Isobel Wylie Hutchison and crew of her umiak at lunch Tasermiut Fjord Greenland 1927
Our image of Greenland has been seriously distorted by the famous phrase "From Greenland's icy mountains", which comes from the opening line of a hymn by Reginald Heber, Bishop of Calcutta in the early nineteenth century. In fact, although Greenland does indeed have many icy mountains, it also has much greenery, which the outlaw Erik the Red preferred to emphasise, when he named the world's largest island in 982, to encourage future visitors. It can also be a very warm place, which partly accounts for the popularity of picnics among Greenlanders. Hutchison occasionally found insects to be a problem in hot weather, but there seems to have been nothing of that sort to spoil the occasion illustrated here.
