Eastern Greenland is remote and removed–just the kind of place any adventurous soul would yearn to explore. I was thrilled to be invited by modern-day explorer Olaf Malver to travel with his company Explorers’ Corner on their 2011 Greenland kayaking expedition this summer. This would mark my third time to Greenland but my inaugural visit to the mysterious eastern coast. Let’s start with a little history lesson before diving into the details of the adventure.
Eastern Greenland is largely absent in the romanticized history of Arctic exploration. Geographically it lacks the allure of the north and south poles and its most hazardous terrain lies just south of the Arctic Circle. The complex networks of fractured fjords and inlets, which can extend hundreds of miles inland, offer no great trade route. Enormous, jagged peaks of ancient rock rise upwards of 4,000 feet from the sea and the unpredictable waterways can be clear one moment, choked with enormous ice bergs and flotillas of sea ice the next. Fractured glaciers shatter into the sea or break off underwater, sending ice shards rocketing to the surface. There isn’t enough flat land for grazing animals such as reindeer and musk-ox to flourish; a sparse population of arctic fox, sea birds and the stray polar bear are the only inhabitants. To top it all off, storms can build in minutes and last for days, an especially precarious trend in the sub-zero winter seasons when darkness falls on the land for months at a time. Finally, when summer does roll around, the mosquitoes can be prolific while a shield of ice from the north buffets the sea coast and keeps a majority of whales and other large marine mammals from entering the channels – not good for the native hunter.
It is not just the severity of the land that has contributed to Eastern Greenland’s low profile. Unlike more well-known polar areas, Eastern Greenland never played host to the epic tragedies that remain a perplexing source of pride for certain nations, England being at the top of the list. The men (and women) who unlocked the mysteries were competent, efficient and strong explorers who quickly adapted native methods rather than trying to bully their way through using inadequate techniques and nationalistic moxie. For every Sir John Franklin, Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton, all of whom blundered into catastrophe, Eastern Greenland features a list of proficient and capable explorers such as Knud Rasmussen, Roald Amundsen and Fridtjof Nansen, mostly of Danish or Norwegian heritage (England does regain a bit of pride from the masterful explorations of Captain William Scoresby ).
