The real Hans Island

Re: How Hans Island Got Its Name,. letter to the editor, Sept. 27. In his letter, Charles Warren Hunt has focused on the wrong Hans Island. There are two northern islands that U.S. explorers named Hans Island, in honour of Hans Hendrik, a Greenlandic guide from Fiskenaesset in southern Greenland.

The island referred to in this letter is part of a group of small islands just north of Littleton Island in Smith Sound, quite close to the Greenland coast. U. S. explorer Elisha Kent Kane discovered it on a voyage in 1854, at which time he wrote: “ We now neared the Littleton Island of Captain Inglefield where a piece of good fortune awaited us. We saw a number of ducks … and it occurred to me that by tracking their flight we should reach their breeding-grounds … Nearby was a low and isolated rock- ledge, which we called Hans Island.”

Seventeen years later, Charles Francis Hall launched his third Arctic expedition — the Polaris Expedition — an ambitious attempt to reach the North Pole by ship. Hall also hired Hans Hendrik as his guide. The U.S. explorer discovered an island smack-dab in the middle of the Kennedy channel, close to Ellesmere Island, and named it after his guide. It is this island that Danes and Canadians are now waging a war of words over.

But let’s not forget that the Inughuit, the native Inuit of northwestern Greenland, have their own name for this island. They call it Tartupaluk because of its distinctive kidney shape. It is an integral part of their world.