Vito de la Vera

Airships of the Whale Culture above Greenland Vito de la Vera 1st edition

To gain an understanding of the past, it is sometimes useful to test what one has learned by investigating the past. That is what this book is about. It is a continuation of my book, "The Whale Culture of Greenland". Based on the details about the whale culture in Greenland that I learned from rock carvings on a cliff in Eastern Greenland, I and like-minded individuals have built an airship, as it could have been built by a hunter-gatherer culture in the Arctic during the Holocene Maximum, and we will now attempt to fly it around Greenland and propel it with the fuel we can gather from hunting.
This is therefore the story of our journey in a hot-air balloon around Greenland and how we managed the long trip north around the island and down along the west coast until we returned to the east coast, facing all the challenges and dangerous situations that arose along the way.
It is also the story of what an ancient people could achieve in the distant past and what it tells about their spread in the Arctic and beyond.
It is a long and eventful journey that I and my companions undertake, which does not go as expected and certainly does not end as such, but still bears the fruits we desired.
The journey is long and tough and constantly tests us, as the Arctic must have tested the whale culture in Greenland's distant past, but we endure it all the way to the abrupt end of the journey, thereby showing that an airborne culture in Greenland could have been possible around the time of the Holocene Maximum.