If it is true that a camel is a horse designed by a committee, then it would seem that a vast heavenly bureaucracy was employed in the creation of the Indian Ocean as a geographic region. That any government should have a policy towards the Indian Ocean area is as unlikely as the region itself. It would be a bold analyst who would set out to give an account of Greenland’s relations with the Atlantic area, the latter defined as those territories – from Iceland to the Cape of Good Hope, from Canada to Tierra del Fuego – the shores of which are washed by that ocean. My task here is no less daunting.