Mapmakers speak a language of contours and borders, but this lexicon says nothing of the relationship between geography and people. And they’ve missed Greenland completely.
What’s the biggest island in the world? If you answered, Australia, you effete pommy know-all, well I’m sorry – go and face the wall by the nature table. If you said Tasmania, go and sit on the nature table. Australia is a continent and therefore doesn’t count as an island, and if continents were eligible as islands, then America would be the biggest. The biggest island in the world is Greenland, which makes Denmark the biggest country in Europe, because Denmark owns Greenland. Except that it isn’t, because geographically Greenland is part of North America. It’s separated from Canada by about as far as an angry girlfriend can throw your copy of Call of the Wild.
I’ve just returned from East Greenland, and there’s not a lot of people for whom that proximity is a reality. Even for most of the people in West Greenland it is cheaper to fly from East Greenland to Reykjavik and then on to New York than to fly across the country. It’s that big. It’s four time zones, without a single clock in two of them. Greenland is twice the size of the next biggest island, which is either Borneo, Madagascar or New Guinea. Well done those of you who said New Guinea.
It makes you think a lot about whether size matters. Despite its massive size, Greenland barely registers a blip on the world political, economic or social consciousness. In fact, none of the top four big islands are exactly what you’d call movers or shakers. On most maps, Greenland is shoved to one side or cut in half, effectively squeezed to the edge of the world. Indeed, being up there in the permanent daylight it feels like the edge of the world.
Geography is all about size. Kids who like geography in school are the ones who like lists, like to know the heft and the girth of things. I liked geography. The hottest place in the world? The record temperature is in the Libyan desert, though it might be Ethiopia. The coldest? Lived-in or uninhabited? Uninhabited, the South Pole. Inhabited, Greenland, where there is a dry wind that comes off the ice cap and blows harder than a hurricane. God knows what its wind-chill factor is. The wettest place, the driest, the highest capital? That would be Lima, wouldn’t it, or perhaps La Paz? Capital furthest north? That’s Reykjavik. Rivers, mountains, basins, plains, plateaux, distances. We keep on and on trying to understand the globe by its statistics, by its facts, but really it’s like trying to know a stranger by his laundry list.
Size has another effect on people. In Greenland, the Inuit only live at the very edge of the country. In 4000 years, they’ve ebbed and flowed up and down its vastness, but haven’t ever really got off the beach. You feel all this great empty howling, keening space stretching away behind you, the infeasible, unimaginable pristine freezing whiteness. There’s a similar sense in Brazil. Again, almost everyone lives on the coast; behind them the steaming, dripping green and fetid dense land, lurking with not entirely loving attention.
Size intimidates, and it informs the national character. Though Inuits and Brazilians couldn’t be more unalike, they’re both people who are made by their landscapes. Now coming from a relatively small island such as Britain or Japan, or indeed Iceland, gives you a very different sense of who you are. We make the landscape in our own image. It’s a tame and malleable place. Our geography is raw material; it’s a stroll, a hike, a summer holiday. We think of the world as being an eventually manageable benign place. We come from humanised, human-sized countries.
There are people who are inspired by the size of their countries, like Americans. That ability to pick up sticks and start all over is central to Americans’ idea of themselves. The open road, the new horizon, the ripe and unending bounty of the country. Then there are people who are confined by their geography, who will feel crowded and claustrophobic. The Swiss, the Cubans. Always looking over the fence. King Leopold bought the Congo specifically because he despised the small-town, little-nation bourgeois beer-and-chocolate mentality of his Belgian subjects. He felt that they could do with getting out a bit more. The Russians all need to get out a bit more, and then when they do, you wish they’d all go back.
Maps don’t tell you the things that would be really useful to know about the world. The most boring place, for instance – East Germany. The rudest? Israel. The best-looking men? Cuba. And women? Somalia and Uzbekistan. The best breakfast? Paris and Hanoi. The best lunch? Sicily and Belgium. The best dinner? Bombay and Singapore. Maps should also tell you the most optimistic landscapes, and the most depressing. More of the world is on the move now than in any time since the fall of the Roman Empire. Millions and millions of slow unromantic odysseys, looking for something, for safety, for opportunity, a wife, a tan, a thrill, a chance, a decent night’s sleep. How we see a journey is not measured by where we think we’ll end up, but from where we start off.
Maps are static things. Greenland is the only place in the world that is uncharted. Look at it: it’s an outline with a blank white interior. No one has ever made a map of it, no one’s been to mark its contours and ravines, its plains or its peaks. It is the most spectacular landscape I’ve seen for a long time. The air is so clear you can see for hundreds of kilometres, and it’s not mapped because there’s no point to mapping it. Nothing lives in the middle. Nothing survives there. A map is a diagram of interest and expectation. And there is none in Greenland, and that makes it extraordinary.
The anonymous white, the enormous white is the world’s largest lump of ice, the world’s biggest, greatest reserve of water. And it’s melting. Last year the pack-ice wasn’t thick enough to take the weight of the sleds and the Inuits’ dogs starved. When the ice all melts, it will re-draw the map of the world. Countries will vanish, cities drown, borders will be meaningless. Every atlas and globe that has been settled for a thousand years will be obsolete. And a country that no one ever thinks of, that barely makes it to the back of the picture, will have redrawn the world.