Disko Bay

Uh, and so, uh, probably like most people who come to Greenland, you come to it and, and find this environment that is just so unlike just about anywhere else on earth.

So I flew out there, um, uh, to the main airport at that point, and then onto a small plane up into, um, uh, central west Greenland into Disco Bay.

And you just enter into this environment where there are so few people that everything is about the natural environment.

The sea, the, uh, in, in that area, there's these, um, fabulous paleogene basalts as, uh, The geology is so well preserved because of the Arctic environment.

My God.

Disco Bay is where you go in Greenland often, isn't it? Is there anywhere? But I wanna check in on Disco Bay.

Do you remember when that used to be a thing? You just wanted to check in on Facebook and have that on your, your Facebook grid.

I miss Facebook.

So we have these accounts of the ships being seen and the expedition being followed and witnessed by individuals.

From there, they then went to Greenland and they went to a place called Disco Bay.

Oh, that sounds like fun.

I know.

I mean, maybe they had a party.

Who knows? But they went to a place called Disco Bay.

And while they were there, this is when they slaughtered the cattle that had been on board, ready to convert it into food that they would then take further with them.

A number of sailors became sick during the journey to Greenland, so they were put on some other ships that had been accompanying them to go home.

The ship has come out from Denmark.

She's going north up the West Coast to plant a colony on Disko Bay where no colony has ever been, and the light up here in July doesn't leave.

It just thins out around midnight to a kind of gray and then thickens again.

You have stopped sleeping properly.

However, the truth is he wasn't.

In the summer of 1734, Hans Egede was ashore at the colony.

The ship that met the thing in the water had come out from Denmark that year and was carrying his son, Paul, to North Disko Bay to found a new settlement there.

It was Paul who kept the mission journal that year.

The name for Ilulissa literally means icebergs, which is honest because the place is absolutely riddled with the things.

The ice fjord sits just outside town, sending enormous slabs of glacier into Disco Bay in numbers that quickly make photographs feel slightly pointless.

You can walk from town to viewpoints above it, then take a boat among icebergs large enough to make your vessel look frankly inadequate.

In summer, do that boat trip late.