Reykjavík Grapevine - 10.04.2015, Page 12

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The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 4 — 2015
So reads “A Report on the Resources
of Iceland and Greenland,” addressed
to U.S. Secretary of State William H.
Seward in 1868. Having negotiated
with Denmark for the acquisition of
the Caribbean islands St. John and
St. Thomas, he thought the idea of
obtaining Iceland and Greenland was
“worthy of serious consideration” and
requested “views and facts on the sub-
ject,” according to the report’s open-
ing remarks.
The resulting 72-page report,
which was written and researched by
mining engineer Benjamin M. Pierce,
is revealing of expansionist policies
of the time and presents a rather fas-
cinating picture of 19th century life in
Iceland.
Tourists, informing
the State Department!
Whereas Pierce said of Greenland,
“There is hardly a part of the world
about which so much has been said or
which has received so large a share of
the public’s attention as this of the far
north,” he bemoaned the lack of infor-
mation about Iceland.
“We have to complain of the mea-
gerness of the data available for the
formation of an opinion upon the
present resources and condition of
Iceland,” he wrote. “Most of the facts
given in this paper have been painfully
picked out from the books of travel-
lers, who fill the bulk of their account
with narrative, personal adventure,
and travelling experiences. Facts and
statistics, important to us, come in as
incidental observations generally, and
need to be disentangled from a mass of
useless matter.”
Specifically, he relied heavily on ac-
counts from Sir George Steuart Mack-
enzie and Ebenezer Henderson, who
had traveled to the country 50 years
earlier, the former with an interest in
science and the latter with an interest
in the Holy Scriptures. But, he justi-
fied, Iceland had probably changed
little in the previous half century
Many of these 19th century tourists
were not overly fond of their visits to
the island as is apparent from their ac-
counts. After relaying a series of their
dreary descriptions
of Iceland, including
one in which an ap-
parently poetic Ice-
landic priest told a
tourist that he would
find in the country
“nothing but bogs,
rocks, precipices;
precipices, rocks,
bogs; ice, snow, lava;
lava, snow ice; riv-
ers and torrents;
torrents and rivers,”
Pierce concluded,
“few countries pres-
ent a less inviting as-
pect than Iceland.”
But, he had pref-
aced, this was just
Iceland at first sight.
“A passing glance at
the general aspect is
deceptive, and one
who merely exam-
ines the quotations
which occur in the
pages immediately
following may well
wonder what there
is to recommend a
further examina-
tion,” he wrote. “It is
only after a thorough
consideration of the
details that he can
find in the seeming desolation the sure
promise, if not the existence, of a rich
prosperity.”
Icelanders, interested
in becoming Ameri-
cans?
The report reads mostly like a primer
on Iceland with painstakingly detailed
descriptions of the island and its peo-
ple, but it’s also clearly a case for an-
nexing the nation which, Pierce noted,
is closer to Greenland than it is to Nor-
way and Scotland, and “thus seems to
be rather American in its connection
than European, especially as we may
add that its most important and most
populous coast is the western.”
Furthermore, despite the fact that
Icelanders were “attached to their
country by an intense patriotism,”
it seems Pierce
thought that they
would welcome this
connection to the
States. “[T]he gen-
eral tone of the more
intelligent people
everywhere shows
that, though they
firmly believe their
island ‘the best the
sun shines on,’ it is
so, rather from its
natural position and
climate and from
its undeveloped re-
sources than from
what the govern-
ment and human ex-
ertion has made it,”
he wrote. “They look
forward to a glorious
future, where a free
and enterprising
government shall aid
them with capital
and energy to ex-
plore their country’s
wealth, and give
them the honour-
able position among
nations which they
ought to hold.”
In this way,
Pierce framed inade-
quacies of the island
in terms of potential that the United
States could capitalise on, and cherry-
picked evidence from the aforemen-
tioned travelogues to suggest that the
islanders would be sympathetic to the
idea. This of course would have been
part of its selling point.
News of the report
travelled remarkably
fast
Apparently getting wind of the re-
port the following year, the New York
Times ran an article titled “Iceland:
Rumored Plan for the Annexation of
the Island to the United States,” in
which it noted that Icelanders “seem
to know nothing of the intended trans-
fer” and speculated that the idea was
“not likely to be at all cordially re-
ceived by ‘still-vexed’ islanders.”
But Iceland’s Independence hero
Jón Sigurðsson had actually heard of
the report, according to an article in
socialist newspaper Þjóðviljinn from
1981, which quotes a letter that Jón
penned to an Eiríkur Magnússon in
1868. “Perhaps we could exploit the
plan itself, as the Danes are always
eager to sate their lust for profit, and
they were so happy to sell St. Thomas,”
Jón reportedly wrote about the report.
“Of course we would never go there,
where they want to sell us, but it would
be a kind of cause for termination and
it would be a way to get the equivalent
value of the Bjelke lands with leases
and sub-leases, which would amount
to something like 50 million dollars, in
addition to other issues, that would be
fun, to scare them with that.”
Ultimately though, it’s unlikely that
the American government pursued
the idea any further. When Pierce’s
report-in-the-making was mentioned
in U.S. Senate hearing about the pur-
chase of Alaska, it reportedly elicited
laughter from the room, and upon its
publication, a year later, it probably
wouldn’t have been easy to win sup-
port from the public, which had taken
to calling Alaska derisive names like
“Seward’s Icebox” and “Andrew John-
son’s Polar Bear Garden.”
But one can only imagine.
Highlights From
The Report
“At first sight Iceland is a country devoid
of interest from a material point of view.
A passing glance at the general aspect is
deceptive, and one who merely examines
the quotations which occur in the pages
immediately following may well wonder
what there is to recommend a further
examination; it is only after a thorough
consideration of the details that he can
find in the seeming desolation the sure
promise, if not the existence, of a rich
prosperity.”
“The Icelandic men are rather tall, have
frank, open countenances, fair, often very
florid, complexion, and flaxen hair. The
women are inclined to corpulency, but
otherwise resemble the men. They are
not cleanly, and from this cause, as well
as from their peculiar food, often suffer
from cutaneous diseases. They are said to
be cheerful, so honest that the doors are
not locked at night in their largest town,
strangely frank and unsophisticated, lov-
ers of constitutional liberty and of litera-
ture, pious, contented, with remarkable
strength of intellect and acuteness, brim-
ful of hospitality, and not given to any
crimes or vices except drunkenness.”
“Above all, they possess an enthusias-
tic affection for their island, which they
call ‘hinn best land sem solinn skinner
uppa’—the best land the sun shines on.”
“A sort of superstition exists about a tribe
of robbers who live in the desert centre of
the island and carry off sheep. The only
ground for this belief is the immense loss
of sheep, which, however, could be ac-
counted for in other ways.”
“Iceland is by no means a warm country,
but we have learnt enough to know that
its inhabited parts do not deserve the
harsh name of Iceland, for the climate is
clear and fine, and in summer even warm
and pleasant.”
“Like everything else in Iceland, the light
is under a bushel.”
“The population of Iceland is about 70,000, but in view of
its pasture and arable lands, its valuable mines, its splen-
did fisheries, and its unsurpassed hydraulic power, it could,
when fully developed, sustain a population exceeding
1,000,000. It has been greatly neglected by Denmark. The
Icelanders complain of this, and look forward with hope to
association with the United States.”
Iceland | 19th Century life
…And based their due diligence
on 50-year-old travelogues
By Anna Andersen
Photo from Almenna bókafélagið
That Time The United
States Were Thinking
Of Buying Iceland
What The U.S.
Found Valuable
— Sulphur springs
— Sulphur mountains, beds
and mines
— A mountain of obsidian
— Beds of lignite
— Grasslands
— Moss
— Fisheries
— Spar (AKA double refract-
ing crystal, magnificent
zeolites)
— Calcedonies
— The possibility of an inde-
pendent American line of
oceanic telegraph