Greenland is an island, the largest island in the world, measuring more than 827,300 square miles, It extends from north to south some 1,700 miles, a distance equivalent to from the northern limit of the Shetlands to the southern rim of the Mediterranean, and its average width is 600 miles. It is true that almost six-sevenths of the total area is covered with an enormous and continuous ice-cap which is uninhabitable and almost inaccessible, but at the present moment, in seventy different settlements and trading places, there are about 17,000 colonists entirely cut off from Denmark and their only source of supplies.
Since 1776 Greenland trade has been carried on at the cost of the Danish Government. The Royal Greenland "Trade" or Trading Company has the sole right of navigating and trading in these parts. Both Danish subjects and foreigners alike are forbidden to trade with the Greenlanders or Danish settlers and all vessels met off these coasts by Danish warships are bound to submit to the right of search.
Denmark made a "closed country" of Greenland so that the Greenlander should continue as far as possible to pursue his natural economy and to live his own life, that contact with the Danes should aim at bringing to Greenland the advantages of Western civilization as, far as they could be assimilated and adopted, without its disadvantages. In other words, the aim was to create a good Greenlander and not a poor imitation of a Dane.
The rate of progress from Stone Age culture to ability to participate in the general cultural life of Europe should not proceed at a quicker rate than the majority of natives can keep pace with. The Greenlanders themselves could not possibly handle the trade, they have no natural ability for commerce, and to grant them entire freedom of trade at present would be but to hand them over to deal with private individuals rather than with a protective and benign State.
The only mineral that has become an article of trade and given rise to a commercial undertaking in mining is cryolite, that rare fluoride of aluminium and sodium which is largely used for the making of opalescent glass and, with bauxite, in the production of aluminium, Greenland is the only country in the world where this mineral occurs extensively enough to justify large-scale mining operations. It is found and worked at only one spot in the country—at Ivigtut, on the shores of the Arsuk Fiord. Since 1865 a monopoly for this mining has been granted to the Cryolite Mining and Trading Ca., under the terms of which contract one-third of the net profits went back to the Greenlanders.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.