University of Groningen Between Greenland and America Hacquebord, Louwrens; Vaughan, Richard Published in: EPRINTS-BOOK-TITLE IMPORTANT NOTE: You are advised to consult the publisher's version (publisher's PDF) if you wish to cite from it. Please check the document version below. Document Version Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Publication date: 1987 Link to publication in University of Groningen/UMCG research database Citation for published version (APA): Hacquebord, L., & Vaughan, R. (1987). Between Greenland and America: cross-cultural contacts and the environment in the Baffin Bay area. In EPRINTS-BOOK-TITLE (10 ed.). Copyright Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). 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Download date: 03-10-2021 BETWEEN GREENLAND AND AMERICA CROSS-CULTURAL CONTACTS AND THE ENVIRONMENT IN THE BAFFIN BAY AREA ARCTIC CENTRE University of Groningen Netherlands BET WEE N G R E E N LAN DAN DAM E RIC A CROSS-CULTURAL CONTACTS AND THE ENVIRONMENT IN THE BAFFIN BAY AREA EDITED BY Lom'/RENS HACQUEBORD RICHARD VAUGHAN ARCTIC CENTRE UNIVERSITY OF GRONINGEN, THE NETHERLANDS 1987 CIP-GEGEVENS KONINKLIJKE BIBLIOTHEEK, DEN HAAG Between Be tl"een Greenland and America: cross-cultural contacts and the environment·in the Baffin Bay area / ed. by Louwrens Hacquebord, Richard Vaughan. - Groningen: The Arctic Centre. - Ill. - (Horks of the Arctic Centre; nr .10) Het lit.opg., index. ISBN 90-800042-2-7 geb. SISO 975.1 UDC 919.87/.88 NUGI 672, 649 Trefw.: Baffin baaf. / PREFACE The papers presented at the Seventh International Symposium organized by the Arctic Centre of the University of Groningen are published here in their entirety. The sym­ posium's title was "Cross cultural contacts and the environment in the Baffin Bay area" and it was held in Groningen, The Netherlands, on 18-19 September 1986. The centre's earlier symposia have dealt with Arctic whaling, early European exploitation of the North Atlantic, Spitsbergen, Inuit culture in Greenland, and Scandinavian Arctic cultures. The Arctic Centre wishes to acknowledge the financial support given by the Royal Dutch Academy of Science, the Willem Barentsz Stichting, and the Faculty of Arts of the University of Groningen. The symposium which was projected by the Board of the Arctic Centre, was planned and set up by an organizing committee comprising the editors of these proceedings and Mr. Herbert prins, to whom their special thanks are due for his wise advice and attention to practi­ cal detail. The committee wishes to place on record here its thanks to all who helped to set up the symposium and who contributed to its success. They included not only everyone of the contributors, organisers and participants, but also personnel of the Groningen Faculty of Arts, espe­ cially those of the congress bureau, as well as Mrs. Gonnie Goossens, who entertained us with colour slides of icebergs set to music. Finally, the editors wish to thank Mrs. Tineke Datema-Ruben, secretary of the Arctic Centre, and her colleagues and helpers in the secretariat, for their patience and skill in converting much corrected and often partly illegible typescripts in varying styles into a finished print-out. Although we have standardized the spelling of place names as between the different papers printed here, and adopted a uniform editorial style for all of them, we have attempted neither to impose a uniform spelling in general nor a uniform use of terms. For instance, the words 'Inuit' and 'Eskimos' are treated as equally accceptable alternatives. References in one contribution to another have only excep­ tionally been inserted, it being thought desirable to print the papers as near as possible in their original form. There «ere two substantial changes from the programme as originally planned: Mr. Gerti Nooter had perforce to withdra\·/ his contribution, and Dr. F.O.Kapel very kindly agreed to present Dr. E.W.Born's paper in his absence. The Arctic Centre Lou«rens Hacquebord University of Groningen Richard Vaughan February 1987 3 CONTENTS page Preface 3 Tabel of contents 5 Introduction 7 1. The origin of the seas between Greenland and Canada. L.M.J.U. van Straaten. 11 2. Changes in the glaciers and climate of Greenland in the last two millenia: the present state of knowledge. A.Weidick. 31 3. The relationship between the mediaeval Norse and Eskimos. Robert McGhee. 51 4. European-native contacts in the Strait of Belle Isle, Labrador. James A. Tuck. 61 5. Dutch whaling and its influence on Eskimo culture in Greenland. Hans Christian GUll¢v. 75 6. How isolated were the Polar Eskimos in the nineteenth century? Richard Vaughan. 95 7. Aspects of present-day maritime sUbsistence hunting in the Thule area, northwest Greenland. E.W. Born. 109 8. A mode of thought. Dutch perceptions of the Arctic in early modern times. Hugo s'Jacob. 133 List of names and addresses of the contributors 151 5 INTRODUCTION The different contributors to this symposium are in dif­ ferent disciplines and in different countries; they can be thought of as working along parallel lines. The function of the symposium was to bring their work together, to jux­ tapose their hypotheses, to reveal discrepancies between their conclusions, above all to show where problems exist and point to their nature. Thus the reader must not be surprised to find one author calling the native inhabitants of northwest Greenland 'Polar Eskimos' and another calling them 'Thule Inuit'; one stating they were isolated in the years before 1818, another demonstrating that they were not. Such disparities only serve to underline the value of holding symposia like this one. Out of such a concourse and confrontation of individual studies systematic and certain knowledge may hopefully emerge. Is there any foreseeable outcome or end-product of the different stUdies gathered together here? The first and most brilliant attempt to write the complete history of a sea was Fernand Braudel's La Mediterranee. In his wake t historians began to look at the North Sea in a new light, a light coloured by the connections between peoples around its shores. Is it too far-fetched to think of Baffin Bay, and its associated seas Davis Strait and the Labrador Sea, as a single entity, and to trace the history of the peoples on these shores against the background of their environment? The Norsemen or Vikings, it now appears, created a kind of sea-empire or maritime territory for themselves out of these waters just as they already had done in the North Sea and the North Atlantic. Perhaps some day it will be possible to reconstruct not only the Viking history of Baffin Bay but also the total history of human activities round the seas which divide Greenland from America. This symposium could be construed as a first small step towards such a goal. In recent times the brute forces of politics and warfare, symptoms of nationalism, have in many places obliterated the past, obscuring or replacing the lasting and meaningful processes of history. Thus the geographical unity of Baffin Bay vias divided by the imperalisms of Britain and Denmark. NOI. we have Canada (I.ith sporadic intrusions by the United States into her Arctic domains there) on one side of Baffin Bay, and an emerging, dare one suggest nationalistic, Greenland on the other. This new Greenland is rapidly replacing the old Danish Greenland, though the Thule dis­ trict was only formally taken over by Denmark as recently as 1937. The real human unity of the area has been obscured by these developments. That unity was provided by the Inuit inhabitants and their predecessors the so-called Palaeoeskimos who, at one time or another, have settled on almost every shore between the Labrador Sea and·Smith Sound. Here they lived and survived, in tiny,scattered, 7 nomadic hunting communities, for thousands of years, until the modern world disrupted and transformed their way of life and engulfed and all but obliterated them. Historians Iqrite in this respect about the 'contact period', but the word contact is perhaps none too appropriate except in the sense that a road roller makes contact Iqith a hazel nut \'lhen it runs over it. The material presented at this symposium brings together, be it noted, the two sides of Baffin Bay, for more than half the papers corne from Canada and Denmark. Most of them are concerned, directly or indirectly, with the impact on the native inhabitants of successive white incursions into Baffin Bay. Beginning with the Vikings, we continue with a consideration of the effects of Basque activities in Labrador on both Indians and Eskimos, with the eigtheenth­ century Dutch whalers' impact on the Eskimos of Greenland's west coast, with the arrival of English and Scottish ex­ plorers and whalers in the Thule district in the nineteenth century and, finally, the delicately balanced subsistence hunting economy of the Polar Eskimos is considered in rela­ tion, among other things, to the impact on it of ideological activities like the campaign against the sale of seal skins.