The recent squabble over Greenland is not only to acquire its rare earth reserves which account for 1.5M (million metric tons) as opposed to the US’s 1.9M (source: U.S. Geological Survey, 2024, accessed 12 February, 2026). Greenland’s location is strategic. Russia with 3.8M is close by. China (44M) sees it as integral to its Polar Silk Road. The US is vocal on its potentials but Canada, its closest neighbour (only 26km apart at the narrowest point by sea) with only 830K of rare earth reserves, is silent.

Greenland is central to the Northwest Passage, which Canada claims as part of its internal waters. As global warming sees the Arctic Ocean opening up potential routes, the passage, and disputes over who controls it, are now centre stage. We review here the race to cross this route to Asia, a route where Greenland is central, and where it can now dominate a west-Arctic bloc to counter Russian hegemony and Chinese influence in the eastern Arctic.

I
Commanding Arctic waters and located nearer America than Europe, Greenland carries immense strategic value. From 986 until ca. 1450, Vikings or Norsemen settled there. It was politically and culturally associated with Norway until 1814, when it was transferred from the Norwegian to the Danish crown which presently owns Greenland as an autonomous territory. ‘Kingdom of Denmark’ incorrectly refers to both countries in the sixteenth-to-nineteenth-century period when their crowns were united.

Per Groenlendinga Saga, Bjarni Herjólfsson, who saw from afar Baffin Island, Labrador and Newfoundland in 986, communicated this to Leif Erikson, son of Erik the Red who had founded Greenland’s first Norse settlement. Ca. 1000, led by this Leif Erikson, Vikings settled Newfoundland’s L’Anse aux Meadows.

Then, the Vikings disappeared from the historical record.

Explorations resumed in 1473 when the Portuguese sailor João Vaz Corte-Real claimed to have reached Newfoundland. The claim is unconfirmed. In 1476, John Scolvus, a Danish or Norwegian navigator-pilot in the service of Denmark’s Christian I, supposedly reached either Labrador or Greenland. This too is unsubstantiated. The father-son duo John and Sebastian Cabot, failing to reach Asia by the Northwest Passage, claimed Newfoundland for England’s Henry VII in 1496. Only Greenland remained to be explored. For that to happen, navigating the Northwest Passage through the Arctic Ocean was essential. 

II
In 1500, Portugal’s Manuel I sent João Vaz’ sons Gaspar and Miguel Corte-Real to Greenland to find a passage to Asia. Finding frozen seas, they went south and arrived instead in Labrador and Newfoundland. The data supplied by them was incorporated in 1502 into a world map, the Cantino Planisphere. It accurately depicts Greenland’s southern coastline.

III
England’s efforts at finding an Arctic passage date from the mid-sixteenth century. Hoping for ‘The Orient’s’ riches, it sought a shortcut through ice-bound Arctic waters to bypass Iberia-controlled seas, particularly in the aftermath of the Treaty of Tordesillas which divided lands ‘discovered’ by Portugal and Spain between the two. The Indian, Atlantic and Pacific oceans became ‘closed seas’ where Portugal and Spain exercised absolute control. Three English ships left Ratcliff in 1553 in search of a Northeast Passage (the ill-fated early Arctic explorer Sir Hugh Willoughby led one of them), but only one of them got as far as the White Sea and opened up commercial and diplomatic relations with Russia. As result, the Russia or Muscovy Company was formed in 1555. 

But the passage was not found and ‘The Orient’ still remained out of reach. 

IV
As ships sailed northwest in a westerly direction to go to the East, the route via Greenland is called the Northwest Passage. The list of failed English attempts to discover the route is long: Martin Frobisher’s 1578 journey was the first major attempt, but he was sidetracked by false gold. Henry Hudson would try in 1610, but would end up in an area now known as Hudson Bay in northeastern Canada.  

On John Davis’ second voyage of 1586, the Sunshine and North Star explored the area between Greenland and Iceland. Davis’ third voyage of 1587 saw Greenland becoming a springboard to America. He wrote: ‘I departed from the coast [the west side of Greenland], thinking to discover the north parts of America’.

America itself was not the ultimate destination; navigators thought Asia lay beyond. The notion would be abandoned only when William Baffin’s expeditions of 1615 and 1616, funded by the ‘Company of Merchants of London, Discoverers of the North West Passage’ (est. 1612, first governor Thomas Smythe, later first governor of the East India Company), dashed hopes of an ice-free western maritime path to Asia. Explorations of the Northwest Passage were forsaken for the next two centuries.

V
Greenland’s association with the Northwest Passage dominates historical writings. We ignore that a Northeast Passage was also supposed to exist; that it was first proposed by the Russians; that its discovery was undertaken and fought over by the English and the Dutch; and that it too was linked with the Arctic Ocean but did not pass through Greenland.

Russian settlers and traders on the White Sea coast were exploring parts of the Northeast Passage as early as the eleventh century. The Russian diplomat Grigory Istoma travelled along the passage to Denmark in 1496 to avoid Swedish-controlled waters, according to the Ustyug Chronicle. Russian sources played a decisive role in influencing the planners of the 1553 English White Sea voyage alluded to earlier, and it is very likely that the 1549 publication of Istoma’s voyage informed them. However, the idea of a possible seaway connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans was first proposed by the diplomat and Renaissance collaborator Dmitry Gerasimov at Rome in 1525.

Once the Northwest’s unsuitability as a pathway to Asia was apparent, England ramped up efforts to discover the northeastern route. The Dutch were not far behind. Trading in the White Sea from about 1577-78, they undertook the first Arctic voyage in 1584. The narrative of their three voyages towards the end of the sixteenth century, with a view to discovering a northeast route to China, was printed for Britain’s Hakluyt Society in 1853. We learn that, on instructions from the Russia Company, two English navigators--Arthur Pet and Charles Jackman--were the first to try and find the Northeast Passage in 1580, but had failed. 

VI
When Cornelis de Houtman returned to The Netherlands with the first Dutch fleet from the East Indies in 1597, it was evident he had managed, without much difficulty, to reach Asia via the Cape of Good Hope. Consequently, there was no longer any need of an Arctic route. But when the Dutch East India Company was established in 1602, and got, by its charter (to the detriment of all other Dutch shipowners), the exclusive right to sail to Asia via the Cape of Good Hope or round Cape Horn, interlopers were forced to seek the northern passage. 

‘Interloper’ is a term used for merchants who breached the English Company’s monopoly on trade with Asia. The monopoly forbade English merchants or English vessels to trade anywhere from the Cape of Good Hope to Cape Horn without a Company licence. The Company was compelled in its own interests to be the first to discover the north passage, hoping thus to obtain its monopoly, since it already monopolised the southern route. 

VII
The origin of most of the subsequent expeditions can be traced to rivalries over monopoly and free trade. Hudson, the celebrated English navigator, had just returned from his two voyages of 1607 and 1608, where he had attempted on behalf of English merchants to find the Northeast Passage to China via a route above the Arctic Circle, when the Dutch East India Company hijacked him to the Netherlands, hoping to employ him in their service. After long negotiations, an agreement was entered into in 1609, whereby Hudson engaged to seek the Northeast Passage, but again via a western route. Accordingly, on 6 April 1609, he set sail but got only as far as what are now the Hudson River and Hudson Bay in North America.  

Successive navigators failed to find either passage and, from 1624, there was a return to sixteenth-century plans which were based on the principle of following coastlines. In 1676 an English expedition was sent towards the northeast but, like the others, only got as far as Spitsbergen and Novaya Zemlya. Russians who continued to look for a Northeast Passage as late as 1760 did not meet with more success, even the Russian navigator Sawwa Loschkin. 

VIII
Why is the Northwest Passage privileged in historical accounts, and not the Northeast? 

Records on the former reveal that since the western seas were geographically closer, and thus familiar, navigators preferred the west-to-east route. It was thought to be the shortest way to reach Asia as opposed to the Indian Ocean route via the Cape of Good Hope. 

But, why sail westward to go east? All attempts to find a Northeast Passage entailed sailing west through what are now Norwegian and Russian waters toward the Orkneys, Bear Island and Spitsbergen first. Thereafter, the route turned northeast, with occasional forays to the west when ice floes made the eastern route impassable. The route continually zig-zagged, navigation proceeded through trial and error in a hostile landscape: ‘“The first and second dayes of July we continued also rowing up and down among the floating and drining ice, with little hope of recovering our country”. Having, on the 3rd, a gale of wind from the north, and a strong current, they drifted to the south, and made fast to an island of ice’ (John Knight’s 1606 voyage, somewhere past the Orkneys). 

We may read more on these adverse conditions from the Dutch navigator Willem Barentsz’ log books. Between 1594 and 1597, Barentsz went on three Arctic expeditions in search of a  Northeast Passage. Accompanied by the cartographer Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, he reached as far as Novaya Zemlya and the Kara Sea in his first two voyages, but was turned back both times by ice. The States General licensed the second voyage of 1595 to ‘go on shore to the king, governor, or other authority of the place, to whom they shall, on behalf of these States, offer all friendship, and shall explain the circumstances of these States, namely, that they hold communication by sea with all countries and nations in the whole world, for the purpose of trafficking, trading, and dealing with them in a friendly and upright manner, for which they possess many advantages of divers sorts of merchandise and otherwise’. 

Seeing the signal failure of this expedition the States General, after much deliberation, decided that no further attempt should be made at the public expense to discover a Northeast Passage. Nevertheless, they were willing to encourage private undertakings by the promise of a considerable reward in the event of success. With Barentsz still believing that a passage was possible by the north of Novaya Zemlya, Amsterdam politicians and merchants financed a third expedition. This discovered an unknown sea which was named the Barents Sea in 1853. But Barentsz never discovered the route to China and he died on the return voyage in 1597.

IX
Expeditions were multi-national enterprises. The navigator was not necessarily of the same nationality as his paymaster, be it state, monarch, company or an individual. For instance, the Venetian explorer Sebastian Cabot (c. 1474 – c. 1557) had several employers: Henry VII of England, the King of Aragon, and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. The Dutch Company retained the English navigator Henry Hudson in 1609 to seek an Arctic route to Asia.

Dutch navigators, ruled by the Spanish Habsburgs who clearly had no desire to finance a Dutch expedition that would circumvent the Treaty of Tordesillas’ terms, were often financed by Denmark. The late sixteenth-century navigator Oliver Brunel (‘Dutch’ in records but of Belgian nationality; being from Brussels, he came from the  United Provinces like many of the Dutch navigators) was often in Danish and English service. This accounts for his absence in the later Dutch Arctic voyages. 

Denmark’s imperial moment is evident in these expeditions. Englishman Charles Jackman, appointed in 1580 by the Russia Company to discover the Northeast Passage went, in February 1581, ‘in company of a ship of the King of Denmarke toward Island (Iceland); and since that time, he was never heard of’. John Knight, charged by the Company of English Merchants (another name for the English East India Company, originally ‘Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East-Indies’) with exploring the Northwest Passage in 1606, was employed by Denmark in 1605 to explore a portion of the Greenland coast. James Hall, employed by Denmark in 1605, 1606 and 1607, was engaged by a new association of English adventurers in 1612 to head an expedition on Greenland’s west coast. It was undertaken less for the purpose of discovering the Northwest Passage than to take advantage of the Danish discovery of mines, whether of gold or silver is unclear. 

X
While the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, using a small ship and hugging the coast, made the first crossing of the entire Northwest Passage in 1903–06, the Finnish-Swedish explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld had already sailed the whole Northeast Passage in 1878–79. The Soviets developed the route, establishing the Northern Sea Route (NSR) in the 1920s-30s. In 1934, a Soviet icebreaker made the first one-season, through-transit. Following the USSR’s dissolution, and due to significant, accelerated Arctic sea-ice loss, the route was opened to international shipping in 1991. 

Compared to the Northwest Passage which opened to ships without the need of an icebreaker for at least part of the year due to major changes to the ice pack from climate change only on 21 August, 2007, Northeast Passage use has gained momentum but, lying within Russia’s exclusive economic zone, navigation is no longer a multinational enterprise. It offers significantly shorter distances for ships travelling between ports such as Murmansk and Yokohama compared to the Suez route (12,840 nautical mi via the Suez Canal vs. 5,770 nautical mi). It does not include the Barents Sea, it does not reach the Atlantic, and it does not touch Greenland. It is primarily a trade route. However, it is expensive to navigate, with shallow waters, extreme cold, shifting sea ice, and a lack of search-and-rescue infrastructure. 

However, as ice melts in the once-frozen Arctic, a west-Arctic bloc with new naval bases to counter Russian hegemony over the eastern Arctic becomes imperative. The Northwest Passage’s central portion crosses Canada’s Arctic archipelago and forms Canada’s ‘internal waters’. The US contests this, claiming it as an international strait and transit passage. The route is now vital; cutting maritime shipping between East Asia and Europe by ten days compared with vessels traversing the Panama Canal whose drought conditions constrained shipping during the 2023-24 strong El Niño. Therefore, as has been the case for much of its history, current interest in Greenland is economic, strategic, commercial and logistical. This is the reality behind the furore over Greenland, not just its rare earth deposits that are negligible at best.

Rila Mukherjee is a historian and author of several books.

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