The North Atlantic Fisheries, 1100-1976 - University of Hull

at most of the more populated villages and towns along the West
Greenlandic coast south of Disko Island.
After the First World War, an ultra-nationalistic Norwegian
movement fronted by the journal Tidens Tegn questioned the legitimacy
of the Danish possession of the Faroe Islands, Greenland and Iceland.
The argument was historical and based on the fact of a Norwegian
Atlantic empire of the High Middle Ages. In 1380 Norway and its North
Atlantic Dependencies came into a 400-year long union with Denmark.
At the peace treaty of Kiel in 1814, the North Atlantic Dependencies
stayed in the Danish Realm while Norway, without its former Atlantic
possessions, was seceded to Sweden in a union lasting until 1905.
Norway’s traditional hunting interests in East Greenland together with
this nationalistic wave, became a substantial political embarrassment to
the Norwegian government and forced it to exert increasing pressure on
the Danish government to obtain Danish recognition of Norwegian
claims in East Greenland.
In 1919 the ambassadors of the two countries had agreed that Norway
would recognize Danish sovereignty over all of Greenland. By a state
charter of 10 May 1921 the Danish Government declared its total
sovereignty over all of Greenland and its territorial waters. As a
consequence the government recapitulated the old ban on any nation’s
vessels sailing in Greenlandic territorial seas. 132
In 1923/24 this conflict formed a delicate part of the public debate
raging in Norway, Denmark and the Faroe Islands. With perfect timing,
as always, the Faroese leader of the Autonomist Party
(Sjálvstýris-flokkurin), Jóannes Patursson, expressed the opinion in the
Norwegian press that the Islands might seek another state affiliation than
with Denmark. To him it was a practical question of necessary
cooperation dictated by the facts of where the Islands could obtain the
utmost degree of self government in as loose a union as possible. In
Denmark, as in the Faroes, public reaction to this statement was furious
and embittered. For once even Patursson’s most ardent followers had
difficulties in staying together and defending him in public, for instance
in the Lagting. 133
132 In 1916 at the Danish sale of the Virgin Islands to the United States a secret protocol
was signed obliging the Americans to recognize Danish sovereignty over all of
Greenland and to force the major powers and international community to accept this.
Wåhlin et al., Færøsk og dansk politik, 1994, 58-59.
133 Wåhlin et al., Færøsk og dansk politik, 84 and 225-26, endnote 34. About the
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