Sovereignty, Exploration, and Anglo-Danish Relations

The Diplomatic Background to the Voyages

In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, European rulers became intensely interested in the western Atlantic. As the Spanish and Portuguese kingdoms rapidly expanded their influence in the Americas and Asia, other European leaders sought to increase their kingdoms’ overseas influence. Henry VII of England began to sponsor voyages to explore the Atlantic in the 1490s to discover a quick passage to lucrative Asian markets and gain access to resources in newly discovered territory (Jones and Condon 2020, 60, 66).

The search for a route to Asia from England began in the late 1400s and early 1500s. Merchants from the city of Bristol and individuals such as John Cabot and his son Sebastian led expeditions that explored much of North America’s eastern coast during this period (Allen 1992, 506–8; Jones and Condon 2020, 38–70). In the first decade of the 1500s, however, the idea emerged that the land being explored was not part of Asia but a different continent. A quick route to Asia did not materialize, so an interest grew in finding a northerly passage around this barrier. In 1527 John Rut led an expedition to find the Northwest Passage. After sailing along the North American coast to about 63°N, he gave up the attempt and returned to England. Another attempt to find the passage was made in 1536 under the leadership of Richard Hore. This voyage also proved unsuccessful as the ships encountered ice and ran low on supplies, which forced them to turn back to England (Allen 1992, 511–2; Seaver 1996, 16–24). Greater knowledge of the north Atlantic emerged as a result of three voyages under Martin Frobisher’s leadership between 1576 and 1578. Frobisher’s expeditions landed in Greenland, sailed to Baffin Island, explored the coast of Labrador, and unsuccessfully attempted to establish a colony in North America (McDermott 2001, 95–244). These expeditions were followed by three voyages between 1585 and 1587 under John Davis’s leadership, which also landed in Greenland and explored Labrador’s coast (Gad 1970, 198–201).

Besides trying to find the Northwest Passage to Asia, English mariners moved further west across the north Atlantic as they sought new opportunities for fishing. Throughout the Middle Ages, Europeans concentrated their efforts on fishing the inland and coastal waterways of Europe. By the fourteenth century these areas were showing signs of decline and evidence of overfishing. In response, European fishermen began to engage in deep sea fishing and traveled further west into the Atlantic in search of new fishing grounds (Bolster 2008, 28). English fishermen in particular began to seek new opportunities around the beginning of the 1400s, when they began to regularly sail to Iceland to fish for cod. Throughout the fifteenth century, fishing in this region grew as ever-increasing numbers of crews from England sailed to Iceland to take part in the abundant catch of cod (Fagan 2006, 182–6). By the late 1400s, increasing levels of competition for fish in Icelandic waters caused some English fishermen to seek new opportunities further west in the Atlantic. Although there is little solid evidence of these voyages, scholars have speculated that fishermen (particularly from Bristol) reached Greenland and perhaps the coast of North America in the 1480s and began to open up these regions to fishing and trade (Seaver 2001, 150).

Although English fishermen and explorers saw the north Atlantic as a new region open for exploitation, conquest, and settlement, not all European leaders agreed with their assessment. In particular, the kings of Denmark viewed English expansion with growing alarm because they believed the Danish Crown had sovereignty over the waters from Greenland to Norway based on political control of territories throughout the north Atlantic stretching back to the Viking Age. Beginning in the 800s, settlers from Scandinavia had spread across the North Atlantic settling the Faroe Islands, Iceland, and Greenland. By the 1200s, these territories had come under the Norwegian Crown’s political control. In the 1300s, control over the north Atlantic islands transferred to Denmark as the Danish and Norwegian Crowns became unified. Since then, Danish rulers viewed this vast expanse of ocean as their territory and believed that other states could sail in those waters only with the Danish Crown’s express permission (Theutenberg 1984, 481–4).

English fishing and exploration brought them into potential conflict with Denmark in the western Atlantic and in the eastern Atlantic. Because English voyages to the west did not immediately yield a direct route to Asia, English explorers in the mid-sixteenth century began to search for a Northeast Passage. The first expedition left England in 1553 and sailed north along the Norwegian coast to the White Sea. From there they traveled over land to Moscow, where they met the Russian tsar, Ivan IV, and negotiated a trade agreement. To capitalize on the newly established trade route, the English Crown founded the Muscovy Company in 1555. Throughout the rest of the century and into the early 1600s, the Muscovy Company regularly sent fleets north to Russia (Arel 2019, 1–2).

By the late 1500s, the English were not just trading in the eastern regions of the north Atlantic but also fishing there. During an expedition in 1596 to find a Northeast Passage, a Dutch crew claimed to have discovered the island of Spitsbergen, a claim the English later disputed as they stated that English mariner William Willoughby had discovered the island in 1553. This discovery was significant because the waters surrounding Spitsbergen were teeming with whales. Because the geography of the north Atlantic and Arctic Oceans was not fully understood, contemporaries assumed this new island was part of Greenland. The turn of the seventeenth century saw an explosion of crews arriving from England and the United Provinces to hunt whales in the waters north of Norway and claim the area for themselves, thus bringing them into potential conflict with Danish rights (Dalgård 1962, 41–2; Gad 1970, 215–6; Braat 1984, 474–6).

As English influence grew, Danish rulers sought to assert their sovereign rights in the north Atlantic. Beginning in the 1400s, Danish kings used diplomacy to prevent English crews from fishing in areas under the Danish Crown’s control. Of particular concern was the rapid growth of English activities in the waters around Iceland. In 1432, a treaty was signed between Denmark and England forbidding English contact with Iceland (Marcus 1981, 141). In 1465, another treaty stipulated that English subjects could not sail to Iceland or northern Norway unless they received permission from the Danish Crown (Macray 1883, 5). Neither agreement stemmed the flow of English fishermen to the north Atlantic’s lucrative fishing areas. In 1490, King Hans of Denmark tried a different tactic when he signed a treaty with Henry VII of England giving English crews the right to fish and trade in Iceland as long as they received a license from the Danish Crown every seven years (Macray 1883, 5). Although none of these agreements proved to be enforceable, they did establish a precedent whereby the English Crown recognized the Danish monarchs’ rights to regulate fishing and trade in the waters around Iceland. These treaties later served as a basis for the Danish Crown to claim it could exert such rights in its other territories in the north Atlantic.

It was not until the late sixteenth century that the Danish Crown began to exert its authority in the north Atlantic in a more meaningful way. Throughout the first half of the century, Danish rulers focused on consolidating the Crown’s authority in the wake of the Kalmar Union’s collapse, the Reformation, and the Count’s War. With regard to foreign policy, Danish monarchs were concerned about reestablishing the Kalmar Union and limiting the Swedish Crown’s growing influence in the Baltic region. After the Northern Seven Years’ War ended in 1570, Frederik II increasingly turned his attention to European affairs and as part of this process began to address England’s growing influence in the Atlantic (Frandsen 2001, 331).

Frederik devised a number of tactics to address these developments. First, he used diplomacy to defend his kingdom’s rights in the region. On March 5, 1576, he sent a letter to Elizabeth I stating that earlier Anglo-Danish treaties forbade the English from sailing to Iceland or northern Norway without the Danish Crown’s permission (Frederik II 1576; Laursen 1912, 615). Elizabeth replied that she could not find a copy of the 1465 treaty and could not find any information in any treaty regarding the English sailing to Russia via the north Atlantic. She proposed that the two leaders should have representatives discuss the issue, and a meeting was set for July 25, 1577, in Emden (Elizabeth I 1576; Laursen 1912, 616). The Danes arrived in Emden on July 24 and proceeded to wait for the English representatives, who had not yet arrived. After waiting nearly a week with no word from the English, the Danes left and traveled to Wandsbeck, near Hamburg, which was the home of Danish representative Henrik Rantzaus. On August 7, the Danes received a message that the English were on their way to Hamburg where they arrived on August 8 (Danish Commissioners 1577a; Laursen 1912, 619). The meeting began on August 10, with the Danish commissioners showing the English the treaties from the 1400s and reading them out loud, including the 1465 treaty that the English could not find. They stated that the English were violating these treaties by their continued practice of sailing to Russia via Norway. Two days later, the English commissioners returned and agreed that while the earlier treaties forbade the English from sailing to northern Norway, they said nothing about the English sailing past this area. The Danish representatives replied that new interpretations of the treaties did not supersede old agreements. They reiterated that while the English had the right to sail in the open ocean, such voyages were regulated by the stipulations of earlier treaties (Danish Commissioners 1577b; Butler 1901, no. 171; Laursen 1912, 620). Although the meeting continued for a few days, nothing concrete resulted from it.

With diplomacy having failed, Frederik devised new tactics to assert Danish royal control over the region. The first step in this process was to establish contact with the Scandinavian communities assumed to be living in Greenland to reassert Danish sovereignty over the island. Greenland had officially come under Danish control in the late 1300s as a result of the Kalmar Union’s creation. Although contact with Greenland was maintained into the early 1400s, the religious and economic ties that bound the island to Scandinavia were beginning to unravel. After the 1370s, bishops no longer traveled to Greenland to take up their positions. In addition, in the 1300s the market for Greenlandic goods in Scandinavia began to decline due to the Hanseatic League’s growing economic influence in northern Europe and increasing royal regulation of trade with the Atlantic islands (Seaver 2010, 96–8, 108–16). The last official contact between Greenland and Scandinavia happened in 1410, when a couple, who were married in Greenland in 1408, arrived in Norway to bring trade goods from Greenland before settling in Iceland in 1411 (Seaver 2010, 131–5). Since that time, no official contact had been made with the Scandinavians assumed to be living in Greenland. Throughout the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, discussions had taken place at the highest levels of the Danish government about sending a voyage to Greenland to check on the settlements, but nothing came of these discussions (Jensen 2004, 108–45). Although Scandinavian officials did not realize it, the Norse settlements in Greenland had disappeared, probably by the late 1400s. Modern scholars have developed many theories regarding what happened to the Scandinavian Greenlanders, but the incomplete nature of the source material prevents a definitive conclusion (Dugmore, Keller, and McGovern 2007, 12–30; Seaver 2010, 158–83).

With English adventurers reaching the coast of Greenland and claiming it for the English Crown in the late 1500s, Frederik wanted to assert his kingdom’s long-standing rights over the region. In 1579, he employed an Englishman, James Alday, to lead an expedition to Greenland with the purpose of sending a royal representative and bringing the population back to the Christian church (Bobé 1936, 8). Two ships left Denmark in early July and reached the coast of Greenland by late August. They were unsuccessful in making landfall as ice blocked their path and storms swept them out to sea. With the expedition running short on supplies and with most of the crew suffering from scurvy, Alday headed back to Denmark and arrived in Copenhagen in late October. This voyage marked the Danish Crown’s only attempt in the sixteenth century to reach Greenland (Gad 1970, 194–5, 198).

Besides attempting to defend Danish interests in the western Atlantic, Frederik also tried to assert control over Norwegian waters in the eastern Atlantic and Arctic Oceans. In the spring of 1582, he wrote to the rulers of England, Scotland, the Netherlands, and various northern German towns to tell them to forbid their citizens from sailing to Russia along the Norwegian coast. He stated that if such voyages took place, they would suffer the consequences (Laursen 1903, 430). He backed up his letters by sending a fleet to northern Norway to stop foreign ships from sailing there. This expedition, which consisted of three ships, was moderately successful as it captured four Dutch ships engaged in illegal activities. However, they were unable to stop English ships in the region, which sailed in larger groups (Laursen 1912, 622–4).

Despite the simmering problems related to English activities in Danish waters, by 1582 relations between the two countries began to improve. Throughout the 1570s, the English Crown had made various attempts to construct a Protestant alliance against the growing strength of Counter-Reformation Catholicism, and Elizabeth had attempted to bring Frederik II into such an alliance. In 1582, she tried to woo him into joining the cause by inducting him into the Order of the Garter. In July 1582, Lord Willoughby arrived in Denmark to bestow the honor on the king and settle the economic controversies between the kingdoms. Frederik responded positively to Elizabeth’s gesture of friendship and told Willoughby that the queen should send commissioners to Denmark to negotiate a settlement (Lockhart 2004, 187–8).

In June 1583, English representative John Herbert arrived in Copenhagen to conduct the negotiations. However, the talks did not begin on a harmonious note. On June 13, Herbert gave his first speech and stated that Frederik II could not claim sovereignty over the north Atlantic because the seas were free for all to use (Herbert 1583). The Danish commissioners responded that for 600 years the kings of Norway had exerted sovereignty over the area and used their navies to protect Iceland and Greenland. They argued that English ships paid tolls when they sailed through the Sound to Russia, so they should also pay tolls to sail through Norwegian waters to Russia (Danish Commissioners 1583). After continued debates, a compromise was reached that the Danish Crown recognized English merchants’ rights to sail in the north Atlantic, but only after an annual payment had been made to the Danish Crown (Laursen 1912, 625–6; Lomas 1914, no. 218). While merchants associated with the Muscovy Company initially complied with this agreement, by the mid-1590s payments to the Danish Crown became less frequent and more merchants decided to run the risk of making unlicensed voyages to the north Atlantic (Hagen 2004, 17).

Christian IV’s Atlantic Policies and the Voyages to Greenland

During the early seventeenth century, attempts to regain Danish sovereignty over the north Atlantic and Greenland fell to a new king, Christian IV. Christian had ascended the Danish throne after his father, Frederik II, passed away in 1588. He did not reach his full majority until 1596 at the age of nineteen. As a young monarch, Christian was bright, energetic, and ambitious. The early years of his reign were filled with attempts to expand the kingdom’s economic, political, and military influence. These activities included dramatically expanding and modernizing the capital city of Copenhagen, sponsoring the creation of new towns throughout his territories, and encouraging domestic production of a variety of goods to decrease foreign imports. The king fortified many of the towns, including Copenhagen; built a new arsenal for the navy; and reconstructed and overhauled the navy. He poured boundless energy into making his kingdom a wealthy, respected state (Heiberg 1988, 116–43).

As had been the case during his father’s reign, Christian wanted to maintain Danish authority in the north Atlantic and limit the growing encroachment of Denmark’s northern European neighbors. He poured resources into accomplishing this goal, and he took direct action to illustrate the Danish kingdom’s military might and demonstrate to other European states that the Danes intended to enforce their sovereignty over their Atlantic and Arctic territories. The first step in this process occurred when Christian led a voyage to the Arctic waters north of Norway to personally stop what he viewed as illegal activities by other states in this region. Besides the long-term problem of western European kingdoms fishing and trading in northern Norway, in the 1590s Sweden and Russia began to expand their political influence there. To bring the area more closely under Danish control, the king set sail in April 1599 with a fleet consisting of eight warships, hundreds of sailors, and many members of the Danish court (Hagen 2004, 11). By the middle of May, the fleet had reached the northern Norwegian coast and spent the next few weeks patrolling the coastline. During his time in the north, Christian sailed along the Kola Peninsula, claiming it as Danish sovereign territory. He forcibly stopped English ships, arrested their crews, and confiscated their ships and cargo (Carisius 2004, 39–43). Before returning to Denmark, the king released the English prisoners and gave them two small boats in which to return home, but their ships and cargo were kept as prizes (Grubbe 2004, 74).

The result of this event was that the difficult relations between England and Denmark deteriorated further. After an exchange of angry letters in fall 1599, both sides decided to send commissioners to meet at Emden on March 23, 1600. During their journey to the conference, the Danes experienced bad weather, and their various representatives arrived between March 26 and April 9. The English Crown did not begin its preparations until March 24, and the commissioners did not set sail until April 29 (Cheyney 1929, 31–3). In the meantime, the Danish commissioners waited in Emden with no word from the English. After waiting more than a month, the Danes decided to leave (Danish Commissioners 1600). On May 10, the English representatives finally arrived, but the Danes refused to begin the conference unless the English met with them immediately on the Danish ships, which were about to leave the harbor. The English refused and the Danes left, barely avoiding a meeting with the English when one of their representatives unsuccessfully tried to row out to the ships as the Danes set sail (English Commissioners 1600; Laursen 1916, 367–8; Cheyney 1929, 33–4).

After this disastrous failure, another two years passed before representatives met again. In 1602, Christian IV proposed another conference to try to settle the old disputes, and a meeting was set for September 25, 1602, in Bremen (Christian IV 1602; Elizabeth I 1602). This time the English arrived promptly, and the conference began on its appointed date. Despite auspicious beginnings, the negotiations failed. For their part, the English wanted to discuss general issues of sovereignty versus freedom of the seas. The Danes wanted to focus on settling the specific complaints of individual merchants and fishermen. After two months of meetings, the Danish commissioners announced that they did not have the authority to settle the larger issues of Danish sovereignty versus English rights of free trade and fishing, and they called the meeting to an end (Macray 1883, 56; Laursen 1916, 368; Cheyney 1929, 35–8).

In 1603, Elizabeth died and James I took the throne. With the new king’s ascension, Anglo-Danish relations underwent a thaw. Because James I and Christian IV were brothers-in-law who enjoyed a good personal relationship, James’s reign saw a more congenial connection develop between the two kingdoms (Meldrum 1977, v). Shortly after his ascension, James wrote a letter to Christian stating that he knew there had been problems between England and Denmark during the reign of his predecessor, but “we do not doubt in the least that the past disputes (whatever they might have been) can easily be put to rest and thoroughly removed owing to our mutual friendship, once we have had the opportunity to examine and discuss them more fully” (Meldrum 1977, 5). Even though Christian enjoyed a personal friendship with James, he continued to actively pursue Danish sovereignty over the north Atlantic.

As had been the case in his father’s reign, Christian was concerned about maintaining Danish authority in the north Atlantic, particularly over Greenland, against the growing encroachment of Denmark’s northern European neighbors. To make real the claims to political control, Christian decided to send a voyage to Greenland in 1605. This expedition was the most ambitious one the Danish monarchy had launched. It consisted of three ships from the Danish navy under the command of John Cunningham, a Scottish naval officer in Danish service. His first mate, and the expedition’s pilot, was Englishman James Hall, a sailor who appears to have had previous knowledge of sailing in arctic waters. The main firsthand account of this expedition comes from the report James Hall produced for Christian IV and from Hall’s account that was later published in England (Gosch 2010, xxiv–xxxix).

According to Hall’s account, the ships set sail from Copenhagen on May 2, 1605. They reached the coast of Greenland in early June and began to follow a course north by northwest to clear the pack ice blocking the shore. At this point a conflict erupted between the captains of the three ships. Godske Lindenow, the Danish captain of the ship The Red Lion, asked for a chart of the coast in case the ships became separated. After receiving the chart, Lindenow and his crew sailed away from the other ships a few days later to pursue their own course. In his account, Hall suggested that Lindenow was frightened of sailing within the ice pack (Hall 2010a, 20–9). Other contemporary writers, who discussed these events with the participants after the journey’s completion, thought that Lindenow feared that Hall’s course would take the expedition far north, past the supposed sites of the Scandinavian settlements, and that they would not be able to make contact with the Scandinavian Greenlanders. After Lindenow’s departure, he sailed south along the coast until he found an ice-free harbor. He and his crew spent three days buying furs and other products from the local Inuits. After this encounter, they sailed home to Denmark and reached Copenhagen on July 28. On the homeward journey, Lindenow brought back two Inuit men. He did this to fulfill his orders from the Crown to bring some of Greenland’s inhabitants to Denmark. This was based on the assumption that the voyage would encounter Scandinavians still living on the island. Lindenow found no Scandinavians but still fulfilled his orders by capturing the Inuits, who were unwillingly taken back to Denmark (Gosch 2010, xlii–xlv). These men became a sensation when Lindenow return to Copenhagen. Upon the ship’s arrival, Christian IV and his wife boarded the vessel to see the Inuits and then enjoyed a demonstration of their skill in using their kayaks (Etting 2010, 156). It was hoped that the Inuit would return to Greenland on future voyages and act as interpreters (Gosch 2010, xcii). In August 1605, one of them was sent to live at Dragsholm Castle so he could learn to speak Danish and become familiar with Danish customs (Bobé 1936, 14).

Once Lindenow left, the remaining two ships continued to pursue Hall’s course and reached the Greenland coast on June 12. The ships explored the area for about a week before Hall began leading a separate expedition further north. Hall and a few companions spent the next two weeks mapping the coast and exploring several fjords. During their time in Greenland, the expedition’s members had contact with the local Inuits. The crew left behind with the ships and those that Hall took with him to explore further north had similar encounters with the local peoples. Relations between the groups started out amicably with trade taking place. The situation between the two sides deteriorated quickly with the Inuits launching attacks on the Europeans. Hall’s group was pelted with rocks as they sailed along the shore, and according to his account, a group of Inuits attempted to lure them to an island where a large, hostile group awaited them. Hall mentioned that a group of Inuits threw some shells into his boat and gestured that the shells should be picked up. When Hall sent a servant boy to retrieve the shells, the Inuits shot the boy with a dart (Hall 2010a, 34–43). Hall does not give an explanation for why relations soured, but he stated that during his journey further north, the captain and crews of the other ships also encountered difficulties with the locals. According to Hall’s account:

Also, in the time of our absence, the people did very much villanie to them in the ship, so that the Captaine tooke three of them; other of them also he slew; but the three which he tooke, he used with all kindnesse, giving them Mandillions and Breeches of very good cloth, also Hose, Shoes, and Shirts off his own backe. (Hall 2010a, 48)

Initially, the crew had seized four Inuits. One of them reacted in a frightened manner and fought back, which caused the captain to shoot and kill him. When other Inuits, who had not been seized, saw what had happened to their companions, they also became very angry and tried to prevent the ships from leaving, but the crew fired a cannon to scatter them (Gosch 2010, lxxxiv; Seaver 2010, 196).

Besides experiencing problems with the local people, two other significant related events occurred while the expedition was in Greenland. While Hall was leading the smaller expedition further to the north, he left behind a convict they were transporting. According to an account written by one of Hall’s crew members, “There they put on shore a disobedient son, by name Hendrich Hermansen, for the chance of his keeping himself alive as a pedlar” (Gosch 2010, lxix). Shortly before the entire expedition set sail for the homeward journey to Denmark, another convict was left on the shore. Hall wrote of this event, “before our coming forth of the same, our Captaine commanded a young man whose name was Simon, by the expresse commandement of the Stateholder of Denmarke, to be set aland” (Hall 2010a, 49). Although abandoning malcontents in foreign lands was not an unknown punishment on voyages of exploration, these cases appear to represent a means of expressing Danish authority in the region. The Danish Crown saw Greenland as its sovereign territory, and it would have viewed transporting troublemakers to the outer regions of its realm as an acceptable means of ridding society of problematic individuals.

After depositing the last criminal on shore, the expedition set sail for Denmark on July 11 and reached Copenhagen on August 10. Although Lindenow beat the other ships back to Denmark, news of the remaining ships’ return caused great excitement in Copenhagen. The safe return of the ships set a good precedent for future Danish voyages to its north Atlantic territories and illustrated the Crown’s ability to maintain direct contact with this region (Gosch 2010, lxxxiv–lxxxv).

The expedition’s return offered Christian an opportunity for a diplomatic triumph. He sent word to other leaders regarding the voyage’s success in reaching Greenland and described the places and people the crews had encountered (Bobé 1936, 14). In addition, he sent objects brought back from Greenland as gifts to allies such as Christian II, elector of Saxony, who was married to the king’s sister. Among the items the elector received were a knife with a serrated blade made out of a reindeer tooth and iron and an axe with a blade made out of iron and whale bone (Gulløv and Toft 2017, 17).

Christian IV wanted to quickly follow up on the first voyage’s success and sponsored a second voyage to Greenland the next year, 1606. To finance this expedition, the king levied a new tax. He justified this decision stating that Greenland had traditionally been part of the Norwegian realm and after the successful voyage, he wanted to send another expedition to bring Greenland more closely under the Crown’s control (Lunde 1870, 138–9). This was to be a more ambitious undertaking, consisting of five ships with Lindenow acting as supreme commander. Hall would again serve as pilot. Unlike the previous voyage, the ships experienced bad weather, and only two of the five reached Greenland. This expedition had a different purpose than the previous one. In 1605, during his time mapping the coast, Hall discovered what was assumed to be deposits of silver. In 1606, the expedition was supposed to bring back as much of this silver ore as possible to begin exploiting the nature resources available on the island. To aid them in this process, the Crown sent two of the Inuits who were kidnapped and brought to Denmark the year before back to Greenland. The Crown hoped they could act as intermediaries between the members of the expedition and the locals. However, both men fell sick during the journey and died (Gosch 2010, lxxxix–xciii).

The two ships that completed the journey to Greenland reached the coast on June 27. They remained in the area until August 10, quarrying the supposed silver ore and engaging in some trade with the Inuits. This expedition spent its time in the same locality as the one the previous year, so no further mapping or exploration took place. Relations with the Inuits seemed to be peaceful (Hall 2010b, 65–70). However, before the expedition left for home, a man was left on shore as a means of punishment for a crime that was not described in the accounts. Being abandoned in a foreign land was not the extent of his punishment—the Inuits killed him as soon as the ships pulled away. An account written after the journey stated that the crew did not pity the man who was killed, and they did not want to punish the Inuit for reacting in this manner. Shortly after this happened, the Europeans seized five Inuits who were visiting their ships and took them to Denmark so they could learn more about their culture and land (Hall 2010b, 70–1; Gosch 2010, xc–xci). On August 10, the expedition began its homeward journey and, after running into severe storms, reached Copenhagen on October 4. In the end, this voyage was a disappointment to the Crown because the supposed silver ore collected in Greenland turned out to be worthless and easy profits appeared elusive (Hall 2010b, 71–9; Gosch 2010, xciv).

Despite these frustrations, Christian IV decided to send another voyage to Greenland in 1607. This one would be launched on a smaller scale and have a different purpose. During the previous two voyages, no sign had been found of the Scandinavian colonies that had existed in Greenland since the Viking Age. The assumption was that the settlements were in southeastern Greenland and that the expeditions had sailed too far to the north and west to have found them. The 1607 expedition was launched with the specific purpose of sailing to southern Greenland and reestablishing contact with the Scandinavian settlements (Gad 1970, 220). According to the instructions that Christian issued to the captain, Carsten Richardson, and the navigator, Hall, the ships were to sail to the east coast of Greenland. The previous expeditions had explored the west coast and found no sign of the settlements. The instructions also stated that according to many old documents, the Scandinavians lived along a fjord known as Erichsfiord that was located between 60° N and 61° N along Greenland’s east coast, and it listed the names of churches and farms that would be found along the fjord. When the expedition found the settlements, they were supposed to find out if there were priests in the communities or government officials to whom the people paid taxes. In addition, they were supposed to treat the Scandinavian Greenlanders well, invite them on to the ships, and offer them food and drinks. To help make this encounter a success, men from Norway and Iceland, who were thought to speak a language more closely resembling the Old Norse language of the Vikings, were sent along on the journey to serve as interpreters (Bobé 1936, 15–7). On May 13, two ships set sail from Copenhagen to Greenland. While the journey across the Atlantic was uneventful, the ships were never able to make a landing on Greenland’s east coast. Ice blocked them from reaching the shore, and storms constantly battered the ships. After three weeks of unsuccessfully attempting a landing, and with the crew’s supply of fresh water running out, the expedition’s leaders gave up and sailed back to Denmark (Gosch 2010, xcix–c).

The Greenland Voyages’ Impact

After the 1607 voyage, Christian IV’s sponsorship of voyages to Greenland came to an end. After this point, the king’s attention increasingly turned to pursuing foreign policy issues in the Baltic region and on the European continent. Although the Danish Crown never fully succeeded in forcing other kingdoms to acknowledge its sovereignty over the north Atlantic, its attempts to assert this idea marked an important aspect of Danish foreign policy during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Beginning with Frederik II, the Crown insisted on England abiding by earlier agreements that regulated English activities in Danish water. Christian IV expanded on his father’s policies by taking direct action to enforce existing treaties and link his territories more closely to the Danish Crown. The three Greenlandic voyages Christian IV sponsored were a central aspect of the Danish Crown’s defense of its north Atlantic interests. These voyages illustrated to both the Danes and their European neighbors that the Danish Crown had the resources, manpower, and political and financial strength to successfully send representatives to Greenland and thereby express its sovereignty over the region. In addition, these voyages were not merely based on exploration but also on extracting the natural and human resources of the territory, using this part of the Danish realm as a place for punishing criminals, and exerting political control over Scandinavian settlers assumed to be still living in Greenland.

Although not all of these goals were achieved, the voyages’ success in reestablishing Danish connections to Greenland illustrated to the kingdom’s competitors that the Danish Crown’s sovereign rights in the north Atlantic existed not only on paper through treaties and diplomatic agreements but also on the Crown’s ability to have a presence on the island. The considerable political energy and resources that Christian IV poured into exerting control over the kingdom’s Greenlandic territory demonstrated that the Danish crown could assert sovereignty over its far-flung territories, and that it could compete with other European powers for control over the economic and political gains to be had in the north Atlantic.