Suddenly, hey presto! out of the mist a dark cloud, out of the cloud a soaring mountain peak, sun-gilt, snow-splashed, apparently unattached to solid earth, the mists boiling about its feet—Greenland!

That’s Isobel Wylie Hutchison’s first sight of Greenland, in 1927, as the supply ship Gertrud Rask nosed through poor visibility towards the isolated settlement of Angmagssalik (now Tasiilaq), surrounded by a flotilla of kayaks that had come out to welcome the ship.

I’ve written about Hutchison before—first about Peak Beyond Peak (2022), a posthumous collection of her Scottish writings; and then about North to the Rime-Ringed Sun (1934) her account of her solo travels in Alaska and Arctic Canada in 1933-34.

In On Greenland’s Closed Shore (1930) she tells the story of her journey in southern Greenland during 1927, and her subsequent overwintering, north of the Arctic Circle, in 1928-9. These trips were a sort of gateway drug for her more extensive Arctic adventures in Alaska and Canada.

Why a “closed shore”? Because Denmark didn’t allow casual visits to Greenland at this time—aspiring visitors needed to offer a serious purpose to the visa authorities. Hutchison’s official reason for her visit (just as it would be in Alaska) was botanizing. During her trip she catalogued Arctic flora and collected their seeds, and the book includes a nine-page appendix listing “plants found by the author”.

In Angmagssalik/Tasiilaq she did her first bit of botanizing, and realized that her stout Scottish brogues left her ankles accessible to biting insects in the undergrowth. She quickly invested in a pair of Inuit kamiit, high sealskin boots. In English, these are usually called kamiks; she uses the Danish plural kamiker. (This sort of thing crops up a lot—Hutchison’s names for Greenlandic places and objects are sometimes filtered through Danish, or use now-outdated Greenlandic.)

Most of her 1927 visit was spent in what she calls the “Garden of Greenland”—a fertile area in the southwest, which once housed the Norse Eastern Settlement. She visited a number of archaeological sites relating to that period, including the remains of the Norse cathedral at Garðar.

And on the island of Uunartoq, two boys took her and the local doctor to…

… a great rock close to the beach and removed two of the stones, piled before an aperture, that we might look in. Peering into the close-smelling gloom over the doctor’s shoulder, I caught a glimpse of the strange figure lying as if asleep under the rocks, his back to the light, a thick thatch of black hair covering scalp and neck.

She’d been taken to see one of the 500-year-old “Uunartoq mummies”, which within a couple of years would be carted off to Harvard University by an American anthropologist. (See here for the story of what has happened since.)

And she hired an umiak and crew at Nanortalik to take her up Tasermiut Fjord, to visit the only surviving natural forest in Greenland, in the Quinngua valley (which she spells Kingua):

… a cluster of birch about twenty feet high, which are fast becoming exterminated by the ravages of the fuel hunter with his axe.

(Gratifyingly, the forest is still there, a century later.)

This first taste of Greenland made her determined to overwinter there, which she did during 1928-9, having obtained the use of a house perched on steep ground above the settlement of Uummannaq (which she calls Umanak). Uummannaq is built on Uummanaq Island, in the relatively sheltered Uummannaq Fjord. Hutchison was somewhat frustrated that the ice in the fjord never became extensive enough for long dog-sledding trips, but after the spring thaw she was able to accompany the Danish Lutheran pastor on his visits to small communities on islands dotted around the fjord, and along the Nuussuaq peninsula to the south.

Her book doesn’t make any mention of how she got to and from Uummannaq, though it contains a slightly confusing map showing various visits to coastal towns en route. In my map of her travels below, I’ve therefore restricted myself to showing her trips around Uummannaq Fjord, in red. Her 1927 travels are in blue.

By far the largest section of the book is taken up with Hutchison’s rather obsessive chronicling of her daily existence while overwintering in the house she calls “Scotland Yard”. It’s dark and cold, the Northern Lights are beautiful. She sometimes goes skating on a nearby lake, often goes to Lutheran church services, paints, draws or reads. She has a kivfak*, a housekeeper named Dorthe, who does the cooking and cleaning and with whom there are frequent cross-purpose conversations and amusing misunderstandings. She slowly acquires a smattering of Greenlandic. Dorthe is fiercely protective of Hutchison, especially when she feels that some of the locals are asking for too much money in exchange for artworks. There are parties and frequent dancing—Hutchison’s sword dance seems to have been in much demand. But, to be honest, it all goes on too long for me, and I was relieved when she was able to get out and about again.

She made a couple of visits to Illorsuit, the sole settlement on the paradoxically named (in Danish) Ubekendt Ejland, “Unknown Island”. Not only is that name just plain weird on an epistemological level, it has a dire colonial ring to it, given that it had been home to generations of Inuit before Europeans turned up. Illorsuit was evacuated in 2018, after a landslide in nearby Karrat Fjord produced a megatsunami which caused destruction and fatalities in the surrounding area.

Most interestingly, for me at least, she and two Greenlandic companions made an ascent of a 6000-foot mountain on the Nuussuaq peninsula, which had been first climbed by no less than Edward Whymper in 1872. She calls it Kilertinguit, but I’ve been unable to find its modern Greenlandic name. From textual evidence I believe it’s the summit at 70.64°N, 52.60°W, which I’ve marked on my map above, but I’ll be grateful if anyone can shed more light on it.

At the summit of Kilertinguit, there ensued an episode both comic and alarming.

All we had with ourselves in the way of stimulant was a small bottle of Sal Volatile, which I had never before tasted, but which I found in my Red Cross box at Umanak.

Sal Volatile is ammonium carbonate, the active ingredient of “smelling salts”—in water, it produces a horrible ammoniacal vapour that was then in vogue for abruptly waking up people who had fainted. Hutchison seems to have mistaken it for something that you could drink to perk yourself up, and actually tried to eat the stuff along with a mouthful of snow:

Never in my life have I tasted anything more burningly vile.

Which was fortunate, because ammonium carbonate carries an H302 hazard warning—harmful if swallowed. They all survived the experiment, despite one of her Greenlandic companions being rather keen on the stuff.

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I enjoyed reading this one, but not as much as I did her account of Alaska and the Yukon. There’s certainly enjoyment to be had from her ability to evoke the sights and sounds of Greenland. Here, she’s looking out over Uummannaq Fjord, “filled with drifting icebergs of shapes fantastic as faerie”:

The occasional roar of these splintering icebergs, or the equally sudden outcry from the colony dogs—a shrill howling which rises and ceases as abruptly as a gust of summer wind—are the only sounds that come up to my house founded upon a rock.

This is exactly the experience that the Boon Companion and I had, sitting in the sunshine above the settlement of Kullorsuaq, many years ago. (Although, admittedly, our soundscape was occasionally interrupted by the distant sound of a chainsaw.)

And it’s nice to read how Hutchison’s Greenlandic social whirl in Uummannaq was fuelled by copious quantities of coffee—the hospitable Greenlandic tradition of kaffemik was still very much in evidence during our visit.

On the downside, Hutchison is of course a product of her time, and of her privileged birth, and there’s sometimes a patronizing tone to her description of Greenlanders, most evident during her first visit. Her initial attitude can be fairly accurately paraphrased with smiling happy little people. But she does seem to largely get over it once she has spent time there. She does, however, with the alarming insouciance of her era, manage to casually drop “the n-word” while discussing some of her previous travels.

And, if you love dogs, you really don’t want to read Hutchison’s report of the Greenlanders’ utilitarian attitude to their dogs, which she found particularly distressing. We were still being warned about this during our visit in 2002, and there was an international outcry about it in 2007. You can read about that, and the Greenland government’s response to it, here.

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* Hutchison translates kivfak as “servant”, which seems to be a variant of Greenlandic kiffartortoq.