ABSTRACT
When the young Danish woman Henriette Gjøe (1806–1874) arrived in Greenland in 1832, she became one of very few European women living in Greenland at the time. The large Arctic island of Greenland had been colonised by Denmark since 1721 and at the time of Henriette’s arrival, the colonisation had developed into eleven trade stations and a large and constantly fluctuating number of smaller trade outposts along the west coast of the vast island. The diary of Henriette Gjøe, who travelled to Greenland to marry the outpost manager, Nikolaj Egede, in 1832, is at the centre of the analysis of this chapter. It is an unpublished letter diary to Henriette’s sister in Denmark, covering her journey and first winter and spring at the small outpost of Niaqornat with a population of 60 on the northernmost west coast of Greenland. 1
