The Maps That Were Read With the Hands

In 1885, an Inuit hunter named Kuniit showed Danish explorer Gustav Holm three pieces of carved wood. They looked nothing like European maps. There was no writing, no compass rose, no scale, and no view from above. Yet the carvings described a complicated stretch of the eastern Greenland coast.

One piece represented the mainland, with its succession of capes and deep fjords. Another represented the islands lying offshore. Instead of drawing these features, Kuniit had carved their shapes along the edges of the wood. A traveler could follow the coastline with a finger, feeling each inlet and projecting point in the correct sequence.

The maps did not need to reproduce the exact size or direction of every feature. Their purpose was to preserve the order and character of places encountered along a journey. They belonged to a way of understanding the coast from the water, where the shape of a cape or the entrance to a fjord mattered more than its position on a rectangular sheet.

Their small size made the maps easy to hold, and wood was well suited to representing Greenland’s deeply cut coastline. However, researchers caution against the popular claim that they were routinely used inside mittens or consulted blindly during kayak voyages. They may have served mainly as teaching devices and aids to storytelling.

Kuniit’s carvings still expanded the meaning of a map. A landscape did not have to be flattened onto paper. It could be turned into an object, held in one hand, and remembered through touch.