Saturday, April 19, 2014

Icebergs, Polar Bears and Sledge Patrol Sirius

It occurs to me that I have seriously neglected Greenland in my blog so far.  Whole months go by without a reference to the world's second largest island.  Frankly I don't know how the population of Greenland survives.  Actually I'm very unsure how exactly the population of Greenland does survive.  OK so most of them are concentrated on the south west coast which is the warmest and most habitable part but in Greenland that's a very relative term.

Greenland is an autonomous nation under the Danish crown which is one of those recently created political euphemisms which allow the locals a fair measure of independence from their harsh colonial overlords while simultaneously retaining access to their welfare system.  Plans for full independence have been put on the backburner until such times as the Greenlanders think they can afford it.

But why is Greenland ruled, even notionally, by Denmark?  Well like most places that were both freezing cold and possessed of water access Greenland underwent a sudden influx of Vikings.  The Vikings were an odd bunch. They traded and raided anywhere there was water enough to float a longship but seemed to confine their colonial efforts to the bleakest parts of the world they could find.  Many of the original Viking settlers of Greenland came from Iceland.  Apparently Iceland wasn't cold, rugged and difficult to live in enough for them.  The Viking colonies survived for a number of centuries but eventually died out as a result of decreasing temperatures, increasing conflict with the local Inuit and, apparently, a peculiar reluctance to eat fish.  The Inuit being less picky in their dietary habits are still there.

Despite the ultimate failure of the Viking settlements Greenland remained vaguely in Scandinavian minds and in the eighteenth century a half Norwegian, half Danish bloke established a new colony in Greenland populated mainly by mutinous soldiers and disease riddled prostitutes.  Strangely it has survived to the present day.  Possibly they were prepared to eat fish.

Roughly while the Vikings were arriving in the southwest the Inuit were arriving in the north (by roughly I mean "give or take a couple of hundred years").  The Vikings and Inuit got on pretty well with each other by the simple expedient of pretty much ignoring each others existence.  The Vikings were farmers, the Inuit were hunters.  Normally that's a recipe for disaster as farming colonies tend to expand outwards looking for more arable land at the expense of the hunters (its certainly what happened in Australia and North America) but the Vikings had already settled pretty much the only bits of Greenland that could be farmed and had very little use for the rest.  It wasn't until the dropping temperatures ruined much of the existing farmland that the increasingly desperate Vikings started challenging the Inuit for the hunting grounds.  The Inuit are still there and the Vikings aren't so we know how that went.

Still the Danes are at least officially in charge and to protect their interest they have something called Sledge Patrol Sirius.  This is a specialist unit operating under the Danish navy which patrols northeast Greenland.  Just to make it more fun they do that patrolling in Winter (even in Greenland operating a dog sled in Summer can be problematic).  Contrary to what I wrote in an earlier blog entry the members of Sirius are armed.  They carry M1917 Enfield rifles (an American variant of the more famous British Lee-Enfield), bolt action weapons tend to be somewhat less prone to freezing solid than more modern automatic firearms.  They have also just swapped out their hand guns for something with more stopping power as apparently they were finding it difficult to take down polar bears.

The majority consensus of Greenland seems to be that ultimate independence is desirable but should be delayed until such times as Greenland can support itself economically.  "What do we want?  Independence!  When do we want it?  When we can afford it!" might not be the most inspiring battlecry I've ever heard but its certainly one of the most sensible.  Meanwhile the Greenlanders are doing their best to diversify their economy and are positively looking forward to global warming in the hopes it will free up some farmland and provide access to the undoubted mineral wealth current located under glaciers and buried in permafrost.

Until that happy day the Greenlanders live on their beautiful, half frozen island quietly preparing for independence in a fiscally responsible way and protected by the fourteen members of Sledge Patrol Sirius.

I really want to go to Greenland.

No comments:

Post a Comment