Hans Island

Name

The island is named after Hans Hendrik (sometimes called Heindrich), whose native name was Suersaq. Hendrik was a Greenlandic Arctic traveller and translator who worked on the American and British Arctic expeditions of Elisha Kent Kane, Charles Francis Hall, Isaac Israel Hayes and George Strong Nares, from 1853 to 1876.

The island was probably named sometime between 1871 and 1873 during Charles Francis Hall's third North Pole expedition. The first written reference to the name, and indeed to the island at all, appears in Charles Henry Davis's book Narrative of the North Polar expedition (1876), which is a narrative of Hall's third North Pole expedition. On page 407 it suddenly appears, without any previous introduction; a map accompanying the book is where the island made its first cartographic appearance. Charles Henry Davis writes,

The ship was tied to a large floe, and drifted slowly down the channel with the pack; about noon, she was quite near Hans Island and west of it. The latitude by observation was 80' 48' N; longitude 68' 38' W. The ship continued to drift, and at 7 p.m. was midway between Hans and Franklin Islands, which are ten miles distant from each other. Soundings were taken at a depth of 203 fathoms, with a bottom of black limestone.

This writing is about the ship Polaris's return voyage south down the Kennedy channel. It does not give any answer to when it was named; however, the ship doctor and leader of the scientific part of the expedition, Emil Bessels, wrote his own book, Die amerikanische Nordpol-Expedition (1879 in German). He mentions on page 124 that on August 29, 1871, on the voyage up north through Kennedy Channel, the ship sailed between Grinnell-land (Ellesmere Island) and an unknown little island which they would later name Hans Island, after Hans Hendrik, the native Greenlandic helper.

A previous mention of a Hans Island is found in Arctic Explorations: The Second Grinnell Expedition, 1853,’54,’55, by Elisha Kent Kane (1857), pages 317–319, making the year 1853 often cited as the date of the discovery and naming of Hans Island, including in the letter by the Danish Ambassador to Canada, published in the Ottawa Citizen, July 28, 2005.

We now neared the Litteton Island of Captain Inglefield where a piece of good fortune awaited us. We saw a number of ducks, both eiders and hareldas; and it occurred to me that by tracking their flight we should reach their breeding-grounds. There was no trouble in doing so, for they flew in a bee-line to a group of rocky islets, A rugged little ledge, which I named Eider Island, was so thickly colonized that we could hardly walk without treading on a nest Nearby was a low and isolated rock-ledge, which we called Hans Island. The glaucous gulls, those cormorants of the Arctic seas, had made it their peculiar homestead.

Littleton Island (Greenlandic: Pikiuleq) is approximately 1 km (0.6 mi) from Greenland’s coast right in Smith Sound. It is about 300 km (190 mi) south of the island today called Hans Island. Around it and the coast of Greenland lay dozens of tiny Islands, and Kane names one of them Hans Island after Hans Hendrik, the native Greenlandic helper he had with him on the trip. That this is the current Littleton Island is testified by Kane mentioning Edward Augustus Inglefield, who indeed named Littleton Island.

The names of many places in this region have changed or been altered during the last 100 years. For example, the name of Nares Strait (named after George Strong Nares), separating Ellesmere Island and Northern Greenland, was not agreed upon between the Danish and Canadian governments until 1964.