The Magnetic North: Travels in the Arctic by Sara Wheeler

Author:Sara Wheeler [Wheeler, Sara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Adventure, Autobiography, Biography, Essays & Travelogues, History, Non-Fiction, Polar Regions, Social History, Special Interest, Travel
ISBN: 9781409088806
Google: rz4R6efyJAQC
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2010-07-05T23:00:00+00:00

* * *

1 Denmark was acting within the political framework of the Dano-Norwegian union until 1814, when the latter was dissolved, and Denmark gained total control of Greenland.

2 But satellites have revealed a weakening of Greenland’s gravity, apparently a result of the loss of tens of thousands of tonnes of ice. So perhaps the ice sheet is vulnerable. NASA specialist Waleed Abdalati recently stated categorically, ‘The ice sheet is starting to stir’.

3 Basically because none of the current models include widespread halogen chemistry, so even the best must be getting something wrong.

4 In fact, it was an iglu. Contrary to western belief, an igloo is a traditional, turtle-shaped house made of stone and peat, entered by a tunnel (katak) and ventilated by a hole in the ceiling (qingaq). Sometimes it was clad in an extra insulating wall of snow blocks (torssusaq) which did make it look like our idea of an igloo. The window (equut) was made of seal gut. Glass was already available in the sixties, at the Danish trading stores, but it cracked in severe cold.

5 It was the Danish-Greenlandic ethnologist and hero Knud Rasmussen who brought the name Thule to Greenland. He founded a trading station next to Uummannaq and named it Thule; soon the toponym was being applied to the region. The name was apparently first bestowed on an unidentified northern land by the Greek geographer and explorer Pythias in the fourth century BC. The notion of a mysterious sub-Arctic Thule has recurred ever since then in myth and magic. Louis XIII’s cosmographer described the people of Thule as ‘pygmies who hiss like geese’. The name also featured in fantasies of Nordic-German idealised societies in the Weimar Republic. In 1916 Hitler joined the closed organisation Thule Gesellschaft as a gast, or visiting brother.

6 Malaurie continued to visit the region, witnessing the old ways growing weaker. Productive life dwindled, as working as a cleaner at the base brought in more cash than hunting. ‘The decline of this plurimillennial hunting society’, he concluded, ‘has derived more from an economic system and from the civil law that sustains it than from any so-called culture shock. It was not Danish culture or Christianity that initially undermined it, but rather the capitalist system of exchange.’ But in the late seventies, he saw a measure of Inuit power become a reality.

7 ‘The Land God Gave to Cain’ was how French navigator Jacques Cartier described the north shore of the Gulf of St Lawrence when he spotted it from his ship in 1534.

8 Courtauld married Montgomerie. After his death in 1959, she married Rab Butler. She died in 2009, aged 101.

9 Recent scholarship suggests the plague back in Norway brought the colony to an end: a reduced population boosted the availability of farming land, so the Greenland Norse went ‘home’. So was this the choice they made?

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.