Henrik Dupont: "The Mapping of Greenland from 1700-2025”

Sponsored in partnership with California, Chicago, New York, Philip Lee Phillips, Rocky Mountain, and Texas Map Societies.

Location: Zoom

Time:  7:00 PM ET/ 6:00 PM CT/ 5:00 PM MT/ 4:00 PM PT

Title: “The Mapping of Greenland from 1700-2025”

Speaker:  Henrik Dupont, Retired Map Curator, Royal Library, Copenhagen, Denmark

Summary: The mapping of the world’s largest island is a fascinating story with many heroic adventures, tragic expeditions, and struggles between nations and single people. It involves the necessary help from indigenous people who used to live and travel in the harsh conditions of the high latitudes close to the North Pole. This story will tell about the colonization of the island from the first Danish missionary Hans Egede who settled in 1721, not knowing much about the geography and people of the area. Gradually the Danes colonized the west coast while other nations explored the east and north. Finally in 1907 the last coastline was visited, and Greenland became a Danish colony in 1917, with the agreement of the United States, authorized in 1933 by the International Court in den Haag. The mapping is a complex history which will be shown in this presentation.

Bio: Henrik Dupont, with M.Sc. in geography, geology and history from the University of Copenhagen, served as Map Curator at the Royal Library in Copenhagen from 1979 to 2016. Active in international societies within map history and map curatorship, he organized the 2009 International Conference on the History of Cartography in Copenhagen. His research focuses on the mapping of Greenland and Denmark, aerial photography and other aspects of the history of photography. He recently published Kortlægningen af Grønland (Mapping of Greenland), Copenhagen 2022.

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