Eastern Settlement in the context of "Tunulliarfik Fjord"

The history of Greenland is a history of life under extreme Arctic conditions: currently, an ice sheet covers about eighty percent of the island, restricting human activity largely to the coasts. The first humans are thought to have arrived in Greenland around 2500 BCE. Their descendants most likely died out and were replaced and succeeded by several other human groups migrating from continental North America since then. There has been no evidence discovered that Greenland was known to Norsemen until the 9th century CE, when Norse Icelandic explorers settled on its southwestern coast. The ancestors of the Greenlandic Inuit who live there today appear to have migrated there later, around the year 1200, across the Nares Strait from northern Canada.

While Inuit survived in the icy world of the Little Ice Age, the early Norse settlements, known as the Eastern Settlement, along the southwestern coast disappeared, leaving Inuit as the only inhabitants of the island for several centuries. During this time, Denmark–Norway, apparently believing the Norse settlements had survived, continued to claim sovereignty over the island despite the lack of any contact between the Norsemen (specifically Icelanders) installed in Greenland and their Scandinavian brethren. In 1721, aspiring to become a colonial power, Denmark-Norway sent a missionary expedition to Greenland with the stated aim of reinstating Christianity among descendants of the Norse Greenlanders who may have converted back to paganism. When the missionaries found no descendants of the Norse Greenlanders, they baptised the Inuit they found living there instead. Denmark-Norway then developed trading colonies along the coast and imposed a trade monopoly and other colonial privileges on the area.

Erik the Red's Land (Norwegian: Eirik Raudes Land) was the name given by Norwegians to an area on the coast of eastern Greenland occupied by Norway in the early 1930s. It was named after Erik the Red, the founder of the first Norse or Viking settlements in Greenland in the 10th century. The Permanent Court of International Justice ruled against Norway in the Eastern Greenland Case in 1933, and the country subsequently abandoned its claims.

The area once had an Inuit population, but the last member was seen in 1823 by Douglas Clavering on Clavering Island. By 1931, that part of Greenland was uninhabited and included only three main Norwegian stations (Jonsbu, Myggbukta and Antarctic Havn) and numerous smaller ones.