Clavering Island (Danish: Clavering Ø) is a large island in eastern Greenland

off Gael Hamke Bay, to the south of Wollaston Foreland.

The Eskimonaes (Eskimonæs) radio and weather station was on this island. It
was manned by Danish staff and was captured by German troops in 1943.
The place where the station stood had also been the location of the last Inuit
settlement in Northeast Greenland around 1823.[1]

Contents
1 History
1.1 Eskimonaes
2 Geography
3 See also
4 Bibliography
5 References
History
The island was named by the second German North Polar Expedition 1869–
70 as Clavering Insel to commemorate Douglas Charles Clavering (1794–
1827), commander of the Griper on the 1823 voyage, which explored the
area and, at the southern shore of this island made the first (and last)
encounter that Europeans made with the now extinct Northeast-Greenland
Inuit.

In late August 1823, Clavering and the crew of the Griper encountered a
band of twelve Inuit, including men, women and children. In his journal,
Clavering described their seal-skin tent, canoe, and clothes, their harpoons
and spear tipped with bone and meteoric iron, and their physical appearance
("tawny coppery" skin, "black hair and round visages; their hands and feet
very fleshy, and much swelled"). He remarked on their skill in skinning a
seal, the custom of sprinkling water over a seal or walrus before skinning,
and their amazement at the demonstration of firearms for hunting.[2]
European visitors to Northeast Greenland prior to 1823 reported evidence of
extensive Inuit settlement in the region although they encountered no
humans. Later expeditions, starting with the Second German North Polar
Expedition in 1869, found the remains of many former settlements, but the
population had apparently died out during the intervening years.[3]

Bones of muskoxen have been found at Inuit sites on the island, but no such
animals were reported by Clavering in 1823. Large numbers of Arctic hare
bones suggest that the Inuit were reduced to hunting smaller game after the
extinction of muskoxen in the area. After humans died out, muskoxen
returned, and the first pair of live muskoxen ever to be brought to Europe
were captured at Clavering Island in 1899.[4][5]

Eskimonaes
The Eskimonaes radio and telegraph station stood on a small peninsula in
the south coast of Clavering Island. The place had been named
Eskimonæsset by the 1929-30 Expedition to East Greenland led by Lauge
Koch, after the abandoned Inuit settlement of four houses, of which two were
excavated at the time. The station was built as a scientific post and was also
used later as a base by the Three-year Expedition to East Greenland, as well
as by other scientists from 1931 to 1939. From 1941 to 1943, it became the
headquarters of the Danish North-East Greenland Sledge Patrol.[6]

During the war, the code name used for the Eskimonæs Station by the US
Coast Guard was 'Bluie East Five' — the same code name would be later
used for Myggbukta after Eskimonæs was destroyed. The main building at
Eskimonaes was burnt by a German military patrol on 25 March 1943, and
the site was bombed by the US Air Force on 14 May the same year. The
burnt out station would be replaced by Dødemandsbugten Station, also
known as Ny Station, which was built nearby further to the east later in the
same year. Dødemandsbugten would be succeeded in 1944 by Daneborg
and the ruins of the two former stations lay now abandoned and remain
essentially undisturbed as a conspicuous memorial to war-time events. The
efforts of the North-East Greenland Sledge Patrol led by Ib Poulson in World
War II were chronicled after the war by English author David Armine Howarth
in his 1951 book The Sledge Patrol.[7]

Geography
Clavering Island is a coastal island, separated from the mainland by fjords
and sounds of the Greenland Sea, some of which are narrow. The Tyrolerfjord
bounds the island in the north, with its extension, the Young Sound in the
northeast, Rudi Bay and the Copeland Fjord in the west, the Godthab Gulf in
the southwest, and Gael Hamke Bay in the southeast. Payer Land lies to the
west, A. P. Olsen Land to the north, Wollaston Foreland to the east and
northeast, and [8]

The island's highest point is the 1650 m high Ortlerspids and the island has
an area of 1,534.6 km2 (592.5 sq mi) and a shoreline of 165.4 km (102.8 mi).
[9] The Halle Range (Hallebjergene) is an up to 1,200-metre-high (3,900 ft)
mountain chain on the southwest part of Clavering Island that was named by
Lauge Koch during his 1929–30 expedition.[6]

Some small islands are located nearby, such as the Finsch Islands to the
south and Jackson Island far to the southeast at the mouth of the bay.[10]