Mapping Ultima Thule. Agata Lubowicka

astonished by the foreign, exotic culture. Similarly, the Inughuit name ←73 | 74→of the settlement he cites (Netsilivik)²²⁶ indicate that North Greenland was not a completely “new,” blank slate to him. This enhances the impression that otherness is rhetorically constructed in the descriptions of the first encounters of the European traveller with the North-Greenlandic cultural landscape.

      The first “strangers” the Europeans meet are an Inughuit married couple: “Our dogs begin to bark, and the sledges meet to the accompaniment of loud yelps. We spring off and run up to each other, stop and stare at one another, incapable of speech, both parties equally astonished.”

      “I explain to him who we are, and where we come from.”

      “ ‘White men! White men!’ he calls out to his wife. ‘White men have come on a visit!’ ”

      “We have no difficulty in understanding or making ourselves understood.”²²⁷

      Being immediately recognised by the first Inughuit he encounters as a white man from Europe widens the crack in the traveller’s ostensibly coherent narrative about the “Others” and their alleged novelty, which is exposed as another of his projections. For the Inughuit, the newcomers are first and foremost strangers: they are identified as belonging to the same species as other “white men” they had met earlier – people who certainly differ from themselves, but are by no means new.

      The narrative present tense used in the passage above, which is often used in travel writings as a fictionalising device,²²⁸ serves a variety of functions. Here, it is employed to produce an impression that the narrator is reporting the events as they happen and to build tension. For it is the first moment of contact between the Danish travellers and the non-European Other that will determine whether the polar explorer’s preconceptions about the Inughuit will be confirmed or overthrown, which is a decisive factor in the further course of events and the success of the expedition. To dramatise and dynamise the episodes, the narrative past tense is also used in reporting another meeting. This time the travellers meet a much bigger group of the Inughuit who live in an Agpat settlement:

      And then, like a mountain slide, the whole swarm rushed down to the shore, where we have pulled up – a few old grey-haired men and stiff-jointed old crones, young men and women, children who could hardly toddle, all dressed alike in these fox and bear-skin furs, which create such an extraordinarily barbaric first impression. Some came with long knives in their hands, with bloodstained arms and upturned sleeves, having been ←74 | 75→in the midst of flaying operations when we arrived, and all this produced a very savage effect; at the moment it was difficult to believe that these “savages,” “the neighbours of the North Pole,” as Astrup called them, were ever likely to become one’s good, warm friends.²²⁹

      The way the arrival at Agpat is related even more explicitly renders the mental detachment of the travelling observer from the events at the heart of which he finds himself. By producing a gap between the European subject and the native object of his observation, the narrator seeks to install the “Eurocolonial discursive order” through applying clear binary oppositions between the Other and the Same.²³⁰ The savagery, barbarity, strangeness and geographical remoteness of the Inughuit, their exotic apparel of animal skins, “long knives in their hands”²³¹ and “bloodstained arms,” all but emphasise the alterity of the dangerous Other, who diverges from everything that is familiar, known and represented by “civilisation,” “normality,” “proximity” and “domesticity,” interlocked with an array of characteristically European behaviours. Nevertheless, the binary investment of the description and the dramatic undertones that pervade it are soon neutralised by the voice of the transcendent narrator, who puts the readers at ease by intimating that it is possible to befriend and, thus, “domesticate” the Other. Evoking in the text the name of Norwegian polar explorer Eivind Astrup, the first Scandinavian to pass the winter among the indigenous inhabitants of Smith Sound, further reassures the European reader that this will actually happen despite all the ominous signs to the contrary. At work here is the strategy of “the unquestioned reliability of the transcendent narrator,”²³² which – typically of European travel writing – consists in first exercising the practices of othering in order to foreground a potential threat and then foreshadowing the future in which the peaceable nature of the Other is borne out through the speaker’s personal relationships with him. In Rasmussen’s narrative, however, the strategy is used differently than ←75 | 76→in other authors of Scandinavian expedition accounts, as his narrator includes a West-Greenlandic perspective on an equal footing with the Europe-rooted narrative. For the narrator of The New People, the familiar and the domestic are associated not only with Europe/Denmark but also with West Greenland, with which he identifies and which differs from the space of the North-Greenlandic Other he is experiencing.

      Recounted from the outsider perspective, the dramatic narrative rendering of the first encounter with the Other is intertwined with a complementary story in which the course of events is shown from the viewpoint of two Inughuit hunters who return to the settlement in the wake of the arrival of the European visitors. The hunters see traces of unknown sledges and are completely at a loss because the trail stretches from the south while “sledges never come that way!”²³³ The tension generated by another application of the dramatic present tense is additionally enhanced by references to old tales about murderous people from the South. The hunters worry about their wives who have stayed at home alone with their children. The ostensible native perspective is debunked when the men arrive at the abandoned settlement, which, as the narrator mentions, was a place “where our dogs had disported themselves.”²³⁴ The narrator’s use of “we” to refer to himself and his companions alternates with “strangers,” and the merging of these perspectives heralds the idea that he seeks to understand and adopt the indigenous viewpoint without renouncing his privileged outsider view, which once again confirms that in perceiving the reality he observes he takes two (or even more) positions at the same time.

      The suspenseful story of the native hunters’ homecoming culminates when on returning to the settlement they are welcomed by a commotion, noise and sensational news from a swarm of children who rush out to meet them: “ ‘White men! White men have come!’ ”²³⁵ The narrative about the arrival of the Danish travellers at Agpat and the later return of the Inughuit hunters to the settlement make up two separate episodes which are combined by the textual time-space. The inclusion of the indigenous story serves to portray the dramatic tension on either side of the dividing line which is drawn in the newly emerging contact zone. Consequently, interaction between the newcomers from Europe and the population of the non-Western periphery is portrayed as triggering insecurity and being potentially risky, while this effect is eventually neutralised, on the one ←76 | 77→hand, by a reference to knowledge about the Inughuit acquired from writings by other Scandinavian travellers and, on the other, by the image of excited Inughuit children.

      Arrival episodes are a staple of the travel literature convention, instrumental in “framing relations of contact and setting the terms of its representation” in the text.²³⁶ Although initially the Inughuit make “such an extraordinarily barbaric first impression” on the Europeans and all the tokens suggest to the Inughuit hunters who are hurrying back home that the strangers have not come “with any friendly intent,”²³⁷ the propitious hints at the end of each story are soon re-asserted as the narrative unfolds. The Inughuit turn out to be hospitable hosts and quick and effective helpers. The visitors are offered a welcome meal of walrus liver, pay a visit to angekok (shaman) Sagdlork himself and have an igloo built for them within half an hour as “ ‘There is a sick man with you, so you must be helped quickly’ – they said.”²³⁸ The narrator explicitly appreciates the welcome they are given as “affectingly cordial” and, again, foreshadows the future events by saying: “it seemed that they could not do enough for us. And just as they were on our arrival: helpful as they could possibly be, and most generous with their gifts, – so they remained the whole time that we spent among them.”²³⁹