After reading last week’s article on Greenland (Monitor Nation & World, Aug. 23), it occurred to me to suggest that interested persons might want to begin reading the books of Peter Freuchen. He’s the person who named the town Thule, “the end of the earth.” He started out manning a Greenland weather station and wound up president of the New York Explorers Club. Read his classic work Arctic Adventure and his novel White Man, which is based on Greenland’s first Danish settlement. His autobiography, Vagrant Viking, describes the social effect of the Air Force base mentioned in your article (“Once a man would kill for a scrap of wood. Now there is a pile of packing crates free for the taking.”) and includes what is probably the very first written description of an oil spill and its effect on a flock of sea birds.
DAN DUSTIN
Contoocook