Description

Lauge KOCH (1892- 1964). / GEODÆTISK INSTITUT (DENMARK).

Copenhagen: Geodetic Institute of Denmark, 1932.

Folio (56.5 x 35 cm): 20 sheets (consisting of 1 monochrome single-page title/key sheet and 19 double page folding chromolithographed map sheets, each measuring 68.5 x 56 cm), housed in a printed grey card portfolio (Excellent condition, map sheets remarkably clean and crisp with luminous chromolithography, portfolio with only very minor wear).

Northern Greenland, usually defined as the part of the island from Thule (Pituffik) area northwards, is the most northerly place on earth, with its most extreme point being Kaffeklubben Island (83°39′54″N), located off Cape Morris Jessup.  While known for generations to nomadic Inuit hunters, the climate of Northern Greenland was too harsh for permanent settlement beyond Thule (where the Danes would establish a missionary and trading outpost in 1910).

While Northern Greenland was first encountered by Europeans when Sir John Ross visited its southern fringes in 1818, the first serious attempt to scientifically map the region occurred in 1892, during the expedition of the American explorer Robert Edwin Peary.  Given the circumstances under which he operated, Peary’s efforts were masterly.  However, his mapping featured many notable errors (ex. considering Peary Land to be an island, as opposed to being a peninsula of mainland Greenland) and ambiguities.  The Danish First Thule Expedition (1912) and Second Thule Expedition (1916-8) were only partially successful in clearing up these matters, leaving the task of creating an accurate general map to be brought home by a grand new endeavour.

Lauge Koch’s ‘Danish Bicentenary Jubilee Expedition’ to North Greenland

Lauge Koch, the highly talented but controversial geologist and cartographer led the ‘Danish Bicentenary Jubilee Expedition’ to North Greenland (1921-23), with its name commemorating the 200^th anniversary of the founding of Denmark’s colonial presence in Greenland, upon the arrival of the missionary Hans Egede in 1721.  The endeavour was significantly “the last of the great pioneering sledging journeys in North Greenland” (Mills, p. 360).  As explorers had been “puzzled by the discrepancies between what Robert Peary had reported in 1892 and what had been seen by subsequent explorers” (Mills, p. 360), the mission’s purpose was to create an accurate and complete general map of North Greenland and to assess the region’s geology.  Koch, while only in his late twenties, was already a seasoned Greenland explorer, having been a principal of the Second Thule Expedition.

Koch’s plan was to travel with only three Innuit companions from the Thule Colonial District over a 1,500 km arc up to Peary Land, while conduiting systematic surveys, anchored by geodetic basepoints set by astronomical observations, as well as collecting geological samples.  Once reaching Peary land, the party would travel over the Inland Ice back to the Thule area.  Koch, a believer in new technologies, originally intended to make the part of the trip by tractor (which would tow a forward operating depot).  However, when his mechanic was recalled, he had to revert to the tried and tested mode of sled dogs.  The expedition’s objectives were awesomely ambitious, especially for such a small party.  However, Koch was exceptionally driven and expeditious.

Koch and his companions commenced their trek on March 18, 1921, setting out from the small Inuit settlement of Igdluluorssuit, in the Thule Colonial District.  They proceeded to Fort Conger, on Ellesmere Island, arriving on April 5.  From there, they took two days to re-cross the frozen Robeson Channel, arriving in North Greenland at the De Long Fjord, on May 5, which was the furthest point achieved by the Second Thule Expedition.

While carefully surveying along the way, Koch and his men pushed on to Cape Morris Jessup, the northernmost point of mainland Greenland (at 83°39′42″N).  They next made Cape Bridgman, where meaningfully, Koch found a message in a bottle that had been left by his uncle J.P. Koch in 1907, during the Mylius-Erichsen Expedition.  Koch and his companions then came on hard times, as the weather deteriorated and the hunting was poor.  Yet they persevered, and when the weather let up, the proceeded to the Independence Fjord area, where they discovered that Peary’s Land was not an island.

On July 18, Koch’s party climbed up onto the Inland Ice.  They did this under far from ideal circumstances, as their supplies were very low.  They procced at pace, descending the ice sheet to the coast at Cape Heiberg-Jörgenson, where they were disappointed to find the supply depot there to be empty.  All but one of the sled dogs had died, yet that managed to make it to a bountiful depot at the foot of the Humboldt Glacier.  Luckily, in Washington Land they met an Inuit hunting party who supplied them with provisions.  They waited a month for the weather to improve, whereupon they crossed the Humboldt Glacier, arriving back at Igdluluorssuit on October 2, 1921, completing a voyage of 200 days.

For the 1922 season, Koch had an ambitious plan to mount another grand voyage to refine his mapping of North Greenland.  However, an influenza epidemic amongst the Inuit and poor weather compelled him to limit his work to mapping the Cape York area and the Hiawatha Glacier, in the Thule region.

In the end, the Danish Bicentenary Jubilee Expedition, while not accomplishing all that Koch had hoped, was hailed as a great success.  Koch had succeeded in creating the manuscript basis for the first broadly accurate and complete general map of North Greenland, while he gained a strong understanding of the geology of the region.  However, Koch’s long and frequent absences from Denmark (while on expedition in Greenland), not to mention his exacting perfectionism, ensured that it would be nearly a decade before his grand map of North Greenland would be published.

The Map of North Greenland in Focus

The seminal achievement of Koch’s Danish Bicentenary Jubilee Expedition was the publication of the first systematic scientific and broadly complete map, or atlas, of Northern Greenland.  The colossal 19-sheet work which. if joined and assembled, would for an arc approximately 4 metres long, was printed in Copenhagen for the Geodætisk Institut in the most rich, luminous chromatography (the glaciers and ice sheets seem to almost jump out at you!).  The map’s coverage extends from Cape York, near Thule, in the southwest, 1,200 km along the northern coast of Greenland to Danmark Fjord, past Peary Land, in the northeast.  The map sheets, which are individually named, are housed looseleaf within a grey card portfolio, and are primarily printed in English to make them more accessible to the international scientific community.

The ‘Reference’ to the map, given in both English and Danish, explains the symbols used for Travelling Routes – Red Dashed Lines; Survey Stations – Red Dots; Survey Stations with an Astronomical Observatory – Red Rectangles; Villages – Grey Dots; Ancient Village Sites (winter houses, tent rings) – Hollow Dots; Graves / Meat Caches [i.e., food depots]– ‘x’; and Height in Metres – numerals representing spot heights.

The maps are as follows:

[Key Map, on Title Page]

1) Beaumont Island.

2) Lockwood Island.

3) Cape Morris Jesup.

4) Cape Bridgman.

5) Hall Land.

6) Black Horn Cliff.

7) Wulff Land.

8) Adam Biering Land.

9) Navy Cliff.

10) Danmark Fjord.

11) Cape Constitution.

12) Peterman Glacier.

13) Etha.

14) Cape Agazis.

15) Cape Parry.

16) Inglefield Gulf

17) Cape Atholl.

18) Cape York.

[19] Supplement: Lincoln Sea.

Lauge Koch: Explorer with “a polar career of unequalled length”

Lauge Koch (1892–1964) was a Danish geologist and explorer who had “a polar career of unequalled length” (Mills, p. 360).  Between 1913 and 1958, he led 20 expeditions to Greenland, spending 34 summers and 6 winters there, whereupon he was responsible of the first systematic scientific mapping of much of northwest, north and east of Greenland.  As a child and teenager Koch was inspired by the exploits of his uncle Johan Peter Koch (1870 – 1928), who took part in several important expeditions to Greenland.

Koch was educated at the University of Copenhagen, starting in 1911, receiving his master’s degree in 1920 and his Ph.D. in 1929 (with his thesis being on the ‘Stratigraphy of Greenland’).  His first experience in the Arctic was as a fieldwork assistant in Disco in West Greenland.  Importantly, he was the cartographer and geologist to Knud Rasmussen’s Second Thule Expedition (1916-8), a harrowing experience, whereupon he made many discoveries, although he nearly lost his life.

The Danish Bicentenary Jubilee Expedition in many ways represented the height of Koch’s career, as his discoveries dramatically redrew the mapping of Noth Greenland and its geology.  He followed up this success with his 1929–30 Expedition to East Greenland and his Three-year Expedition of 1931 to 1934, whereupon he scientifically mapped the forbidding King Christian X Land.

Koch was internationally highly regarded and between his expeditions gave well attended lectures at universities throughout Europe, the USSR and Canada and the Unities States.

However, while Koch was able to attract funding and support for his Greenland expeditions, he was famously ‘unemployable’ in metropolitan Denmark.  He ‘did not suffer fools gladly’ and was often ‘too candid’ at times when diplomacy would have served him better.  From 1935, he was the centre of the ‘Lauge Koch Controversy’, which started when a group of Denmark’s leading scientists savaged Koch’s groundbreaking book Geologie von Grönland (1935), which largely involved discoveries made during the Bicentenary Jubilee Expedition.  The fallout was unbelievably acrimonious, such that Koch was not on speaking terms with most of the Danish intellectual establishment.  Yet, he persevered, continuing to explore Greenland into his sixties, an amazing achievement as the Arctic was ‘no country for old men’.  His last such endeavour was an expedition to East Greenland in 1956-8, whereupon he conducted mapping and reconnaissance by helicopter.

A Note on Rarity

The present work is very rare; it seems to have been issued in only a very limited print run.  We can trace 9 institutional examples, held by the Royal Danish Library; Det Kgl. Bibliotek Victor Albecks Vej (Aarhus); British Library; U.K. Hydrographic Office Library; Royal Geographical Society; Scott Polar Research Institute Library (University of Cambridge); Biblioteca Nacional de España; University of Michigan Library; and the Université Bordeaux Montaigne.  We cannot trace any sales records for another example since one was sold at a U.S. auction in 2013.

References: Royal Danish Library: K-2501; Det Kgl. Bibliotek Victor Albecks Vej (Aarhus): 5-93-0137; British Library: Maps 7.e.9.; U.K. Hydrographic Office Library: OPC/20;

Royal Geographical Society: mr Arctic S.45; Scott Polar Research Institute Library (University of Cambridge): Drawer 2J; Biblioteca Nacional de España: Salón General ; SG/3988; University of Michigan Library: GA 355 .K78; OCLC: 828275997, 476582531, 465721034, 68183056, 1011591937; Peter DAWES and Walter KUPSCH, Lauge Koch: Pioneer Geo-Explorer of Greenland’s Far North, Earth Sciences History, vol. 10, no. 2 (October 1991), pp. 130-53; William James MILLS, Exploring Polar Frontiers: A Historical Encyclopedia, vol. 2 (2003), pp. 360-1; Marie TREMAINE (ed.), Arctic Bibliography, vol. 1 (1953), no. 8963 (p. 1344).