GREENLAND – PART 1 

It took us 21 hours to get from Charlottetown to downtown Reykjavik. We’d been to Iceland’s capital once before in 2022 on a cruise with Princess. On that occasion, the ship was docked in the city for a full day, and we’d rented a car to drive the Golden Circle, taking in three of the island’s signature attractions. This time, we had three hours to kill before boarding the MS Fridtjof Nansen, and we spent it strolling around old Reykjavik on what one local told us was a very fine day for early June. We sipped on coffee and tea on a courtyard overlooking a nice square and winced a bit when the bill arrived: $20.47 Canadian!

The population of Iceland is about 400,000 with Reykjavik being home to about 140,000. We walked up to Reykjavik’s most famous landmark, the towering Lutheran church called the Hallgrimskirkja. The statue out front of Leif Erickson was donated by the United States of America to mark the thousandth anniversary of the first meeting of Iceland’s Parliament in the year 930, making it one of the world’s longest running parliaments. Historians believe the first settlement in Iceland was in Reykjavik in 874 by a Norwegian chieftain named Ingolfr Arnason.

In Grade 5, I moved from la petite école to la grande école in my native village of Wellington and there discovered two subjects new to me, history and geography. I was fascinated by both. We learned that Christopher Columbus “discovered” the Americas in 1492. But we also heard of the Norse sagas, those that spoke of Erik the Red and his son Leif Ericson, also called “Leif the Lucky”. I couldn't help imagining that the Norse sagas were true and, in the early 1960s, when archaeologists discovered the remains of a Norse settlement in L’Anse-Aux-Meadows, they did become very real and changed our view of how Europeans first came to know what is now Canada.

The Fridtjof Nansen is an expedition-class cruise ship with a passenger capacity of 650, and she spends most of her time in the Arctic and Antarctic regions. Only 283 guests were onboard. Not long after our cruise ends, she’s scheduled to cross the Northwest Passage from east to west, head down the east coast of the Pacific and spend our fall and winter months running back and forth between South America and Antarctica. The Nansen is one of the nicer vessels we’ve been on and our room, the cheapest on the ship, is quite a step up from what we’re used to.

Our first full day aboard a new ship involves an orientation to our new surroundings, adjusting to the time change and lack of sleep, getting used to the pitch and roll of the ship, and taking in as much information as we can about experiences the cruise has to offer. The first two were sea days spent sailing across the Denmark Strait on generally calm seas before we rounded the southern tip of Greenland, Cape Farewell.

While the southwest part of the island is suitable for limited farming, 81% of Greenland is covered by an ice sheet the thickness of which averages more than 1.5 kilometers. To put that into perspective, if the Greenland ice sheet were to melt, sea levels around the world would rise by about 7.5 meters or 24 feet, something to ponder in our age of global warming.

Greenland, an autonomous territory with its own Parliament, is part of the Kingdom of Denmark and is home to 56,000 people. A bit of trivia: Greenland shares a 1.2-kilometer border with Canada on Hans Island, a small speck of land located in the far north. The principal source of wealth, accounting for 20% of GDP, is financial aid from Denmark. (By comparison, federal transfers to our province account for 11% of GDP.) The most important local industry is the fishery, with shrimp being the primary species caught and exported. While the island has extensive reserves of minerals, oil and gas, virtually none of these resources have been exploited. The main reasons for this are extreme weather conditions, the high cost of extraction and a very strong environmentalist movement.

Greenland has been inhabited at intervals over at least the last 4,500 years by Inuit peoples, the Thule, whose forebears migrated there from what now Canada. Today, Greenlandic Inuit make up 90% of the population.

Erik the Red, exiled from Iceland with his father, Thorvald, crossed the Denmark Strait with a group of followers in open boats powered by sails and banks of oars, carrying livestock and all the supplies they would need to start a new life. They settled the uninhabited southwestern part of Greenland in about 986, and their descendants lived in Greenland for over 400 years until they disappeared in the late 1400s.

Many years ago, I picked up a book called The Greenlanders, a historical fiction epic written by Jane Smiley. It describes the daily affairs of Nordic settlers living in South Greenland in the 13^th and 14^th centuries, including marriages, births, deaths, famines, epidemics, trials, church affairs, land feuds, seal hunts, military invasions, and encounters with Greenland’s aboriginal inhabitants. In an accurate description of the book, one reviewer called it a "bleak, stirring picture of the slow slouch towards the death of a civilization". It was the first I’d heard of a European settlement in Greenland, and I was fascinated.

After almost three full days at sea, we saw our first land and our first icebergs. The Nansen sailed up a scenic fjord called Tasermiut and came to a stop just off the tiny community of Tasiusaq, population about 40. As it was fairly late in the day by the time we got there, it was decided that we wouldn’t go ashore, but our zodiacs took us on a run up towards a glacier to give us a better view of the spectacular surroundings. Although we will not reach the Arctic Circle on this trip, the days are long: sunset is at 11:30 pm and sunrise is at 4:30.

We first set foot on Greenlandic soil at the town of Qaqortoq, population 3,000, the only place I know of that has three “q”s in its name. The setting is gorgeous, with multi-coloured houses climbing up the hillside from the shoreline. A nearby lake drains into a small stream that flows through the old colonial harbour district of town, past the Lutheran Church built in 1832. 

Elva and I went into town twice on the ship’s tender, the first to get our bearings and the second to attend a concert in the old church. A drummer from Nuuk had come down for the occasion and a father-daughter duo sang several songs with the MC who was dressed in her finest sealskin jacket. The young woman in the photo is dressed in the traditional Greenlandic costume, much of it made from sealskin. They sang Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” as their closing piece in Greenlandic; such a beautiful rendition, it gave me shivers. Following the concert, I walked up to the highest point I could find to take in the view, then finished off a near-perfect day with a delicious evening meal featuring reindeer.

The first photo below shows a line of older houses. Notice the trees in front of the second one. They must be introduced ornamentals since Greenland has no native trees to speak of except some scrubby willows and birch. The second photo shows a typically quaint house in the local style and the third shows a showy carpet of Alpine azalea I found growing on thin soil at the highest point in the town. How do I know it's Alpine azalea: ChatGPT of course!

Our next stop was the tiny hamlet of Qassiarsuk, population 90. There’s a special reason why we landed there. It became the home of Erik the Red and his clan when they first settled South Greenland in the year 986. They called the place Brattahlid. Today’s settlement consists of a collection of sheep farms, 25 houses or so, a hostel, a church, a primary school, and a store complete with gas pumps and an ATM! According to ChatGPT, the farms here are the most northerly in the world.

The Qassiarsuk area, called Kujataa, is a sub-arctic farming landscape that is the first known example of agriculture in the Arctic. The Viking history, together with the unique combination of farming, hunting and fishing that occurred in the region from the 10^th through 15^th centuries and from the 18^th century to today, explain why it was listed a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2017.

Elva and I walked from one end of the settlement to the other, taking in the sights, including the ruins of a Viking-era church shown in the first photo. We visited the Lutheran church and the sheep farm as well as the reconstructed Viking long house, then climbed to Leif Erikson’s statue which overlooks the valley and fjord below. We even saw a humpback whale cruising past between the ship and the village. In the afternoon, I joined an organized hike to take in a bit more of the spectacular landscape. It was a sunny day, 10 degrees or so, and we were most grateful for our good fortune.