Arctic Exploration

The Arctic has been home to nomadic hunters for many thousands of years, so it is often deceptive to talk about its discovery – often the regions explored by the famous polar navigators were already well known to the Inuit and Saami (Lapp) peoples.

Early explorers However, the first polar explorer recorded in history was Pytheas, from the Greek colony of Massilia, the present Marseille. About 320 BC he sailed from the Mediterranean to Britain, and beyond to the Arctic land of ‘Thule’, from which he returned with fanciful tales of winters when the sun never rose, and summers when it never set. The identity of Thule has been a subject for much debate, but it is now thought most likely to have been Norway. The other main alternative, Iceland, is too far from Britain to match Pytheas' description, although it was reached by Irish monks around 800 AD. They were followed by the Norsemen of Scandinavia who colonized Iceland and Greenland in the 9th and 10th centuries. The colonists took advantage of the warm ‘climatic optimum’ of medieval times, and some lasted until the 15th century. By this time, the rest of Europe was in the middle of a golden age of exploration.

The search for the Northern Passages begins Arctic exploration was revived in the 16th century, primarily by English and Dutch merchants. Their principal aim was to identify a route to the Far East that avoided travel around South America or Africa. The two alternatives, a route from Europe to the north of Russia, or across the Atlantic and north of Canada, became known as the Northeast and Northwest passages.

In 1553, the London Company of Merchants Adventurers sent an expedition of three ships under the command of Sir Hugh Willoughby (died 1554) on the first organized search for a Northeast Passage. For Willoughby the voyage was a tragedy. A storm swept the ships apart and he and his crew died after being forced to winter on the Kola Peninsula of Northern Russia. His second-in-command, Richard Chancellor, made landfall near the present Arkhangelsk, and from there travelled overland to meet Tsar Ivan the Terrible. The meeting led to the establishment of trading links between Britain and Russia, and, in 1555, the foundation of the Muscovy Company. Trade with Russia meant that Britain lost interest in the Northeast passage, but the quest was renewed within a few years by the Dutch.

In 1594 an expedition with the Dutchman Willem Barents as navigator explored the west coast of Novaya Zemlya and discovered the passage to the Kara Sea. In 1596 another voyage under Barents reached Bjornoya and Spitsbergen before the ship broke up in the ice. Barents and his crew built a large wooden cabin from driftwood, and successfully overwintered on Novaya Zemlya, becoming the first Europeans to survive an Arctic winter. However, Barents died on the homeward journey.

Meanwhile, explorers on the east coast of Canada were making the first attempts to find the Northwest passage. In 1576 Martin Frobisher explored Greenland and Baffin Island, losing members of his crew in conflicts with the hostile Inuit, and losing two of his three ships in the ice. However, he returned with samples of iron pyrites which were wrongly identified as gold, and on the strength of this discovery, made two further voyages to Baffin Island in 1577 and 1578.

Frobisher's expeditions were followed by those of John Davis (1585–87), who contributed greatly to geographical knowledge of the Arctic, sailing far to the North in search of the passage. In 1585 Davis carried out a systematic exploration of the Greenland coast; while in 1586 and 1587 he went west and explored Davis Strait. In 1616, the English navigator William Baffin explored the bay named after him up to a latitude of 77° 45' N, discovering Smith, Jones, and Lancaster sounds.

Baffin's explorations were swiftly superseded by one of the most famous of all Arctic explorers, Henry Hudson. In 1607 Hudson, employed by the Muscovy Company, attempted to discover a passage via the North Pole to Cathay. He reached a latitude of 80° 23' N, and on his return discovered the island later called Jan Mayen. His reports of this expedition led to the development of the Spitsbergen whale fisheries, which prospered for three centuries.

In 1610, Hudson undertook further explorations, penetrating further west than anyone before, and discovering the bay that bears his name; however, the voyage ended in tragedy when Hudson's crew mutinied and cast him adrift to die. Thomas Button (died 1634) explored Hudson Bay as far north as Southampton Island in 1612–13, and Robert Bylot and William Baffin continued the exploration of the north part of the bay in 1615.

Other explorers also investigated Hudson Bay in the early 17th century in search of a western outlet, but without success. However, the opening up of the area led directly to the founding in 1670 of the Hudson's Bay Company, which laid the foundations of a rich fur trade and was to be responsible for the development of the Canadian North for many years. Late in the 18th century Company men such as Alexander Mackenzie made notable expeditions on the North American mainland. Mackenzie was the first white man to cross the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific, and also discovered the river named after him which leads to the Arctic Ocean.

Most of the early explorers of the Arctic were motivated by commercial interests. However, another valuable source of information were the Christian missionaries, who followed where the merchants led, and frequently made more detailed observations.

National expeditions In the 18th century, exploration of the Arctic became a political matter for the first time, and government-sponsored expeditions began. Russia, whose Cossacks had swept across Siberia in the 16th and 17th centuries, now possessed vast swathes of unexplored Arctic coastline, and Tsar Peter the Great ordered a series of expeditions to chart the extent of Siberia. As early as 1648, a Cossack explorer, Simon Dezhnev (1605–73), may have sailed through the Bering Strait and into the Pacific, but his feat was not recognized until much later. The Tsar ordered the Russian Imperial Navy to chart Siberia's northeast coastline, and in particular to settle the question of whether Asia was linked to North America.

The man in charge of the ‘Great Northern Expedition’ was the Danish explorer Vitus Bering. He oversaw a series of land expeditions along the north coasts, but is most famous for leading the main naval expedition, which between 1733 and 1742 charted the Kamchatka and Anadyr peninsulas and the Bering Strait, and twice landed on the American coast. However, the mission failed to reach the Arctic Ocean, and Bering did not survive to see its end.

The first expedition sponsored by the British Admiralty took place as early as 1741, when Christopher Middleton, formerly of the Hudson's Bay Company, conducted an official search for a western exit from Hudson Bay. In 1773, the Admiralty sponsored an attempt by Constantine Phipps, commanding the Racehorse and the Carcass to reach the North Pole. At the time, there was a popular theory that the Pole itself lay in an open circular sea, but Phipps' expedition was forced to retreat by ice after reaching nearly 81°N.

In the early 19th century British interest in Arctic exploration was revived under the enthusiastic leadership of Sir John Barrow (1764–1848), Secretary to the Admiralty, and boosted by reports from the trader and explorer William Scoresby Jr (1789–1857) that the Canadian Arctic was less ice-bound than before. The Royal Navy undertook a series of expeditions in search of a Northwest Passage, beginning with Commander John Ross's voyage of 1818, during which he claimed to have discovered a range of mountains at the western end of Lancaster Sound.

Many questioned this claim, including William Parry, who made three attempts to find the Northwest Passage in 1819–20, 1821– 23, and 1824–25. Parry's most successful voyage was his first, when he navigated 1,000 km/620 miles into Lancaster Sound, conclusively disproving the existence of Ross's mountains. In 1827, Parry made the first attempt to reach the North Pole. Departing from Spitsbergen, he left his ship and travelled over the pack ice, dragging boats on runners. He reached the highest latitude yet, 82– 45' N. In 1819–22 and 1825–27, two naval land expeditions under Captain John Franklin explored and mapped part of the unknown North American coastline.

Although humiliated by the mountain range incident, Ross still had a major part to play in Arctic exploration. From 1829–33, Ross attempted to find the passage once again on a private expedition. It was during this voyage that his nephew, James Clark Ross, became the first European to reach the Magnetic North Pole.

Franklin's last voyage In 1845 John Franklin set out in search of the Northwest Passage in command of the Erebus and Terror. The tragic fate of the expedition was only reconstructed from the findings of the numerous search parties who followed in Franklin's steps many years later.

Evidently Franklin passed into Barrow Strait from Lancaster Sound, wintering at Beechey Island. The expedition then sailed on through Peel Sound and was beset by ice in Victoria Strait. Franklin himself died, presumably of starvation or malnutrition, during 1847, and in 1848 the crew were forced to abandon their ships, which were still stuck in the ice. They travelled along King William Island across to the Great Fish (now Back) River, hoping to reach an outpost of the Hudson's Bay Company. No one survived the march.

By 1848, concern was growing in Britain. Franklin's young second wife, Jane, began to actively campaign for a rescue attempt, and was the driving force behind a series of expeditions which gradually pieced together the tragic end of the Franklin expedition, and also charted vast unexplored areas of the Arctic.

The search for Franklin began with an expedition by Sir James Clark Ross to Lancaster Sound in 1848–49. After Ross's failure, a more extensive search was organized and, in 1850, a series of six expeditions set out for the Canadian Arctic. The expeditions all took different routes, and one discovered the traces of Franklin's first wintering on Beechey Island. In 1852, the government dispatched another major expedition under Sir Edward Belcher (1799–1877), which extended the exploration of islands north of Barrow Strait. Belcher's expedition also rescued one of the previous search parties which had been forced to abandon ship in 1853. These men returned home through Lancaster Sound, and therefore became the first to complete the Northwest Passage, albeit in two separate ships and partly by land.

In 1854 Dr John Rae (1813–93) of the Hudson's Bay Company reported finding remains of Franklin's men near the mouth of the Back River. Lady Franklin organized a final expedition, led by Sir Francis McClintock (1819–1907) in 1857–59, which found the only record of the expedition deposited at Point Victory on King William Island.

The achievement of the Northern Passages The fate of Franklin's expedition led to a major reassessment of the methods used in Arctic exploration. Large parties, requiring huge quantities of supplies, were recognized as inefficient compared to smaller teams. At roughly the same time, the introduction of iron cladding, steam power and screw propellers created ships far better suited to forcing their way through the Arctic ice.

The first through navigation of the Northeast Passage was carried out in 1878–79 by the Swedish Baron Nordenskjöld, who sailed from Norway to the Bering Strait in the steamship Vega (the first east–west navigation was accomplished by Commander Vilkitski of the Russian Imperial Navy in 1913–15).

The Northwest Passage, however, was not successfully navigated until 1903–06. The Norwegian Roald Amundsen and six companions ran into ice which trapped their ship Gjoa, and forced them to overwinter for three successive years before finally reaching the Pacific. Amundsen, of course, went on to greater fame as the conqueror of the South Pole.

The quest for the North Pole The attainment of the North Pole did not become a goal of explorers until relatively late in the history of Arctic exploration. In 1827 Parry had made the first attempt to reach the pole from Spitsbergen by sledging over the pack ice, but the channel between Greenland and Ellesmere Island became the route chosen by many explorers.

In 1853 the US explorer Elisha Kent Kane (1820–57), while professing to search for Franklin, had the pole as his real aim. He reached Kennedy Channel leading out of the body of water he named Kane Basin. The doctor on Kane's expedition, Isaac Israel Hayes, attempted to reach the pole himself in 1860 but only achieved a slight extension to Kane's explorations. In 1871, Charles Hall (1821–71), discoverer of many relics of the Franklin expedition, took his ship Polaris to within 650 km/403 mi of the pole.

The British Arctic Expedition of 1875–76 under Vice-Admiral George Nares was the next to make a serious attempt on the pole. As well as exploring the coasts of Ellesmere Island and Greenland by sledge, one party under Lieutenant A H Markham reached 83° 20' N, a new record.

In 1879 a US Navy expedition under George Washington De Long (1844–81) tried to reach the pole from Wrangel Island in the East Siberian Sea, aboard the Jeannette. The expedition was a total failure, and the ship was crushed in the ice near the New Siberian Islands. Two boats attempted to return to Siberia, but only one made it. Several years later wreckage from the Jeannette was found on the southwest coast of Greenland, having drifted across the Arctic Ocean in the pack ice.

The Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen had the idea that a strong enough ship could be carried through the Arctic ice intact, perhaps taking it very close to the North Pole. In 1893, he sailed his specially built, reinforced ship Fram into the pack ice near the place where the Jeanette sank. The ship's hull was designed so that it was lifted above the ice, rather than crushed by it.

The Fram drifted for nearly two years, during which time Nansen and his crew conducted detailed scientific studies and drilled through the ice to the sea beneath. In April 1895 Nansen and a companion, Hjalmar Johansen, left the ship to sledge to the pole, reaching 86° 13' N, before turning south to Franz Josef Land. In April 1896 by pure coincidence they met up with English explorer Frederick Jackson, and returned to Norway in his ship. Meanwhile, the Fram broke out of the pack northwest of Spitsbergen after a 35-month drift. Nansen's mission had proved without doubt that the North Pole was situated in an ice-covered sea, with no major land mass beneath it.

In 1899 an Italian expedition led by the Luigi Amedeo, Duke of Abruzzi made their attempt at the pole from a base on Franz Josef Land, but were forced to turn back only 35 km/22 mi beyond Nansen's farthest north point.

Reaching the Pole From 1891 to 1909, the US explorer Robert E Peary led a total of six expeditions to North Greenland. After several unsuccessful attempts at the Pole, he sailed in the Roosevelt on a final attempt in 1908. Peary's operation was meticulously planned, with advance teams building staging posts and leaving supplies along the route from Cape Columbia to the Pole at regular intervals. This enabled Peary to approach the Pole with ease, but still left a 250 km/150 mi final stretch. Peary, accompanied by his assistant Matthew Henson (1866–1955) and four Inuit, made the sledge journey over the ice to the pole. However, the speed of their march, covering a total of 1030 km/635 mi in only 16 days, made some suspect whether Peary had in fact reached the North Pole.

Another American, Frederick A Cook (1865–1940), created further controversy with a claim to have reached the pole from Axel Heiberg Island in 1908. Controversy surrounded these rival claims for many years, but Cook's claims are now generally ignored, while more recent explorations have proved Peary could have covered the distance required in 16 days. However, there is still some doubt about whether Peary's navigation techniques were accurate enough to have placed accurately at the Pole itself. The first land expedition which is universally accepted to have reached the pole did not occur until 1968, under the American Ralph Plaisted.

The early 20th century The first decades of the 20th century saw the exploration of the remaining unknown territory. A series of Danish explorers charted the northeast corner of Greenland and explored the interior in the years before World War I. The Norwegian Otto Sverdrup (1854–1930) reached the Canadian Arctic islands of Axel Heiberg, Ellef Ringes, Amund Ringes, and King Christian in 1900–02. Also noteworthy was Vilhjalmur Stefansson's (1879–1962) Canadian Arctic expedition of 1913–18 which conducted an intensive study of the Inuit peoples.

Aerial exploration Many of the most daring polar explorers in the early 20th century travelled not by land, but by air. As early as 1897 the Swedish scientist Salomon Andree (1854–97) tried to reach the pole from Spitsbergen in a balloon and died in the attempt. In 1925 Roald Amundsen and the US explorer Lincoln Ellsworth (1880–1951) flew to within 160km/100 mi of the pole in two Dornier flying boats, and the following year Richard E Byrd of the US Navy flew to the pole and back to his base at Spitsbergen.

Also in 1926, Amundsen, Ellsworth, and the Italian Umberto Nobile (1885–1980) flew in Nobile's airship Norge from Spitsbergen to Alaska. Nobile was a pioneer of aerial exploration, and returned to the Arctic in 1928 with another airship, the Italia, planning an attempt on the pole which came to an abrupt end when the Italia crashed on the ice. Tragically, Roald Amundsen disappeared while on a rescue mission, though Nobile survived. In 1928 the Australian Hubert Wilkins used a more conventional aircraft to fly from Alaska to Dead Man's Island, Spitsbergen.

Between the wars Pioneering explorations drew to a close in the interwar period 1919–1938, and the emphasis changed to exploitation and development. Intensive mapping surveys, meteorological studies, geological prospecting, and the development of purely scientific expeditions marked this period. Support for claims of sovereignty was one motive for such development. There was also a demand for the type of research that would benefit commercial aviation – the shortest routes between Europe and America involved passing over the Arctic.

The period between the wars also marked the beginning of the Soviet Union's efforts to promote Arctic research. The development of a Sea Route around the USSR's north coast became government policy in 1932, and the Russians also led the way in the establishment of semipermanent drifting ice stations. The North Pole I was set up at the pole by Ivan D Papanin in 1937, and was the first of many Soviet and US stations after World War II.

Polar exploration since World War II The advent of air power increased the strategic importance of the Arctic and since World War II much activity has been due to the development of air defences. The first commercial flight over the pole from Copenhagen to Los Angeles was accomplished by the Scandinavian airline SAS in 1954. In 1958 the nuclear-powered US submarine Nautilus completed the first trans-polar voyage beneath the ice, while in 1959 the USS Skate was the first to surface at the pole. A Soviet nuclear icebreaker, the Arktika, was the first vessel to succeed in reaching the pole by sea.

There have been many successful land expeditions to the Pole in more recent times. One of the best known is the British Trans-Arctic Expedition of 1968–9, which crossed the Arctic from Alaska to Svalbard. Other notable expeditions include the first solo march to the Pole, by Naomi Uemara in 1978, and Ranulph Fiennes's 1981–2 Transglobe Expedition which passed through both North and South Poles.

By reaching the geographic North Pole in April 1998 the British explorer David Hempleman-Adams achieved the explorers' grand slam of reaching the highest peaks on all seven continents and both poles.