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

A comparison between the proposal of the Autonomous Party to the
Fishery Committee of the Lagting about extended territorial waters (and
better coast guard inspection) and the parallel committee report about the
fishery off Greenland demonstrates that the Autonomists and their
opponents, the Unionists (Sambandsflokkurin, close union with
Denmark), must have given each other substantial concessions during
the deliberations since a solid majority of both the major parties could
vote for this far reaching address to the government in Copenhagen.
Only the leader of the Autonomists, Jóannes Patursson, expressed a
substantially different opinion during the debate in the Lagting and in
public. He “did not recognize Denmark’s rights to Greenland” since such
rights alone followed the old Norse landnam “which our forefathers took
in possession”. Two Faroese members of the Danish parliament, A.
Samuelsen and O. Effersøe, both Unionists, were accused of deserting
both the Historical-Norse and the Faroese interests in the East Greenland
case, i.e. the Greenland Treaty of 5 July 1924 with its proposal for a new
general law of resource-management, already agreed in principle,
especially about hunting and fishing. In his opinion the Faroese should
have the same right to hunting and fishing in the Greenlandic waters as in
their own territorial sea. No Faroese should apply to the Danish
government for anything that was already his inherited and undisputable
right. Patursson expanded and clarified his points of view in articles in
the nationalistic Norwegian Tidens Tegn. There he declared that by the
decisions of the Lagting the Faroese had claimed free access to
Greenland and thus the Norwegians and the Faroese had mutual interests
in the Greenland problem. 144 These opinions were not produced for the
occasion. Already in the debates of 1918 concerning the new Icelandic
constitution Patursson as Member of Parliament in the Landstinget in
Copenhagen expressed the historical arguments and rejected, in vain,
any specific protection of Faroese fishing rights in Icelandic waters. So
sure was he of the Icelandic goodwill towards their small brother nation
in the future that no guarantee was needed. Interestingly enough, after
the Second World War, the Icelanders actually behaved that way. 145 In
144 With references to Tidens Tegn and the Debate in the Lagting and with direct
quotations from Patursson’s statements, Dimmalætting has covered and summarized the
case, 20 and 28 December 1924. Quotations in Danish, “Jeg anerkender ikke Danmarks
Ret til Grønland”, (landnammet...) “som vore Forfædre tog i Besiddelse”.
145 Steining, Danmark og Island, VI, 403, 409. Already in 1944 with the upheaval of the
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