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Noted Arctic historian and published author
Kenn Harper walks us through Hans' past so we may understand
its possible future.
By Kenn Harper
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| The question one is inclined to ask
is not, "Who owns it?" but rather, "Who would want it?" |
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The island is barren and steep-sided. No-one lives there. No-one
except scientific parties ever have. The question one is inclined
to ask is not, "Who owns it?" but rather, "Who would want it?" But
this island is different from other interruptions in the surface
of the Arctic sea. This is Hans Island, two square kilometers of
rock situated at 80° 49' N and 66° 26' W, smack-dab in the middle
of Kennedy Channel, mid-way between Ellesmere Island and Greenland.
It has become the focus of a bizarre border dispute between Canada
and Denmark, an issue that has simmered for three decades and finally
boiled over in 2005.
CANADA'S CLAIM
Canada showed Hans Island as Canadian territory on a map for the
first time only in 1967. Six years later, during negotiations on
a Danish-Canadian agreement over division of the continental shelf,
Canada voiced its claim to Hans Island but efforts to reach a solution
regarding ownership were unsuccessful. Both parties agreed to stop
the median line referred to in that agreement at the low-water
mark on the south coast of the island and start it again at the
low-water mark on the north shore. Because these lines reach the
island, the agreement noted that "the island has no territorial
sea."
In 1983, both countries signed an agreement on co-operation in
marine environmental matters. They also considered a reciprocal
arrangement for processing applications to conduct research on
and around Hans Island. Although that agreement was not signed,
the respective ministers reaffirmed their common interest in avoiding
acts prejudicial to future negotiations. But the unsigned agreement
had already been violated.
That year I met a scientist from Dome Petroleum in Resolute, Northwest
Territories. Embroidered in bold letters on his knitted Inuit-style
hat was the name HANS ISLAND, N.W.T. I asked him about his sartorial
claim to an island that I regarded as part of Greenland and was
surprised to learn that he had just spent the summer on the island
doing ice research.
Dome Petroleum, it turned out, had been doing research on this
tiny island for some years. It planned to build offshore artificial
islands on which to position drilling rigs in the Beaufort Sea,
1,700 kilometres away. Hans Island was a surrogate for an artificial
island. Huge ice floes, some several kilometers in diameter and
up to eight metres thick, flow southward each summer through the
large funnel that is Kennedy Channel. The first obstacle they meet
is Hans Island. With its steep sides, it provided a perfect location
in which to determine how strong an artificial island needed to
be to withstand the force of multi-year ice coming down from the
Arctic Ocean.
BATTLE OF THE BOTTLES
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| Canada’s unyielding position today
has more to do with its claim to the Northwest Passage than
to Hans Island itself. |
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In 1984, I wrote an article on Dome’s occupation of Hans Island
for the local newspaper in Qaanaaq, Greenland, where I lived. A
Danish paper picked up the article. Denmark’s Minister for Greenland
immediately flew to the island where he raised a Danish flag and
left a bottle of Denmark’s finest schnapps at its base. Thus began
the battle of the bottles. Subsequent Canadian and Danish visitors
to the island took turns leaving bottles of their respective favourite
libations, erecting their nation’s flag and removing that of their
opponent.
The dispute is perplexing. Because it has already been agreed that
the island will have no territorial sea, there is no possibility
to extend one or the other nation’s claims for offshore drilling
or fishing rights. One suspects that Canada’s unyielding position
today has more to do with its claim to the Northwest Passage than
to Hans Island itself. Canada appears to feel that losing its claim
to Hans Island may set a precedent for challenge to the more important
trans-oceanic passage through the heart of the High Arctic. The
United States, for one, has always claimed the Northwest Passage
to be an international waterway.
Neither country can claim Hans Island on the basis of historical
occupation. Canada bases its claim on the island’s British discovery
and Canada’s subsequent acquisition of Britain’s Arctic territories.
The problem with that claim is that the island was not discovered
by the British. It was discovered and named on August 29, 1871,
by an American, Charles Francis Hall, as his ship, Polaris,
was northward bound in Kennedy Channel.
Hall named the island for Hans Hendrik, a Greenlandic Inuit member
of his expedition. Hans, from southern Greenland, had worked as
a hunter and guide for two previous American expeditions to remote
northwestern Greenland. He returned once after Hall’s expedition,
this final excursion being with George Nares’s British expedition
in 1875, but this was four years after Hall had named the island.
In Hall’s time, Danish sovereignty did not extend to northern Greenland.
Its exploration had been carried out by Americans. It was not until
1909 that the Greenlandic church established a mission at North
Star Bay. Danes established a trading post there the following
year. The United States gave up any claims it may have had in northern
Greenland in 1916 when it paid Denmark $25,000,000 for the Danish
West Indies (now the Virgin Islands). With that, Denmark extended
its sovereignty to all of Greenland.
"...NINE-TENTHS OF THE LAW..."
One of the tests of a country’s claim to territory is the use it
makes of that land. No Canadian Inuit have ever hunted or routinely
travelled in the area of Hans Island. In fact, no Canadian Inuit
lived permanently on adjacent Ellesmere Island in historic times
until 1953. But the Inughuit of northwestern Greenland historically
used the area surrounding Hans Island as part of their traditional
hunting grounds. Moreover, they have a name for this tiny island.
They call it Tartupaluk in recognition of its kidney-like
shape.
In June of 1915, three men fought their way south by dogsled through
the ice-choked waters of Kennedy Channel. Part of an American expedition
to discover Robert Peary’s chimerical Crocker Land, they were on
their way to the expedition’s base at Etah, Greenland. The three
men, two Inughuit and one American, made good progress until just
north of a tiny island in the middle of the channel. Then, the
American later wrote, "just a mile or so north of that little island
our progress was stopped by a pressure-ridge about forty feet high
that seemed to extend quite across the channel…" Ittukusuk, Asiajuk
and their companion laboured to reach the island, and climbed to
its top to reconnoiter the route ahead. In doing so, they were
using Hans Island for what it historically had been to the farthest
northern Inuit in the world – a landmark, a beacon, a hill to climb
to survey ice conditions ahead or to search for polar bears.
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