuaded me to move.

  Shaped like a great arrowhead hurled southward from the Pole, Greenland is the largest island in the world, stretching from Cape Morris Jessup, 83° north of the equator, to Cape Farewell, just south of 60°. From its earliest, uncertain appearances on the map, it has largely been a blank space, an enormous emptiness into which centuries of European fears, myths and misconceptions have been poured. This is a land of concentrated northness, where childhood images of Eskimos and polar bears, ice and isolation, come together. It is a paradoxical place, both intensely alien and deeply familiar. Geographically and culturally it is a meeting point between Europe and the American Arctic, where north and south come awkwardly together. Here, certain tensions and certain conflicts between these two worlds are played out, day to day.

  But this situation is far from new, for it is here that European people first encountered American people more than 1,000 years ago, and it is here that two visions of the Arctic and two very different understandings of place have been tried and savagely tested. The familiar story of Greenland is the European story: the westward advance of the Norsemen at the end of the first millennium AD. With their empire expanding, from Shetland and Orkney south to Britain, Ireland and beyond, and from Faroe north into Iceland, the Vikings were apparently unstoppable. They flourished in these northern lands – lands once considered beyond the habitable edge of the world – and it was not long before they ventured further still, into places that no European had ever gone before.

  But in some ways this story is unlike other colonial histories. For one thing, there is the rather peculiar fact that, in Greenland, the colonisers arrived before the colonised; the Norse reached this island prior to the arrival of the Inuit. When Eirik the Red first landed in Greenland in 982AD, somewhere not far from present day Nanortalik, Greenland was populated by an entirely different people, the Dorset – part of a wider northern culture, known as the Tuniit, which is now extinct – but their small population was restricted to the far northwestern coast. This might have come as a surprise to Eirik, had he known, for although the Icelander met no-one as he explored the western fjords, he did find evidence of people. It was clear that he was not the first man to reach this place. Old settlements were still visible, the remains of hearths and homes still apparent. But no fires had been lit along this coast for more than 1,000 years. The people that had been here – the Saqqaq, from 2400 BC, and the early-Dorset, from 900 BC – had long since died out or retreated northwards.

  By calling this place Greenland – ‘for he said that people would be much more tempted to go there if it had an attractive name’, as the Grænlendinga Saga has it – Eirik the Red succeeded in convincing enough of his fellow Icelanders to follow him to the new land to found two major settlements. The larger of these, known as the Eastern Settlement, was based on this southwestern coast; the other was further north, where Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, now lies.

  Initially, the Norse lived much as they had in Iceland and elsewhere, as farmers. Their options were limited somewhat by the shortage of suitable ground for crops, but the climate was good and the colony succeeded, with large numbers of goats, sheep and cattle reared at the wealthiest farms in the south. The Norse hunted too, making use of the plentiful seals to supplement their diet. Soon, a trade in northern goods – walrus ivory, furs, polar bears, and narwhal or ‘unicorn’ horns – opened up between Greenland and Bergen in Norway. This was a valuable trade. Ivory and furs were luxury items in the south, and narwhals’ tusks could fetch more than their weight in gold. King Christian V of Denmark would later have an entire throne constructed from these horns, and Queen Elizabeth I of England could have had a new castle built for the price she paid for a single, decorated tooth. But the Norse probably saw very little of this money; coins would not have helped them much in Greenland. They exchanged their Arctic treasure for iron, timber and other necessary materials. And just as importantly, this market allowed them to keep open the contact between the colony and Europe, to remain part of the Scandinavian, Christian world. They had neither the knowledge nor the desire to survive without this ongoing connection.

  As exploration of the area expanded, the settlers began to encounter other peoples, whom they called skraelings: wretches. Despite the all-encompassing word, there were at least three distinct groups that came into contact with the Norse. The first of these were late-Dorset Tuniit, whom the settlers would have met as they travelled north on hunting trips. The second were Algonquin Indians living on the east coast of North America, whose violent resistance, probably more than any other factor, put an end to the Vikings’ western expansion. The final group encountered by the Norse were the Thule, ancestors of today’s Inuit, who first arrived in the country between 1200 and 1300 AD, when the colonies were at their strongest. A highly adaptable and successful marine culture, the Thule emerged first in the Bering Strait region of what is now Alaska. In addition to hunting and fishing they had also learned to use dog sleds and to build boats and kayaks, from which they caught whales, using harpoons made of iron. During the Mediaeval Warm Period, when the Norse were pushing westward across the North Atlantic, the Thule made a similar push eastward through the Arctic. They understood how to live in this environment; they were deeply at home in the landscape. But they too were traders, and the supply of iron for making tools was critical to their success. In Alaska this iron was most likely acquired through exchange with peoples in East Asia, but there were rich sources of iron in the east too, at meteor crash sites in northern Greenland, and in the hands of the Norse settlers.

  Recent archaeological evidence suggests that the m
igration of the Thule across the Arctic may not have come about merely through nomadic curiosity or as part of a natural expansion of their homeland, but because the existence of iron – and of the Norse themselves – had become known to them. Indeed, far from being an insular and isolated society, as they were long portrayed, the Inuit’s development as a culture may effectively have been defined by their contact with other peoples, from both west and east.

  When the Norse finally met the Thule, in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, an uneasy balance was struck between the two cultures. Most likely neither trusted the other very much, and for understandable reasons. Throughout their time in Greenland the Norse proved themselves to be exceedingly poor when it came to public relations. Their default approach on encountering unknown people was violence, and no doubt tensions simmered in all of their dealings with these new neighbours. Ultimately though, it was not hostility or mistrust that was to upset the balance between these two peoples. It was something far more mundane, and with unexpectedly dramatic consequences. It was the weather.

  In the centuries of Viking exploration and Norse settlement, the north had been enjoying a mild climate and hospitable summers. Temperatures had peaked around the time Eirik first arrived in Greenland, when, according to Njal’s Saga, corn was being grown on Icelandic farms. But this fruitfulness was not to last. From the late fourteenth century onwards, there was a significant cooling of the climate in Europe and the Arctic. Winters became longer and more severe, and summers less predictable. It was a trend that was to continue. Farming in Greenland was immediately made more difficult. Crops failed, meaning fewer animals could be kept, and the Norse soon found themselves in trouble. Seal hunting may have increased to cover some of the loss in reared meat, but it seems the farmers were slow to adapt. They held on to their way of life even as it became impossible, as though familiarity itself could offer them some kind of protection.

  There were other consequences of this colder weather, too. Sea ice increased, so that trading ships from Norway, already intermittent after the arrival of the Black Death in Europe and the rise of the Hanseatic League, now ceased entirely. This was a serious blow, both materially and psychologically. The Norse found themselves isolated from Europe, and all trading relations with the Thule came suddenly, necessarily, to an end. This would not have gone down well. A good supply of iron was as important to the hunters as it was to the farmers, and it is likely that, unable to obtain it through trade, they began to take it by force.

  Many theories have emerged over the years to account for the ultimate failure of the Norse colonies in Greenland. Plagues, inbreeding, attacks by pirates: all have been blamed. Jared Diamond has argued that overuse of the land and a taboo against eating fish could have been the deciding factors. But perhaps no final nail is required in this particular coffin, for the facts themselves are enough to lead to the conclusion. The climate changed; farming became increasingly difficult and certainly impossible in places; trade with Norway and with the Thule ceased; relations between the groups soured, and conflicts erupted over scarce resources. The threat of starvation would then have hung over the colonies like a vulture. Some people may have tried to flee eastwards to Iceland, others may even have fled west. Those who remained died. In 1350, the Western Settlement was found to be empty of people, their few remaining animals roaming free. And before the end of the fifteenth century, all of the Norse were gone. While the Inuit had continued to thrive, and had expanded their range across the American North, the Europeans had been entirely wiped out. For the proud, hardy Scandinavians, it was a terrible conclusion. The creeping cold, the suffocating fear, the inevitable end: this was a slow Arctic nightmare that would recur many times in years to come. For another century, or perhaps even less, the Inuit had the American Arctic to themselves. But European exploration was about to begin again in earnest, and before long the Scandinavians were back in Greenland to stay.

  I was sitting drinking coffee at the kitchen table on the morning after my arrival when a face appeared at the window, hands cupped around eyes. The face didn’t see me at first so I waved in front of it. David Kristoffersen grinned. ‘Hello Maleeky,’ he shouted, then walked round to the front door and let himself in. ‘Home sweet home,’ David laughed, looking around the tiny room. I made more coffee and we sat down together at the table, gazing out at the ice in the bay.

  David is the curator of Nanortalik’s museum. A small man, smiling and fidgety, with a baseball cap permanently attached to his head, he had introduced himself to me the day before, recognising me immediately as the only tourist in town. ‘Kristoffersen,’ he said. ‘Like the American singer.’

  Although David’s English is certainly better than my Danish, when we met previously I had made the mistake of explaining that I had lived in Copenhagen for six months as a student, but that I had forgotten most of what I knew of the language. It is an explanation that I have practised in Danish so many times that my ineptitude is apparently no longer convincing. Each time I used it in Greenland, English was immediately abandoned, as though false modesty alone was preventing me from communicating. And so David began to talk. Hesitantly at first – the pained, puzzled looks on my face slowing him down just now and again – but with increasing pace and enthusiasm, he spoke. Despite my minimal comprehension, I was aided by the fact that he was the most exuberant speaker I have ever met. He would stand suddenly in the middle of a sentence, as though what he was saying could not properly be expressed from a seated position. His hands held out before him, he would point at his chest and then hurl his arms outwards with his words. It was exhausting to watch, but it did help. A little.

  David explained that his great-grandparents had come to Nanortalik from remote southeast Greenland to have their children christened. They knew about the religion from Moravian missionaries, and had decided that they should convert. ‘That is why I am David Samuel Joseph,’ he said. ‘We must have Christian names, not Greenlandic names.’ Many people migrated from the east coast and the Cape Farewell region to settlements around Nanortalik during the nineteenth century. Previously they had visited trading stations in the area only occasionally, but eventually they began to settle on a permanent basis. By the beginning of the twentieth century, southeast Greenland was entirely depopulated.

  During a prolonged pause in the conversation, David examined the map I had spread out on the table. He seemed at first not to recognise his own town, turning the paper this way and that with a slightly uncertain look, but soon he nodded as the shapes and names began to make sense. He pressed his forefinger to the paper and began to speak the Greenlandic place-names aloud, inviting me to repeat them. I tried my best, but he was a strict teacher and every mistake was corrected. The sounds were not easy. There is an odd, almost lisping effect in Greenlandic – a sound produced, I think, by pushing air around the sides of the tongue rather than over the top. The glottal Qs are awkward too, half-swallowed into the gullet, almost gulped down. For an English speaker these are not comfortable noises to make, but David insisted, so we continued. He tried to explain the meanings of some of the names too, pronouncing them first, then offering definitions when he was able: ‘Nanor: ice bear; talik: the place where it is’. Other words were acted out. One, described partly in Greenlandic, was accompanied by a physical demonstration that suggested nothing less than a chronic bout of diarrhoea. My bewildered expression prompted him to persist with the action, becoming increasingly graphic until I could no longer imagine anything else he might be referring to. When I laughed, he laughed too, and raised his thumb to indicate that I had got it right.

  Later that morning I walked back and forth through the dusty streets of the village, among houses and apartment blocks that sit up, away from the water. Most of these houses are small, with perhaps only one bedroom. They are basic, rectangular boxes, raised slightly above the ground, with steep roofs and metal chimneys. There is little to distinguish them one from the other, except for the colour of the paint and the varying sta
tes of disrepair. There are few cars in Nanortalik – there is nowhere to drive beyond the confines of the town – and people were out walking, alone or in couples. Away from the supermarkets, which stand opposite each other on the main street, the place felt quiet. No hum of industry, no traffic. Later in the day, when school was finished, children appeared, playing along the shore and among the buildings, their toys and bicycles picked up and then abandoned wherever the afternoon carried them.

  Travellers often complain of the untidiness of Greenlandic towns; they are described as squalid or chaotic. But the root of this impression is not simply the human detritus, it is the non-human disorder that is found there. It is the wild land that laps up against the buildings. Bare rock is not covered here as it would be in a European town; hills and slopes are not smoothed or flattened. In between the houses is empty, uncivilised space – rocks, earth, grass, growth. There are very few gardens, and these are almost never partitioned or fenced off. People walk between the buildings, creating dusty paths with the regularity of their footsteps. Elsewhere, this between-space would always be allocated to one person or another, but in Greenland there is no private land ownership. All land belongs collectively to the state, and therefore to all people. Public space, wild space, is both out there and here, in the village. The wild is part of the community, it dwells among the houses; but the community, too, dwells within the wild. In the industrialised world we imagine a division between nature and culture, country and town, wild and domestic. We may allow a park to smudge the lines a little, or permit a river to run feral through a city, but we still see that division and that fence between. Here, the line that separates nature and culture has been erased completely. The wild roams freely in the streets.