Donald Trump hasn’t given up on taking possession of Greenland. The White House says it wants the world’s third largest island which is located just east of Canada in the north Atlantic Ocean. The reasons include national security. That idea is not welcomed in Denmark, where Greenland is currently part of that European kingdom. Historians say the United States and Denmark have tussled over Greenland. Viewers of the movie streaming service Netflix can see a dramatization of one fight that occurred in the early 1900s.
“I find it ironic that he's trying to make Greenland, to some extent, like a colony, despite the fact that the US originally was a colony of England.”
Benjamin Lynggaard is majoring in American Studies at the University of Southern Denmark. We previously met him in my story on how the Danish view Alabama’s civil rights record. The subject of Donald Trump’s fixation on taking possession of Greenland wasn’t far away.
“There's no real reason he didn't want Greenland at all, really. And I feel like if you made it a state, that would be horrible because it's so far away from the US. So they wouldn't be able to aid it in any way,” he says.
Greenland is a self-governing entity within the Kingdom of Denmark. You may be wondering why a public radio station in Alabama is covering the story of Donald Trump’s ambitions about Greenland. And you’d be right. Except this isn’t the first time the US and Denmark have clashed over ownership of Greenland.
And here’s where the movie streaming service Netflix may be complicating things. The motion picture “Against The Ice” premiered on Netflix in 2022. It’s about a ship sent on an expedition to Greenland in 1909. The name of that expedition is what makes this a story of significance to the state of Alabama.
Ditte Kolbæk, a retired professor and historian who lives near Copenhagen, explains why.
“I wondered, why is one expedition called the Denmark Expedition, and why is the Alabama Expedition called Alabama? Because, in my geography, in my head, it's quite far from Alabama in the US to the northeast of Greenland,” she says.
An expert on the so-called Alabama Expedition, Kolbæk discovered the diaries of her grandfather C.H. Jørgensen, who went on the expedition, and wrote a book about it.
The story goes that Danish arctic explorer Enjar Mikkelson got his ship, the Alabama, from a Norwegian who had previously given it this unusual name.
It also bears noting that Donald Trump’s ambitions over Greenland aren’t new. Kolbæk says the reason the 1906 Denmark Expedition and the 1909 Alabama Expedition set sail was an earlier dispute between the United States and Denmark over Greenland.
“An American called (Robert) Peary has found what he called the Peary Channel in the northern part of Greenland,” Ditte says. “Peary said this channel was a channel so that the northern part of Greenland should be American, and the American government and the Danish government did not agree on that.”
In short, the United States thought the Peary Channel was a waterway that cut the northeastern chunk of Greenland into a separate island—and the US wanted that separate chunk.
This dispute prompted the Denmark Expedition of 1906, to determine whether or not the Peary Channel separated Greenland. But the leadership of this expedition disappeared, into the frigid ice of Greenland.
When that expedition didn’t return, Mikkelsen and the crew of the Alabama—including Kolbæek’s grandfather—were sent to recover the bodies. It’s this rescue that was dramatized in “Against the Ice.”
Sharp-eared listeners might catch actor Nikolai Coster Waldau as explorer Ejnar Mikkelson. (Waldau played Jamie Lannister in “Game of Thrones.”) Kolbæk explains more about how Mikkelson acquired his ship called the Alabama.
“Jørgensen visited Mikkelsen in Copenhagen. A few days later, they went out to the harbor to look at the ship Alabama and Jørgensen thought it was a very small ship.
“It was only 20 meters (65 feet) long, six meters (19 feet) broad, and with a depth of 1.6 meters (5 feet). So it was a very, very small and very, very slow ship.”
Against the Ice details how Mikkelson used sleds pulled by dog teams to cross Greenland, fighting through the brutal conditions of the Arctic winter. The team did manage to recover the bodies of the previous expedition—and, Kolbæk says, foil the United States’ ambitions of claiming part of the island.
“I guess the biggest thing that happened from it was they found that the Peary channel was actually a bay, and that Greenland was one island,” she says.
Returning to Benjamin Lynggaard: while Netflix movies and Danish history are one thing, Lynggaard is just a university student wrestling with the politics behind Donald Trump’s goal of taking possession of Greenland.
“(It would be) way too hard to supervise or run Greenland, considering how far it is from the country of America, right? It also feels like it just comes across like a power play more than anything else.”
Like the U.S. power play for Greenland in 1909 that prompted the Alabama Expedition, we will have to wait to see how this all plays out—or wait for the next movie from Hollywood on that subject, at least.
