Canada’s biggest island still argues over Viking yarn
Baffin Island—Qikiqtaaluk, “very big island”—is Canada’s largest, the Americas’ second after Greenland, and Earth’s fifth, covering about 507,205 square kilometres with only 13,039 residents in the 2021 census. Iqaluit, Nunavut’s capital on Frobisher Bay, reclaimed its Inuktitut name in 1987.
Martin Frobisher landed in 1576 as “Queen Elizabeth’s Foreland”; Edward Parry attached William Baffin’s name in 1821 after the 1616 bay survey. Northeastern Baffin Mountains peak at Mount Odin (at least 2,143 metres) and Mount Asgard (2,011 metres); Mount Thor’s 1,250-metre sheer face is often called Earth’s greatest pure vertical drop. Nettilling and Amadjuak Lakes dominate the south-central interior.
Human presence exceeds 3,000 years—pre-Dorset, Dorset, then Thule/Inuit who replaced Dorset after about 1300 CE. Norse sagas likely map the island as Helluland; Bjarni Herjólfsson may have sighted it around 985–986. Patricia Sutherland argued for early European traders from yarn, cordage, and alloy traces, yet Michele Hayeur Smith and others show Dorset communities spun sinew and hair for a millennium before Norse arrival, and William Fitzhugh notes spun cordage by the sixth century. L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland remains the only confirmed Norse site outside Greenland.
In 2016 roughly three-quarters of islanders were Indigenous, mostly Inuit, though Iqaluit is more mixed. Isulijarniq Migratory Bird Sanctuary—8,159 km² and a 1982 Ramsar wetland—hosts the world’s largest goose colony; Bowman Bay Wildlife Sanctuary covers 1,079 km². Barren-ground caribou crashed to about 5,000 by a 2012 survey, down as much as 95% from the 1990s, while polar bears, foxes, hares, lemmings, and wolves endure year-round.
A proposed Mary River iron mine could still remake logistics across this sparsely peopled cordillera of ice and stone.
Source: Baffin Island
