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III Encounters with the Cultural Other in the Land of the New People

1 The Literary Expedition to Greenland, 1902–1904

The New People is an account of the Literary Expedition to Greenland, which took place between 1902 and 1904. Among the travellers were the leader of the venture, writer and Politiken journalist Ludvig Mylius-Erichsen (1872–1907), lieutenant Harald Count Moltke (1871–1960) (draughtsman and painter), physician Alfred Berthelsen (1877–1950), Greenlandic catechist and translator Jørgen Brønlund (1877–1907) and twenty-two-year-old Knud Rasmussen, whose responsibilities involved putting down the tales told by the Inughuit. The expedition set off on 1st June 1902, when the travellers went by sea from Godthåb [Greenlandic: Nuuk] to Jakobshavn [Greenlandic: Ilulissat], stayed there till January 1903 and then moved on by dogsleds to Upernavik. On 27th March 1903, they departed from Tasiusaq, the northernmost settlement in Greenland’s colonised part, and crossed Melville Bay for the first time in centuries, reaching Cape York. Their chief aim was to conduct observations among the indigenous Inughuit population which lived in the region in isolation from Danish Greenland and had been spotted earlier by whalers and prior polar expeditions.¹⁹⁸ Their original plan was to spend five-to-six weeks among the Inughuit, return to Nuuk over the ice and, finally, sail to Frederikshåb [Greenlandic: Paamiut] and Julianehåb [Greenlandic: Qaqortoq]. While things did run according to plan in terms of the topographic design, the time-frame of the journey was considerably extended because Moltke fell seriously ill. The explorers had to spend the winter in Agpat/Saunders Island, whence they set out on the return journey in late January 1904. Moltke got back to Copenhagen in mid-1904, while Mylius-Erichsen and Rasmussen remained in South Greenland, travelled as far as Lindenow Fjord on the east coast and returned to Copenhagen on 7th November 1904.¹⁹⁹

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The New People was Rasmussen’s literary debut. Admittedly, he had written Lapland earlier (1901), but the book was published only six years later. Dedicated to “Mother and Father,” The New People is a revised and enriched version of the original diary in which Rasmussen recorded the Literary Expedition.²⁰⁰ The New People is thus a type of expedition account which Karlsen calls “a second-position report” [Norwegian: annenposisjonsberetning], in which the author is subordinate to his commander. Usually this entailed a delayed publication, which was actually not the case with The New People as Rasmussen’s book was released one year before Ludvig Mylius-Erichsen and Harald Moltke’s Grønland (1906), as the first literary narrative of the Literary Expedition.²⁰¹ According to Knud Michelsen, the account was originally entitled The Last Heathens in Greenland (De sidste Hedninger i Grønland), but Rasmussen changed it into The New People after his encounter with the Norwegian explorer Otto Sverdrup, who in 1903 published the expedition account Nyt land: fire aar i arktiske egne (English edition: New Land: Four Years in the Arctic Regions, 1904).²⁰² The likewise entitled actual account of the journey (Nye Mennesker) takes up the first, one-hundred-page-long part of the book, which is followed by two other parts: “Primitive Views of Life” (Primitive Livsanskuelser) and “Fables and Legends” (Fabler og Sagn), which contain Greenland’s verbal folklore (myths, fables, legends, tales, songs, depictions of customs, etc.), collected and translated into Danish by Rasmussen. In this book, I focus primarily on the narrative of the journey in the first part of Rasmussen’s work, which unlike its further ethnographic sections is narratively, thematically and generically ←66 | 67→diversified and yet offers a coherent story about cultural encounters with the Inughuit. The narrative does not cover either preparations for the expedition nor its stages from Copenhagen to Godthåb, Jakobshavn and Upernavik. Similarly, it does not mention the journey back home. The plot starts with their arrival at an Inughuit settlement on the island Agpat after crossing Melville Bay and ends with the narrator’s farewell to an old Inughuit woman called The Sinew. The major axis of the narrative is provided by the traveller-protagonist’s interactions with various members of the Inughuit community and by various aspects of their daily life, beliefs, customs and tales, which are predominantly quoted as being spoken by them. The story revolves around the actions and reflections of the narrator and his indigenous interlocutors, while the other Danish expedition members are scarcely mentioned in the text. The account is chronologically and thematically structured by the titles of the successive subchapters: “First Meeting with the Polar Eskimos” (Første Møde med Polareskimoer), “The Magician’s Last Great Inspiration” (En Aandemaners sidste store Inspiration), “A Tribal Migration” (En Folkevandring), “The Old Bear-Hunter” (Den gamle Bjørnejæger), “The Orphan” (Forældreløs), “Women” (Kvinder), “A Summer Journey” (En Sommerrejse), “The Dark Draws Near” (Mørket nærmer sig), “Hunting for Reindeer” (Efter Vildren) and “Weatherbound” (Vejrfast). This is followed by the section devoted to Inughuit beliefs and old fables.

Generically speaking, The New People is a first-person travel narrative, which rarely morphs into a personal diary. Published by Gyldendal in 1905, the book sported a graphic design which resembled fictional literature, as each chapter was preceded by Moltke’s artfully crafted plates and the volume contained no maps, photos or drawings of the route, which typically featured in such accounts.²⁰³ In his diary from the Literary Expedition, Rasmussen stated that he wanted to avoid producing a “travel description” as Mylius-Erichsen, the leader of the expedition, had taken the task upon himself.²⁰⁴ As a result, Rasmussen came up with a literary hybrid which defies any simple definition and vastly differs from his later writings, though it shares with them the theme of a journey into the unknown and the encounter of the European subject with the non-European Other.

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2 The Subject’s Preconceptions about North Greenland and the Inughuit

When I was a child I used often to hear an old Greenlandic woman tell how, far away North, at the end of the world, there lived a people who dressed in bearskins and ate raw flesh.

Their country was always shut in by ice, and the daylight never reached over the tops of the high fjelds.

Whoever wished to go there, must travel with the South wind, right up to the Lord of the wild northern gales.

Even before I knew what travelling meant, I determined that one day I would go and find these people, whom my fancy pictured different from all others. I must go and see “The New People,” as the old story-teller called them.

While I was growing up in Denmark, the thought of them was always with me, and the first decision I came to as a man was that I would go to look for them. My opportunity arrived, and as a member of the “Danish Literary Expedition to Greenland,” I passed the winter of 1903–1904 among these Polar Eskimos, the most northerly dwelling people in the world.

And it is from this sojourn, remote from all civilisation, that the following recollections date.²⁰⁵

This poetical introduction to The New People lays the foundation for establishing a relationship between the subject of the utterance and its objects: North Greenland and the Inughuit. The narrator, whose distinctive features include Europeanness, masculinity, middle-class membership and scientific aspirations as implied by his participation in the “literary” expedition, presents his motivations for undertaking a journey in order to meet the Other, which he then turns into the object of his narrative, thereby investing it with new meanings. His first step towards the discovery of the North-Greenlandic world is an imaginary feat, driven by the power of the old Greenlandic story-teller’s narrative, which the introduction evokes. This narrative breeds the concept of an origin in which the Inughuit are imagined – invented – as exotic Hyperboreans who inhabit the northernmost of all lands, situated on the fringes of the European world. Consequently, a journey to this place, which the narrator perceives as remote, is discursivised as ensuing from the cumulative influence of pre-existing, superimposed information, prejudgements and narratives about the Other.

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Telling a story of himself and the events preceding the journey in retrospect, the narrator begins with his expectations as to the remote, northern realm: it is forever locked in ice, knows no daylight and is inhabited by half-legendary, exotic creatures who, “different from all others,” do not resemble people he knows. This image of North Greenland and its inhabitants reproduces an entrenched stereotype of the island as the space of the Other and as “other” space: like Said’s Orient, the unknown Arctic Greenland, as perceived by a traveller who plans on going there, embodies that which Europe is not and exists first and foremost as a projection of his own ideas and expectations. That his perspective is rooted in European (Danish) culture is indisputable, yet the menacing, distant Other tempts him with its exoticism and remoteness, becoming the imaginary destination of his future journey. This journey will produce another narrative, one which the traveller is now presenting to the reader, wiser as he is from all his experiences on the journey. The new narrative will serve as a starting point for other travellers.²⁰⁶

For the narrator of The New People, the experience of North Greenland begins at an indefinite place in West Greenland in his childhood and is mediated by the tales of an indigenous Greenlandic story-teller, to whom people living far off in the North are as foreign and as exotic as they are to a European boy that listens to her stories. The character of an old Greenlandic woman is not only an evocation of an old memory. Importantly, she embodies native knowledge, which the narrator accepts and recognises as a worldview equally as legitimate as the European one. It is from this woman that he first hears the term “new,” which he picks up to call the object of his dreams: new people and new land. At the same time, his narrative gets inscribed in the European mythological order as the imagined “new people” are placed at the periphery of the charted world, just behind the dwelling ←69 | 70→of the god of the North Wind, Boreas.²⁰⁷ Underpinned by both indigenous and European knowledge, the dual mythical pattern resembles the quest in search of the promised land of Canaan; it sets the direction and the route for the journey into the unknown as a network of metaphorical associations enabling the narrator to orient himself amidst “the unpredictable novelty of things.”²⁰⁸

In the preface to the account a split has already been produced in the European subject, who on the one hand inscribes his narrative in the ancient European myth of Hyperboreans inhabiting the outermost edge of the world and on the other builds on the indigenous knowledge about people who wear bearskins, feed on raw meat and live far off in the North, a realm unknown to West Greenlanders. The nexus of references stretches at the same time to the cradle of European civilisation with its grand narratives and to the Greenlandic oral tradition of telling stories of their ancestors by the light of fish-oil lamps when a storm is raging outside or the polar night has set in. Evoking both tale species simultaneously, the subject locates himself in-between the two stories, with the meaning of his own narrative similarly finely poised as “neither the one nor the other.”²⁰⁹

The journey to North Greenland is motivated by sentimental reasons that guide the European traveller. His innocence is highlighted by the fairy-tale nature of both tales: one heard from an old Greenlandic woman and the other produced by the narrator. Although he is already a grown-up male, he still resembles a young boy, who mirrors young Marlow in Heart of Darkness with his curiosity about the “blank spaces” on the map of the world and his urge to pursue his dreams of distant journeys and meetings with exotic, non-European Others in order to re-assert his own expectations and beliefs.²¹⁰ Such journeying, ←70 | 71→which Syed Manzurul Islam labels “sedentary travel,”²¹¹ indeed institutes a rigid boundary between the Other and the knowing subject, immobilising the latter in its self-sufficiency.²¹² Such positioning leads to othering, a process based on essentialisation and the binary frame.²¹³ The aims of Rasmussen’s traveller, which are presented as an innocent aspiration to capture otherness in the form of knowledge and patently unrelated to the goals of Eurocolonial expansion, inscribe the narrative about the original reason behind the expedition to the space inhabited by the mythical “new people” into the discursive paradigm of “anti-conquest.” This paradigm is expressed in a craving “for a way of taking possession without subjugation and violence,”²¹⁴ where narrative is relied on for subordinating non-European subjects – despite or, rather, due to the obtrusive passivity and innocence of the western traveller.²¹⁵ It results in a story entitled The New People, the foreword to which is the first of many inscriptions the narrator will perform upon the Inughuit people and the area of North Greenland.

The traveller’s yearning for the mythologised Other, however, expresses something more than just an aspiration of the remote and immobilised subject to give meaning to a non-European people in the guise of anti-conquest ideology. The subject’s utterance is split in itself, which comes to light when “the call of the other” surfaces in the narrator’s reflective retrospection.²¹⁶ This call, which is first heard as an old Greenlandic woman is spinning her tale, becomes part of the narrator’s past experience and present moment, in which the Inughuit are still vivid in his mind, which is why he wants to meet them face to face. The discursivised presence of the Other makes the traveller mobile and directs him towards North Greenland. This shows that interaction is possible and, consequently, that it is possible to transcend “the paranoia of othering that represents the other in relation to oneself,” thus portending the viability of “nomadic travel,” during which the stiff boundary dividing the subject and the object will be demolished.²¹⁷ Productive of his epistemological position, the journey of the foreword’s narrator to North Greenland may thus equally be an upshot of the ←71 | 72→shared past of the Other and the European subject and a project expressive of the passage of mutual experience from the past to the present.²¹⁸

3 North Greenland and the Inughuit as the Other

North Greenland becomes a “new world” for Rasmussen’s narrator many years before he physically crosses the boundary between the parts of Greenland colonised by Denmark and the “no man’s land” in the north, where his narrative of the expedition commences. “We had reached our goal!”²¹⁹ the European traveller announces triumphantly in the first sentence of his account, without explaining why he finds himself in this unknown area in the first place.

His joy is tarnished because one of his companions falls terminally ill and the natives, on meeting whom the success of the expedition hinges, are nowhere in sight. The travellers only come across recently abandoned “strange, primitive human dwellings”²²⁰ of the Inughuit, which makes them feel that they have come into contact with something unknown and new. The former dwellers apparently could not have gone far away because their tracks are only slightly covered in snow, and a big, yet-ungutted seal is found behind one of the snow huts. The narrator makes a poetic pause to reminisce about a legend an old Greenlander from the island’s western part once told him about a man who had lived north of all the settlements and who, like the travellers themselves now, had come across traces of strangers and freshly deserted dwellings several times, without ever seeing their inhabitants.

The inclusion of a Greenlandic legend into the story about the mysterious people of the North confirms the narrator’s familiarity with the oral folklore of Greenlanders, which had already been highlighted in the introduction to the account. This confirms the complexity of the narrative perspective, as the narrator is not just a Danish, middle-class male who is propelled by an innocent desire to meet “new people.” He is well versed in Greenlandic realities, which helps him interpret the traces left by “strangers” beyond that which the European framework of reference would allow. The dramatic nature of the situation which the travellers face is thus expressed through a parable whose course, if re-enacted, will be disastrous to the expedition members, dependent on the help of the absent natives as they all are.

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Having thoroughly scrutinised the abandoned abodes, the travellers grow even more distressed as the homes differ strikingly from everything the Europeans recognise as human dwelling places. Discursive processes of othering surface in the narrative:

The first time one sees a house of this description one is struck by the little with which human beings can be content. It is all so primitive, and has such an odour of paganism and magic incantation. A cave like this, skilfully built in arch of gigantic blocks of stone, one involuntarily peoples mentally with half supernatural beings. You see them, in your fancy, pulling and tearing at raw flesh, you see the blood dripping from their fingers, and you are seized yourself with a strange excitement at the thought of the extraordinary life that awaits you in their company.²²¹

The “imagination was at work” both in the narrator and in the expedition members, and as it soared, so did the processes of making sense of the unknown reality.²²² As perceived by the narrator, North Greenland turns into the space of “others,” and the otherness is marked by their heathen, uncivilised ways, mysterious aura and purported supernatural features. North Greenland is also “other” space as the narrator – who is a European traveller and a citizen of the country that took possession of a northern territory many times larger than itself, which it calls “Danish West Greenland”²²³ – refers to the Greenlandic hunters who accompany him as “our Greenlanders,”²²⁴ whereby he marks the difference between the familiar and the otherness he encounters, deflecting the imaginary constructs which emerge in his mind. A solid foundation is thus laid for the otherness of the Inughuit even before they appear as subjects within the superior European narrative.

The alterity of the “other” which is crafted in this way is, at the same time, moderated by the explanatory voice of the omniscient narrator. Describing the burial sites he comes across, he states: “There, then, men lay buried with all their possessions, as Eskimo custom prescribes,”²²⁵ which explicitly points to his expertise in the cultural habits of the indigenous population. As his additional, non-European knowledge is revealed, it seems less plausible that the traveller is entirely astonished by the foreign, exotic culture. Similarly, the Inughuit name ←73 | 74→of the settlement he cites (Netsilivik)²²⁶ indicate that North Greenland was not a completely “new,” blank slate to him. This enhances the impression that otherness is rhetorically constructed in the descriptions of the first encounters of the European traveller with the North-Greenlandic cultural landscape.

The first “strangers” the Europeans meet are an Inughuit married couple: “Our dogs begin to bark, and the sledges meet to the accompaniment of loud yelps. We spring off and run up to each other, stop and stare at one another, incapable of speech, both parties equally astonished.”

“I explain to him who we are, and where we come from.”

“ ‘White men! White men!’ he calls out to his wife. ‘White men have come on a visit!’ ”

“We have no difficulty in understanding or making ourselves understood.”²²⁷

Being immediately recognised by the first Inughuit he encounters as a white man from Europe widens the crack in the traveller’s ostensibly coherent narrative about the “Others” and their alleged novelty, which is exposed as another of his projections. For the Inughuit, the newcomers are first and foremost strangers: they are identified as belonging to the same species as other “white men” they had met earlier – people who certainly differ from themselves, but are by no means new.

The narrative present tense used in the passage above, which is often used in travel writings as a fictionalising device,²²⁸ serves a variety of functions. Here, it is employed to produce an impression that the narrator is reporting the events as they happen and to build tension. For it is the first moment of contact between the Danish travellers and the non-European Other that will determine whether the polar explorer’s preconceptions about the Inughuit will be confirmed or overthrown, which is a decisive factor in the further course of events and the success of the expedition. To dramatise and dynamise the episodes, the narrative past tense is also used in reporting another meeting. This time the travellers meet a much bigger group of the Inughuit who live in an Agpat settlement:

And then, like a mountain slide, the whole swarm rushed down to the shore, where we have pulled up – a few old grey-haired men and stiff-jointed old crones, young men and women, children who could hardly toddle, all dressed alike in these fox and bear-skin furs, which create such an extraordinarily barbaric first impression. Some came with long knives in their hands, with bloodstained arms and upturned sleeves, having been ←74 | 75→in the midst of flaying operations when we arrived, and all this produced a very savage effect; at the moment it was difficult to believe that these “savages,” “the neighbours of the North Pole,” as Astrup called them, were ever likely to become one’s good, warm friends.²²⁹

The way the arrival at Agpat is related even more explicitly renders the mental detachment of the travelling observer from the events at the heart of which he finds himself. By producing a gap between the European subject and the native object of his observation, the narrator seeks to install the “Eurocolonial discursive order” through applying clear binary oppositions between the Other and the Same.²³⁰ The savagery, barbarity, strangeness and geographical remoteness of the Inughuit, their exotic apparel of animal skins, “long knives in their hands”²³¹ and “bloodstained arms,” all but emphasise the alterity of the dangerous Other, who diverges from everything that is familiar, known and represented by “civilisation,” “normality,” “proximity” and “domesticity,” interlocked with an array of characteristically European behaviours. Nevertheless, the binary investment of the description and the dramatic undertones that pervade it are soon neutralised by the voice of the transcendent narrator, who puts the readers at ease by intimating that it is possible to befriend and, thus, “domesticate” the Other. Evoking in the text the name of Norwegian polar explorer Eivind Astrup, the first Scandinavian to pass the winter among the indigenous inhabitants of Smith Sound, further reassures the European reader that this will actually happen despite all the ominous signs to the contrary. At work here is the strategy of “the unquestioned reliability of the transcendent narrator,”²³² which – typically of European travel writing – consists in first exercising the practices of othering in order to foreground a potential threat and then foreshadowing the future in which the peaceable nature of the Other is borne out through the speaker’s personal relationships with him. In Rasmussen’s narrative, however, the strategy is used differently than ←75 | 76→in other authors of Scandinavian expedition accounts, as his narrator includes a West-Greenlandic perspective on an equal footing with the Europe-rooted narrative. For the narrator of The New People, the familiar and the domestic are associated not only with Europe/Denmark but also with West Greenland, with which he identifies and which differs from the space of the North-Greenlandic Other he is experiencing.

Recounted from the outsider perspective, the dramatic narrative rendering of the first encounter with the Other is intertwined with a complementary story in which the course of events is shown from the viewpoint of two Inughuit hunters who return to the settlement in the wake of the arrival of the European visitors. The hunters see traces of unknown sledges and are completely at a loss because the trail stretches from the south while “sledges never come that way!”²³³ The tension generated by another application of the dramatic present tense is additionally enhanced by references to old tales about murderous people from the South. The hunters worry about their wives who have stayed at home alone with their children. The ostensible native perspective is debunked when the men arrive at the abandoned settlement, which, as the narrator mentions, was a place “where our dogs had disported themselves.”²³⁴ The narrator’s use of “we” to refer to himself and his companions alternates with “strangers,” and the merging of these perspectives heralds the idea that he seeks to understand and adopt the indigenous viewpoint without renouncing his privileged outsider view, which once again confirms that in perceiving the reality he observes he takes two (or even more) positions at the same time.

The suspenseful story of the native hunters’ homecoming culminates when on returning to the settlement they are welcomed by a commotion, noise and sensational news from a swarm of children who rush out to meet them: “ ‘White men! White men have come!’ ”²³⁵ The narrative about the arrival of the Danish travellers at Agpat and the later return of the Inughuit hunters to the settlement make up two separate episodes which are combined by the textual time-space. The inclusion of the indigenous story serves to portray the dramatic tension on either side of the dividing line which is drawn in the newly emerging contact zone. Consequently, interaction between the newcomers from Europe and the population of the non-Western periphery is portrayed as triggering insecurity and being potentially risky, while this effect is eventually neutralised, on the one ←76 | 77→hand, by a reference to knowledge about the Inughuit acquired from writings by other Scandinavian travellers and, on the other, by the image of excited Inughuit children.

Arrival episodes are a staple of the travel literature convention, instrumental in “framing relations of contact and setting the terms of its representation” in the text.²³⁶ Although initially the Inughuit make “such an extraordinarily barbaric first impression” on the Europeans and all the tokens suggest to the Inughuit hunters who are hurrying back home that the strangers have not come “with any friendly intent,”²³⁷ the propitious hints at the end of each story are soon re-asserted as the narrative unfolds. The Inughuit turn out to be hospitable hosts and quick and effective helpers. The visitors are offered a welcome meal of walrus liver, pay a visit to angekok (shaman) Sagdlork himself and have an igloo built for them within half an hour as “ ‘There is a sick man with you, so you must be helped quickly’ – they said.”²³⁸ The narrator explicitly appreciates the welcome they are given as “affectingly cordial” and, again, foreshadows the future events by saying: “it seemed that they could not do enough for us. And just as they were on our arrival: helpful as they could possibly be, and most generous with their gifts, – so they remained the whole time that we spent among them.”²³⁹