Exploration: Early classical cultures shared the concept of a shining region in the far north, enamelled with purity. Seneca referred to this ethereal land at the top of the world as "Thule". Farthest north became "Ultima Thule".
When, in the early 20th century, a pioneering Dane founded a radical trading-post on the coast of Greenland, north of Baffin Bay, he called it Thule, tapping into the familiar myth. Home of the Polar Inuit, Thule became a co-operative venture, its profits funding the exploration by the native people of their own lost history across the Arctic north.
It was only a few generations since the Polar Inuit had believed themselves entirely alone on earth. They had discovered the outside world when Capt John Ross sailed into their ken in 1818, on a voyage of exploration, searching for the Northwest Passage. Ross, in full dress uniform, with sword and admiralty epaulets, disembarked to meet the native seal-hunters on the ice. Ship's officers were towed about on sleds by sailors. The Inuit, an egalitarian society (defined by Jean Malaurie, their chronicler, as "anarcho- communist") were not impressed. They responded with concealed contempt to the authoritarian slave culture that had sailed into their midst. The whites, qallunaat, showed them the wonders of technology, bestowing knives and needles.
The Polar Inuit (30 to 50 families) were emerging from a mini-Ice Age of two centuries that had pared down their numbers and stripped them of earlier development. Theirs was an animist culture of good and evil spirits, regulated by shamans and by taboos that maintained the frigid balance of survival and averted inbreeding. Their diet was meat, their tools bone and sealskin thong. Harpoons were made from bone tipped with primitive metal, which was chipped from one of four iron meteorites in their territory.
British and American expeditions arrived in the wake of Ross with wood, iron, tools, weapons and alcohol. The Polar Inuit continued their Bone Age lifestyle for decades, convinced of the superiority of their own culture. This did not stop them from fraternising with the explorers and whalers arriving on their shores.
The Inuit hunters, Arctic experts, observed the disasters that passed for 19th-century exploration. Certain expeditions, Greely's and Franklin's for example, degenerated into cannibalism.
Inuit hunters accompanied many ill-fated expeditions. Their experience, their diet, their clothing and footwear were not adopted by the qallunaat, who were strangled by navy rank, and authority. Hunters and guides saved lives on many documented occasions, sacrificing their own at times, but they were never accepted as equals, as advisers, or even as models of survival.
When exploration switched from the Northwest Passage to the North Pole itself, the race was dominated by two Americans, Peary and Cook. Peary employed virtually the entire population of Polar Inuit in his attempts to reach the Pole. A charismatic dictator, his courage was admired by the hunters. He rewarded their devotion poorly, shipping their furs and artefacts to America at great profit to himself. He removed (Malaurie calls it theft) one of their iron meteorites and sold it in the US for $40,000.
Secretly, Peary kept an Inuit wife and two sons in the Arctic north, as Josephine, his American wife, discovered to her horror when she sailed north in search of her husband, who had disappeared for several years.
Of course, neither Peary nor Cook ever reached the North Pole. It is well-established (and confirmed by Malaurie) that both men lodged fraudulent claims. Each was capable of reaching it, and both were driven to desperate straits by the knife-edged competition between them. Cook, however, went on to manufacture a fraudulent first ascent of Mt McKinley (Denali), the highest mountain in North America. As climbers know, he made little impact on the mountain and the spuriousness of his claim was conclusively demonstrated by the great mountain photographer, Bradford Washburn, in The Dishonorable Dr Cook, published in 2001.
The gulf in understanding between qallunaat and native during the decades of exploration began to close with the arrival of Knud Rasmussen, a Greenland Dane, in 1903, whose lifelong mission became the study of Inuit culture, language and folklore. He founded Thule, the cooperative trading-post, in 1910. Not only did he link Inuit heritage into the tradition of European myth, but the exploration he inspired was designed to reconnect the people of Thule to their own circumpolar culture, which had spread from the Bering Strait across the Arctic north over thousands of years.
The shining myth was soon shattered. In 1951, without warning, the US navy and air force landed 5,000 men at Thule. They built a secret nuclear air-base there and deported the community 60 miles north to Qaanaaq. In 1968, a B-52G bomber crashed near Thule. Three bombs exploded on impact, a fourth was lost in the pristine ocean. Untrained Inuit, among others, were used in a frantic clean-up. Inevitably, a high percentage of the workforce died of cancer.
Jean Malaurie, a French scientist and explorer, was travelling with Inuit hunters when the Americans invaded Thule. A passionate cultural and political commentator, he wrote the classic Last Kings of Thule, (1953) in response. As a scientist and reformer, he has campaigned internationally on behalf of the Inuit for 50 years. Ultima Thule, rich in pictures and text, is his testimony to their history and culture, and a record of their interaction with a century and a half of exploration. Magnificent in his central preoccupation, Malaurie occasionally falters in other ethnic domains. He identifies Robert McClure, who resolved the Northwest Passage, as Scottish. Frank Nugent's recent book on Irish explorers, Seek the Frozen Lands, shows that the ruthless McClure was born at The Rectory, Main Street, Wexford, in 1807, and that Ernest Shackleton was born not in Kilkee, as Malaurie has it, but in Co Kildare.
In a coda, Malaurie considers how the Polar Inuit - battling high rates of alcoholism and male suicide today - might regain their inspiring capacity to survive extreme conditions.
His solution involves the recovery of hunting skills and respect for the hunter, devalued today, combined with the development of polar technology to be exercised by educated Inuit through the air-base, which is there to stay.
It is difficult, though, for the reader of this compelling book to forget the fourth egg, laid in 1968 by that B-52 and since disowned by the Americans. Could it, in the tradition of monster myth, be incubating still on the ocean-floor of Ultima Thule?
• Dermot Somers is a climber, writer and broadcaster. His Collected Stories was published earlier this year by Bâton Wicks