stefansson-wrangel-09-31-019v

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THE ADVENTURE OF WRANGEL ISLAND

known only from the tiniest fragments of documents and
from the scattered bones of a few of those who died.

The white and fearful wilderness which the Greeks
had assigned to the northern portion of their flat world earth (whether spherical or flat)
had been banished from men’s minds for three centuries
in favor of a potentially navigable ocean joining, on a
round world, Europe to the coveted East. But the
Franklin tragedy gave the lifeless northern wastes of the
ancients their second innings. The world was still round,
but at the “top” of it men now pictured to themselves
an impassably frozen and desert ocean which no longer
connected, but, instead, separated Europe and China.

Commercial endeavors have their roots in a firm opti-
mism. Men hope for success, they hope for profit, and
that general frame of mind colors everything they see.
The old Norse Icelandic sagas tell that the discoverers of Greenland
in 983 named the country so “thinking that colonists
would all the more desire to go there if the land had a
fair name.” When Eric the Red went among his Norse Scandi-
navian countrymen in search of colonists, he certainly
told them no tales of hardship and terror, for he induced
twenty-five ships to follow him from Iceland towards
Greenland in 986, each loaded with men, women, chil-
dren, dogs, cattle, horses, sheep, poultry and household
goods. Some of the ships were wrecked and some were
driven back by storms, but fourteen got through, and
that autumn about 700 colonists landed on the west
coast of Greenland. That was a larger colony than the first contingent sent by
England to Virginia, Massachusetts, or indeed to any of
what became the Thirteen American Colonies. And so well
did they understand their new environment that they
seem to have had in the beginning fewer hardships than
the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock. They built up there at once in Greenland what we would
now call a "dairy industry." Vatican documents show
that the Popes of the Middle Ages knew that Greenland
exported butter, cheese and wool to Europe, and that the
dignitaries of the Church were thankful for the contribu-