摘要：The Danish Greenland cartographer and geologist Lauge Koch (1892–1964) was a legend at the time of his last public appearance, in Hamilton Hall at McMaster University in March 1964. Before he was 30 years old, he had charted the entire coastline of North Greenland by dogsled (19 sheets at 1:300K scale) and had described the essential features of its geologic struc- ture and stratigraphy (Haller 1971; Dawes 1976; Dawes and Haller 1979). This was made possible by opportuni- ties arising from threats to Danish sov- ereignty over North Greenland by the United States prior to 1917, when the American claim based on Robert E. Peary’s 1891–1909 expeditions was relinquished as part of a deal whereby they acquired the Virgin Islands, for- merly Danish West Indies. In 1926, Koch shifted his activities to East Greenland, where a providential Nor- wegian challenge to Danish sovereignty in 1931 enabled him to establish a large, international, multidisciplinary research and mapping program, utiliz- ing ship-based float planes and flying boats for systematic aerial photogra- phy, support of land parties, and navi- gation through sea ice. Oskar Kulling, a member of Koch’s 1929 expedition, discovered Devonian vertebrate assem- blages sensationally containing the ear- liest known tetrapod, Ichthyostega (Jarvik 1961; Clack 2002; Larsen et al. 2008). Supported by the Greenland Ministry of the Danish government, independ- ent of the federal Geological Survey, Koch’s East Greenland expeditions continued for twenty-three field sea- sons until 1958 (Koch 1961), culminat- ing after his death with tectonic and geological maps of East Greenland (Haller 1970; Koch and Haller 1971) and the magnificent book, Geology of the East Greenland Caledonides (Haller 1971). Koch was lionized international- ly—he received medals, national hon- ours and honourary degrees in eight foreign countries and was venerated at Yale, Harvard, Columbia and McGill universities (Müller 1964; Dunbar 1966)—but in Denmark he was a con- troversial figure whose failure to make alliances with parties who were other- wise bound to oppose him led to a damaging court case in the mid-1930’s (Ries 2002) and the premature termina- tion of his East Greenland mapping- based research program in 1958 (Dawes 2012). Koch was 71 years old and struggling to complete a treatise on the Precambrian geology of Green- land and North America when, in Feb- ruary 1964, he embarked on a six- month lecture and study tour spon- sored by the American Geological Institute and the Carlsberg Foundation. Some may read this who were present at Koch’s last lecture, in Hamilton Hall, but after nearly fifty years their recol- lection will have faded while mine has not.
