Introducing the North Water: Histories of exploration, ice dynamics, living resources, and human settlement in the Thule Region

Abstract

The North Water is a recurrent polynya in the High Arctic situated between Northwest Greenland and Ellesmere Island of Canada. The North Water makes a dynamic space, where various processes may enhance or obstruct each other, accelerating or halting particular modes of human–animal relations in the region, where life itself depends on the North Water. This will be discussed in four steps. The first step posits the North Water as a perceived oasis for explorers and whalers hailing from Europe or America in the nineteenth century. The second step concentrates on the diverse rhythms inherent in the ice conditions, as affected by trends that are set in motion elsewhere. The third step highlights the implications of the dynamics of the ice and sea currents for animal life in the region. The fourth step gives an overview of human settlement patterns around the North Water across the ages. The article shows how natural and social features are deeply implicated in each other, even if they are not directly co-variant.

Living in an oasis: Rapid transformations, resilience, and resistance in the North Water Area societies and ecosystems

“…When and how do particular transformations qualify as transitions or even tipping points? Life in the multi-species community in the Thule Region has been sustained by the post-glacial polynya, which allowed both animals and humans to settle and remain there over four millennia—even if human settlement in the area was discontinuous (Hastrup et al 2018 ). The hiatuses have a lot to do with climate fluctuations, as have the current changes, social and ecological, although there is no simple causality, as we have seen.…”

“…The best documented case of direct relevance to our study area is that of the travels of the famous Qillarsuaq, who eventually had a major effect on the lives of people in the North Water area (Gilberg 1976 ; Ulloriaq 1985 ; Mary-Rousselière 2002 ; see also Hastrup et al 2018 ). Qillarsuaq’s long journey seems to have begun with a killing in southern Baffin Island in the early 1840s.…”

“…1 a or b scenario) took place in the fifteenth century. An important driver in these changes would have been a gradual exhaustion of the wood brought from Alaska and the local and limited sources of driftwood, owing to the expanding ice cover in the Baffin Bay during the Little Ice Age (Alix 2016 ; Hastrup et al 2018 ). Even if we do not have a sufficiently refined chronological control of the order of events that took place in prehistoric times, it does seem clear that a substantial amount of Inuit moved further south in Greenland to settle all areas from south of the Melville Bay to Cape Farewell, and then north into East Greenland during the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century.…”

Life around the North Water ecosystem: Natural and social drivers of change over a millennium

“…(Ross 1819, pp. 119–120; Hastrup et al 2018). The Baffin-landers were also to contribute vitally to the technologies of the inhabitants of Thule.…”

“…A few of the remaining Islanders arriving in the 1860s were still alive, when Knud Rasmussen first came to Thule in 1903, and they could tell how they had taught people to use the (now) available wood for bows and arrows, fishing spears and not least kayaks (Rasmussen 1908, pp. 32–33; Hastrup et al 2018). This brought back vital elements in their original technologies of movement and hunting.…”