“Of course,” said Nookap, “there is one real difference between white men and Eskimos. White men always think of ice as frozen water, but Eskimos think of water as melted ice. To us ice is the natural state.”

As part of my research for this trip I’ve been reading some of the classic tales of polar explorers, including Farthest North and The First Crossing of Greenland by Norwegian polar explorer extraordinaire Fridtjof Nansen (1861–1930), and Tracks in the Snow by David Haig-Thomas, a British explorer and rapscallion (1908–1944). Haig-Thomas’ book depicts a long dog sledge trip with Nookapingwa, a Northern Greenland Eskimo hunter and guide (1893–1956), who had a lot to teach ‘Davey’ about life in the Arctic. The lessons still resound loudly today.

The audio commentary of the following film is cringe-worthy but the scenes were shot by Haig-Thomas in 1938 while in Greenland. I would love to see the footage that was cut but I have no idea if it still exists.

“You white men are strange,” he said. “Look now, there is old Tigguak. He is so pleased because he has won the competition and there are the rest of us who are sad because we haven’t won, and yet you go and give him the prize. Why, it is we who haven’t won who ought to have something to cheer us up.”

“I had also found a barren island of some two hundred square miles — I imagine entirely useless to anyone. But who could tell? Gibraltar and Canada had, in turn, both been thought completely useless. Who knows? One day a geologist may visit my island and find radium. If anything was to be found there, I would rather it were radium, which could be used to help mankind, than some useless metal like gold or silver, or, worse still, iron to be made into guns, tanks and other weapons for slaughtering men.”

“As far as I could hear from the news, which we could never get very clearly, war would break out in a few days. It seemed a pity that perhaps the results of our expedition would never be worked out — but whatever happened I had had those wonderful fifteen months in the Arctic, even if, in a few weeks’ time, I was riddled with machine-gun bullets.”

That was written about August 1938. Nazi Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. After he returned from Greenland, Haig-Thomas served in the British Royal Army Service Corp and was ambushed and killed on D-Day — June 6, 1944. The Arctic wilderness can be a dangerous place — but so is civilization.

Tracks in the Snow Page Citations: “There is one real difference…” pg 170; “You white men…” pg 276; “I had also found…” pg 251; “As far as I could hear…” pg 279.