These historical photos of Greenland were taken by Danish physician and photographer Krabbe, during his visits to Greenland. He mainly focused on the way of life and the inhabitants (Danish Greenlanders and indigenous Greenlandic Inuit people) of this isolated Arctic area.
Europeans discovered Greenland in the 10th century. At that time, it was inhabited by Arctic people and it was unpopulated. The Viking also settled along the south-west coast for about 450 years and disappeared. The ancestors of the modern Inuit Greenlanders arrived in 1200 from the northwest. They developed a society to fit the increasingly forbidding climate and were the only people to inhabit the island for several hundred years.
A missionary expedition was sent out in 1712 by Denmark-Norway and they found none of the lost Viking Greenlanders, but they found some local Inuit Greenlanders and developed their trading colonies and the coast. This expedition was a part of the Dano-Norwegian colonization of the Americas. At the turn of the 20th century, many American explorers, including Robert Peary, explored the northern sections of Greenland. By 1911, the population of Greenland was over 14,000, scattered along the southern shores.
