In 982 A.D. a fleet of little dragon-prowed ships with red sails moved slowly westward from Iceland. Somewhere in the grey Atlantic their Norwegian outlaw leader Eric the Red expected to find a new land. North Atlantic gales blew up. Many a little ship foundered, its red-bearded vikings drowned stolidly in their iron helmets and shirts of mail. But Eric sailed on until he came on a mountainous waste of land. Four years later he sailed there again with 14 shiploads of colonists, survivors of 25 ships that had tacked away from Iceland. Not because his new land was briefly luxuriant in summer, but because "people would like better to come there if it had a good name," Eric the Red called it Greenland. When his colonists looked at the miserable winter waste they howled "Swindle!" He dumped them brusquely ashore just the same.
For three centuries Greenland was a republic. In 1261 it became a Norwegian colony and a government ship went once a year to Greenland; after 1410 it went no more. In 1585 an Englishman found only graves and Eskimos in Greenland. The Norse skeletons showed the effects of scurvy and rickets. In 1721 a Norwegian missionary tried again to make Greenland a white man's land, and Norway began to ship its convicts to Greenland. But in 1814 Norway lost Greenland. It was done by an Irishman's "lie" that last week reverberated through Norway and Denmark.
King Frederick VI of Norway & Denmark, having sided with Napoleon, was forced to cede Norway to Sweden. At the peace table it was read, "King Frederick cedes the kingdom of Norway with all its dependencies. ..." A smart Dane put in quickly, "excepting Greenland, the Faroes and Iceland." An Irishman named Edmund Bourke added, "These colonies have never belonged to Norway." In 1814 Norwegians, rankling at Sweden, scarcely noticed the lie or the loss of Greenland. They continued to hunt and seal on its gloomy eastern coast. The Danes claimed only the west coast. Greenland was still anybody's dead horse.
In 1917 Denmark suddenly decided all Greenland was worth having. Like an ant with a dead beetle, it claimed sovereignty over an area 50 times as big as itself. Startled were Norwegians who had always quietly thought and quietly said that eastern Greenland was theirs. They began to remember Eric the Red's drowned vikings, the seals and the lie, began to mutter that Norway had been put upon.
In 1931 Norway's little-known Arctic Council of peppery explorers warned Norway that Danes were planning to explore East Greenland, secure it for Denmark (TIME, June 8, 1931 et seq.). Acting quickly, Norway sent half a dozen men to plant the Norwegian flag among the sad-eyed Eskimos and puffins on a 350-mile strip of the eastern coast which they named Eric the Red Land. A year later another Norwegian expedition "seized"' more of East Greenland.
Denmark's rage at this "impudence" was not softened by the fact that Denmark had ruled Greenland philanthropically at a loss. It could easily have made it pay but it has shut out all foreign immigration except for some 300 Danish cryolite miners. Its policy is to keep Greenland safe for the "kindhearted, trusting Eskimos." To keep Eskimos happy, Denmark now furiously claimed every foot of Greenland.