Godthåb > Nuuk Vestgronland Greenland

Greenland is at this time technically a Norwegian colony under the Dano-Norwegian Crown, but the colony has not had any contact with Norway proper for more than two centuries, and Denmark-Norway had only reasserted its latent claim to the colony in 1721.

The area around the site of present Nuuk was first occupied by the ancient pre-Inuit, Paleo-Eskimo people of the Saqqaq culture as far back as 2200 BCE when they lived in the area around the now abandoned settlement of Qoornoq.

For a long time, it was occupied by the Dorset culture around the former settlement of Kangeq, but they disappeared from the Nuuk district before 1000.

The Nuuk area was later inhabited by Viking explorers in the tenth century, and shortly thereafter by Inuit peoples.

Inuit and Norsemen both lived with little interaction in this area from about 1000 until the disappearance of the Norse settlement for uncertain reasons during the fifteenth century.

Godthåb, which translates to "Good Hope" in English, is founded in 1728 by Norwegian missionary Hans Egede, who had arrived at a place he called Colony of Hope (in Danish known as Håbets Ø) close to the already existing Inuit population living in Kangeq and near the site of Vesterbygden, a tenth-century Norse settlement.

The city proper is founded as the fort of Godt-Haab in 1728 by the royal governor Claus Paarss, when he relocates the missionary and merchant Hans Egede's earlier Hope Colony (Haabets Koloni) from Kangeq Island to the mainland.

Paarss's colonists consist of mutinous soldiers, convicts, and prostitutes and most die within the first year of scurvy and other ailments.