History of Greenland

The Western Norse Settlement in Greenland disappeared suddenly, probably in 1342. Research in the area includes medieval sources, archeological studies of the ruins, climatic data from the Greenlandic icecap, oral stories from the Inuit in Greenland and Canada, and possible sightings of ancestors of the Norse in the Canadian Arctic. Feeling threatened both physically by the Thule (ancestors of the Inuit) and a cooling climate, and economically by the Norwegian crown, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Eastern Settlement in Greenland, the Western Settlement voluntarily left en masse for the new world, probably in 1342 based on sailing dates.

This paper is being written mainly as a genealogy, but it does also contain much valuable information as to just why such genealogies exist and/or can be reconstructed with the right knowledge of ancient texts. It is also more evidence of the existence of a royal oligarchy which had many branches, so as to cover many geographic locations and peoples. Because we find that the Viking leaders were of ancient royal ancestry, as the rest of those who were in power and either royal or of papal families, we can better understand just why they were able to do what they did and get away with it. They were, doing publicly, what their royal ancestors had been doing (and what other royals of their time were also doing) in secret (See my work on Royal Supremacy).[I] In terms of the Viking history as it was left to us, as 'Vikings', their " history " as Viking raiders began with the attack on Lindisfarne monastery in 793 CE/AD, and ended with the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066 CE/AD, when the Vikings were battling the English army, and the English army had successfully repelled them. Another thing to note, is that the Vikings are credited with various things, particularly, the discovery of America. However, there is evidence that their relatives and ancestors had already known of and visited America. And that explains just how it is that they knew where it was and how to get to it, and back. Though I have not yet written much about it (see my paper 'What Claudius Ptolemy Knew'), I have been meaning to write more about ancient world travel and the evidence that there is for it.[II] There are still a lot of people who do not want to even consider that ancient people had traveled around the world.

The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, UNCED), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, held 3rd-14th June 1992, launched the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) which operates through its annual roadshow the UN Conference of Parties (COP) that seeks to establish sustainable management of the global climate system.

The  'Earth Summit' by UN in 1992 brought the problems  in climate to the attention of even some of the world's most remote and isolated nations. One of these nations was the Hopi Nation in Arizona, a non-sovereign nation - which the UN labels as 'indigenous peoples'. In a long chain of events beginning from the League of Nations' decision in 1926 to deny the First Nations of Americas and the small island nations' representation in that international forum, its successor the United Nations, turned down four attempts by the Hopi Nation to raise the issue between 1948 and 1992. Finally, in the immediate aftermath of the Rio Earth Summit (1992), the United Nations Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar authorised the Hopi Nation to table the matter to the floor of UN General Assembly 10th-11th December 1992.

The First Nations of Americas Ethnoclimatology Motion and the Tradition-Keepers ('Faith-Keepers') background to that motion is elaborated here in this UNFCCC submission with further points were raised in 1st-2nd October 2018 at CRIAS conference. This contextualises the First Nations of Americas UN General Assembly Investigation Request 101292 which was the Concluding Plea of the World Indigenous Peoples' Joint Summit with the United Nations Parties ('Member States') Delegations to open the first UN Year of the Indigenous People (1993) to other ethnoclimatologies appearing world wide. The Geophysical Annotations were discussed at the Cochabamba-Tiquipaya Climate Summit (CMPCC1) in aftermath of the collapsed Copenhagen Climate Summit COP15 (2009) with the request from the UNESCO Delegation of the Plurinational State of Bolivia on 7th January 2010 and His Excellency President Evo Morales Ayma.

The key tenents of the Geophysical Annotations being:

(1) A signal noise from a substantial radiocarbon-dilution effect due to major sea level retreats and rises during the Ice Ages that depressurised methane clathrates - releasing copious amounts of methane and carbon dioxide into air from depressurised seabed clathrates and also from thawing terra firma permafrost; this results in regressive, or sideway, 14C  readings in tree rings ("tree rings in a wrong order"). Thus, the Ice Ages era (the last glacial maxium to holocene thermal maximum period) cores of the tree trunks can appear substantially 14C-younger than the tree trunks' latest (outermost) tree-rings which cannot be the case due to the extreme steadiness of the radiocarbon's decay rate.

(2) Methane accumulates to upper troposphere, stratosphere, and mesosphere: hence any methane signature in the ice cores is only from methane-in-transit. Additionally the global warming episode that ended the ice ages had heavy methane loads that warmed and melted away most of the era's recent ice surfaces, thus obliterating the-then-most recently laid down snow stratum (leaving behind the earlier less methane rich snow layers). This caused incomplete records (time gaps) in the ice cores, and hence "global warming" always appears "before" higher atmospheric CO2 or CH4 levels (hence appearing as if them being 'respondents', rather than the drivers of climate warning).

(3) Noting that the partial melting equations can also be run inverse direction, it is proposed that the Pleistocene glaciations resulted in damage to Peridotite which partially melted producing basalt deposition in a large scale onto the seafloor in vast effusive eruptions with field emission of heat rather than radial spot emission of heat like in modern-day Surtseyan eruptions that have only a minimal heat crossing to sea surface due to small spatial extent of hot subsea surface. The vaporisation of sea water in field emission is vast due to spatial extent of hot subsea surface greatly exceeding the thickness of overlying water column, leading to runaway snowfalls. This caused an inflated size hydrological cycle which effectively washed out atmosphere-generated radiocarbon while geological seabed-associated depressurised carbon-12 was being released en masse leading to negligible carbon-14 readings (the radiocarbon-dilution effect by the Pleistocene's hydrological cycle / sea bed depressurisation).

On these three premises, the First Nations of Americans Ethnoclimatology Motion at the United Nations General Assembly on 10th-11th December 1992 is proposed as a variant possibility to the climate theories advocated aggressively by the Western Group of Nations and their influential academia. Its implications to present-day climate change suggest that the Polar Ice Caps will continue on their much-faster-than-anticipated loss trajectory to violent collapses. This aspect was highlighted in Sea Research Society's Evidence Giving at the UK Houses of Parliament in Environmental Audit Committee evidence giving on 5th and 24th April 2017. The urgency of situation is underlined by the fact that despite world-wide economic shut down by covid-19, carbon dioxide has continued its rapid rise to 417 parts per million indicating that time to act is running out as the remaining North Pole marine ice cap is soon to melt away and then destabilise the surrounding glaciers post Arctic sea ice (most notably the Greenland Ice Sheet).

Background and proposed initial survey of a shipwreck at Queqertarsuaq harbour, Queqertarsuaq, Greenland (edited).

Disko Island lies in the Davis Strait, belonging to Greenland, it is the 84th largest island on Earth and lies 300 miles east of America (Canada).
In the relatively shallow waters off the shore from Godhavn harbour I found in March 2016 via Google Earth a structure that I cannot explain.

Quite obviously it shows a shipwreck,
that I feel it should be the subject of an archaeological enquiry.

This report is an account of excavations conducted in 1981 and 1982 by Jørgen Meldgaard (1927-2007) The National Museum of Denmark at the Qajaa site in West Greenland. A total of 388 wooden objects, 255 bone artefacts, 696 lithic tools and more than 4000 flakes have been excavated and are presented here in their archaeological context

Keywords:

Representation of Greenland and its indigenous inhabitants in Hungary, Eighteenth-nineteenth century translation, History of ethnology/anthropology, History of the Moravian Church, History of the Hungarian Reformed Church, David Cranz (1723-1777), Rev. Mihály Dobosy (1780-1853).

Abstract:

„Fieldwork” Before the Time of Fieldwork:  Rev. Mihály Dobosy (1780-1853), the Greenland Inuit and the Emergence of Ethnology (Anthropology) in Hungary At the Beginning of the 19th Century

The article discusses a chapter from the reception history of the account of David Cranz (1723-1777) entitled Historie von Groenland and published for the first time in 1765 in Barbÿ, Sweden and Leipzig, Germany. There was a Hungarian translation of this work which the author could locate in the special collections of a number of Hungarian libraries. The work was translated by Reverend Mihály Dobosy (1780-1853), a pastor of the Hungarian Calvinist Church, and was published in 1810 in Buda. The examination of the Hungarian version contributes to the understanding of the possible political implications of the translation of early ethnographic accounts from one language/cultural context to another. The author argues that Reverend Dobosy’s work constituted a subversion towards Habsburg (Catholic and imperialistic) science. Reverend Dobosy’s Grönlánd históriája belonged in this respect to a whole series of works aimed at producing natural history, world history and world ethnography in the Hungarian vernacular during the period concerned. The author demonstrates how ethnographic fieldwork is represented in the act and the cultural context of the Hungarian translation in an era in which fieldwork as such was not privileged at all in gaining knowledge about non-European, „exotic” people. She analyses what Reverend Dobosy has done with the original text of Cranz and pinpoints the textual and also visual/figural results of the kind of Enlightenment representation of the „first stage” of humanity that he relied on. Reverend Dobosy himself spent a year at the University of Göttingen as a student, saw its cabinet of natural history and took the example of German „ethnographical geography” as something to be imported and followed in Hungary. His work is one of the most important sources of early ethnology/anthropology in Hungary.

This paper will illustrate how Greenland’s turbulent history, both as a Danish colony and as a semi independent nation, continues to have significant impact on Greenlandic literature, causing it to be viewed as ‘minority’ fiction in relation to both Denmark but also within Nordic and European writing more widely. In 2008, Greenlanders voted for increased autonomy from Denmark, and in 2009 Danish was replaced by Kalaallisut as official language. However, as Greenland remains part of the Kingdom of Denmark, with foreign affairs and defence still presided over by Copenhagen, the two countries remain closely connected. This paper argues that Greenland itself serves a symbolic function within Danish fiction, despite the fact that Greenlandic writing is marginalised within the Nordic literary canon. In the fifty year history of the prestigious Nordic Prize, no Greenlandic writer has ever won, despite writers such as Kelly Berthelsen, Juaaka Lyberth and Niviaq Korneliussen being nominated regularly. Yet Greenland and Greenlanders are common features in all four novels by Danish-Norwegian writer, Kim Leine (2013 winner of the Nordic Prize), and in the internationally bestselling novel by Danish Peter Høeg, Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow. In comparing the presentation of Greenland and Greenlanders in contemporary Danish and Greenlandic literature, this paper will raise questions about what is gained and lost in the ‘majority’ representation of Greenlandic ‘minority’ cultures. In their application of postcolonial theory to post-soviet literature, scholars such as David Chioni Moore (2001) have illustrated how the term ‘postcolonial’ is being stretched in response to recent discussions about the direction of the field and the role of ‘peripheral’ literatures internal to Europe. By situating my chosen texts within these debates, this paper will therefore evaluate the relevance of both postcolonial studies and world literature to reading Greenlandic ‘minority’ fictions.

The European Union is attracting more and more members. But not all of Europe is equally attracted to membership. In Europe’s North-Atlantic outskirts, the Faroe Islands and Greenland – two largely autonomous parts of Denmark – are holding out against increased European integration. When Denmark joined the European Communities in 1973, the Faroe Islands remained outside. Greenland had to join the European Communities against its will. But in 1985, Greenland became the first and only nation so far to withdraw its membership. This book explores Euroscepticism in the Faroe Islands and Greenland since 1959. Why did the Faroe Islands and Greenland reject EU membership? In order to keep their waters free from European fishermen or to preserve their political independence? And what were the consequences of Denmark becoming a member of the EU, while two self-governing parts of its territory did not?

In Greenland, Palaeoeskimo dwellings are mostly concentrated in the north and northeast parts of the island. Some are found in the southeast, in the west (from Nuuk to Disko Bay), and in the northwest (Inglefield Land and Washington Land).
During the entire period, Palaeoeskimo dwellings show an emphasis on an axial element. In the Early Palaeoeskimo period (Saqqaq and Independence I) the fireplace is a separate square box inside two parallel rows of flags or boulders. Cooking and/or seething stones are common during Saqqaq and rare in Dorset. In Late Saqqaq, a shift in dwelling style to a platform-like dwelling is indicated by material from the Disko Bay region. During Independence II, the external borders of the axial feature often extend towards the front of the dwelling and may display "wings" at one or both ends. Late Dorset is only found in Northwest Greenland where the material from Inglefield Land documents the presence of at least four dwelling types with a clear axial element in the more substantial ruins.

By accident, the world-famous brewery Carlsberg became a central force in global marine science during the first three decades of the 20th century. Within a core group of scientists and managers, Johannes Schmidt (1877-1933) was the key figure combining the efforts of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES), the Danish state and several private companies. Launching 26 oceangoing expeditions Schmidt made landmark discoveries such as the breeding ground for the Atlantic eel in the Sargasso Sea. The scientific frontier was pushed literally kilometres into the deep sea and across the World’s oceans. While the formal North Atlantic Empire of the small state of Denmark was in decline, an informal empire of science was erected instead.

Early in the Second World War, before formal American entry in the conflict, Washington identified Greenland as a key approach to the American continent and an essential platform to keep communications with Great Britain open. This would lead to the construction of different bases, overcoming the harsh climate and logistical difficulties, and paving the way to the forward defence posture that would come to characterize the Cold War

'Savage Coast' was first published in 2010 as 'Seventh Journey', in an author's private edition of 500 signed copies. These are now in collections and libraries worldwide. This new edition tells the same story, of Australia's first Arctic expedition, but is fully revised and updated with new research. It is aimed at the executive leadership market and although the 16 pages of colour are not included, the 155 halftones are retained throughout.
These reviews are just some of the many very positive responses received and were selected because each reflects on different elements and layers of the book.