David goes to Greenland

by David Binney Putnam

The Morrissey in Jones Sound.

One night Professor Hobbs of the University of Michigan gave us a lecture on the Greenland Ice Cap. He believes that many of the Atlantic storms start in Greenland. The country, as you probably know, is practically all ice. There is just a little strip of land around the shore, especially at the south, which is not covered with the Ice Cap. It is thought that this may be a mile or more thick, but nobody knows the exact measurement. The glaciers are tongues of the Ice Cap that kind of ooze out to the ocean and then break off into icebergs. There are about three hundred people in the part of Greenland where we are going, up North. The Greenland [[27]]Ice Cap and the Antarctic regions are supposed to be the coldest places in the world, even colder than the North Pole region.

When Peary crossed the northern part of Greenland he found that when he climbed a hill of ice the wind was in his face; and when he went down a slope the wind was on his back. In other words, that there always seemed to be a wind coming down from the ice. Professor Hobbs and his party, whom we are taking to Holsteinsborg, will study these winds, the movements of the ice and other things.

A Baffin Bay Portrait of the Author.

One time about our second day in the ice when we were winding in and out of the leads we saw a black something in the water. I yelled out to the others to come and see the seal. It was the first northern one I had seen outside of a zoo or circus. I happened to see this one because I was out on the end of the bowsprit, with Robert Peary, our chief engineer, with whom I play around a lot. [[28]]He is the son of Admiral Peary who discovered the North Pole. This is his first trip North. He and I are great friends.

You probably have heard of Eric the Red. He was a Norwegian who equipped a ship from Norway in the year 983 and set sail for a land that had been discovered by one Gunbjorn to the west of Iceland. When he got to this land he wondered how he could best get people to go there to live, so he called it Greenland. That was the real beginning of the present Greenland. After that cattle were brought and raised in the southern parts.

Greenland is about fifteen hundred miles long from South to North and about six hundred miles wide at the widest place.

We will pick up Knud Rasmussen at Disko Island where, I have read, lots of fossils have been found. I hope to get some for my collection. At home I have a small room which we call my museum, in which I am gathering together quite a lot of really interesting [[29]]things. Already I have a lot there brought back from the Arcturus expedition, and things given me by explorers and travellers who come to our house. One of my best treasures is a bunch of pieces of the shell of a dinosaur egg, given me by Roy Chapman Andrews, the man who first found these eggs in Asia. They are ten million years old.