Polar Exploration

I

Introduction

Polar Exploration, history of the attempts to reach the North Pole and the South Pole, and the preceding and following exploration of the surrounding Arctic and Antarctic areas.

II

The Terrain

The polar regions are sometimes defined as the areas on the globe within the Arctic Circle (66°33′ North), and within the Antarctic Circle (66°33′ South) respectively, the Circles themselves marking the lines beyond which the sun is not visible above the horizon on the winter solstice of their respective hemispheres. It is more satisfactory, perhaps, taking account of the differing conditions and terrain of the two regions, to think of the Arctic as extending north from around 60° North, or further north in places, and the Antarctic as beginning at around 50° South (about where the cold Antarctic currents of the Southern Ocean sink beneath warm currents from the tropics).

From antiquity to the late 18th century the polar regions were regarded by Europeans with dread: it was thought no one could survive in such extremes of cold. Nicholas of Lynn, a Franciscan friar, pictured a magnetic North Pole rock surrounded by whirlpools and mountains. It is now known that, while the regions share features such as great cold and dark winters, the Arctic consists of an ocean, the Arctic Ocean, surrounded by land masses, while the Antarctic is a continental land mass, with an area of more than 13 million sq km (5 million sq mi) and an average elevation higher than that of any other continent. The vast Antarctic ice-cap, with an average depth of about 2,400 m (8,000 ft), has no counterpart in the Arctic Ocean, where the ice that permanently covers the sea to the depth of a few metres is in constant movement. It is not possible to reach the North Pole over ice in a continuous line, as there are always breaks, called leads, in the ice floes, however tightly they may in places be jammed up into pack ice. The land regions of the Arctic, moreover, have nearly a thousand species of wild flowers; the Antarctic has two. And the Antarctic, with its continental vastness and ferocious cold, remains largely unexplored.

The polar regions have always inspired not only fear but also ambition and fascination, and reasons for their exploration have included religious, commercial, political, military, or personal motives, not to mention mere human curiosity. As in all areas of exploration, some discoveries have been extremely hard-won—as Fridtjof Nansen wrote, “Nowhere has knowledge been purchased at greater cost of privation and suffering”—while others have been accidental.

III

The North Pole

A

The Northern Sea Passages

Interest in reaching and exploring the Poles emerged gradually out of a general desire, originally commercially motivated, to find new sea routes for the conduct of trade. English and Dutch trading companies in the 16th and 17th centuries, unable to reach the ports of China and South East Asia via the southern seaways, which were barred by the power of Spain and Portugal, had to seek another route into the Pacific Ocean, one that passed north of Russia or America, or even directly over the North Pole. The two sea routes they sought were called the North East Passage (north of Russia), now known as the Northern Sea Route, and the North West Passage (north of Canada)—these terms have always been used to refer to any route through the areas concerned, rather than any particular route.

The first known attempt to find a North East Passage to the Pacific was made by the English traders Sir Hugh Willoughby and Richard Chancellor, sailing on behalf of the Muscovy Company; in 1553 they managed to reach the White Sea, from where they travelled overland to Moscow. Forty years later Willem Barents made further advances in this direction, rediscovering Svalbard and Novaya Zemlya, and overwintering on the latter. Nevertheless it was not until the 1870s that a complete North East Passage was finally navigated, by Adolf Erik Nordenskjöld.

The search for a North West Passage started in 1576 when Martin Frobisher sailed to Frobisher Bay in Baffin Island (believing the bay to be a strait between two headlands leading into the Pacific). Ten years later John Davis sailed further north still and found the strait now named Davis Strait. Most of the English expeditions to the area during the 17th century became bogged down in an ultimately fruitless attempt to find a passage by locating an outlet to the Pacific from the western shore of Hudson Bay, beginning with Henry Hudson himself in 1611, and followed by Thomas Button, Robert Bylot, William Baffin, Luke Foxe, and Thomas James. Bylot and Baffin’s expedition of 1616, however, pushed through Davis Strait and reached a northernmost point of 77°45′ at the entrance to Smith Sound, separating Ellesmere Island from Greenland; it was a latitude that wouldn’t be reached again in the Americas for nearly 240 years.

B

Heading for the Pole

It was not until the late 18th century—still long before the route of either of the two northern sea passages had been established, let alone navigated—that an expedition was mounted specifically to reach the North Pole. It was launched in 1773 by the British Navy (which would be one of the most prominent players in the exploration of both poles over the next 140 years) and led by Captain Constantine Phipps. As his colleague James Cook, on his second great voyage, was penetrating deep into the Antarctic Circle, Phipps, sailing due north from Britain in the Racehorse, reached the edge of the ice pack at a latitude of 80°48′, to the north-east of Svalbard, a new furthest-north record that lasted for 33 years. He made valuable scientific and natural history observations (a species of polar bear is named after him), but found that his way to the north was blocked by an impenetrable shield of ice. One of the most interesting facts about this expedition for later historians was that it was the first important voyage of Horatio Nelson, then a teenage midshipman.

For a time the quest for the Pole was abandoned, until the Hydrographic Department of the Royal Navy, established in 1811, started to carry out scientific surveys to make navigation safe for commercial shipping and, with an eye on national supremacy, to consider means of keeping Russian influence to a manageable level. The motivating force behind the Navy’s enthusiasm for Arctic exploration was John Barrow, Jr., the second secretary to the Admiralty. His idea that beyond the visible barrier of ice there existed an “Open Polar Sea”, devoid of ice—an idea backed up by no evidence and flying in the face of reason—influenced British and American exploration of the area for most of the 19th century. An enormous exploratory effort that linked the search for the North West Passage and an attempt to reach the North Pole was initiated in 1817 by a report from William Scoresby, the whaling captain and noted expert on Arctic conditions, that the northern seas were unusually free of ice (this climate change was a temporary effect, possibly related to the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815), though the experienced Scoresby never himself believed in the Open Polar Sea theory.

In 1818 John Franklin commanded one ship of an expedition attempting to sail towards the Pole from Svalbard—essentially a repeat of Phipps’s expedition, and with the same result. In 1827 Sir William Parry, who had led successful expeditions in search of a North West Passage, led another attempt on the Pole from Svalbard, this time landing on the ice pack and hauling sledges northwards. Though the sledging party reached 82°45′ North, a new record, it had to stop short nearly 800 km (500 mi) from the Pole. Much experience had been gained: reindeer were useless as draught animals; heavy wooden boats converted into sledges were cumbersome and exhausting to haul; their rations were inadequate in balance and quantity for the enormous physical demands made on the crew; and the continual drift of the Arctic pack-ice (which in that region was generally southwards) carried travellers back nearly as fast as they advanced. The tragedy for later Royal Navy expeditions was that so few of the obvious lessons were learnt.

In 1829 James Clark Ross, second-in-command on Parry’s expedition and nephew of John Ross, established a landmark in polar exploration when, at a spot on the Boothia Peninsula, he discovered the North Magnetic Pole, chosen, he wrote, by Nature “as the centre of one of her great and dark powers”. Discovery of the Magnetic Pole’s location (which varies with time) was essential in helping navigators to calibrate accurately readings from their compasses.

Attention then turned to the idea of reaching the North Pole from North America, this time with American explorers in the vanguard. In 1853 Elisha Kent Kane led an expedition to penetrate Smith Sound and try to find a way through the narrow channel separating Ellesmere Island from Greenland to the hoped-for open sea beyond. He got as far as a widening of the channel, named Kane Basin, before failing supplies and rancour among his crew forced him to retreat two years later. In 1860 Isaac Hayes led an expedition to the same area which penetrated further, on foot, into the Kennedy Channel. In 1871 Charles Francis Hall led an expedition that sailed beyond any point previously reached by a ship, to 82°11′, pushing beyond Kennedy Channel to the widening that came to be known as Hall Basin, where he died that year.

The final breakthrough to the shores of the Arctic Ocean west of Greenland came in the last British naval expedition to the Arctic in the 19th century, led by George Nares in 1875-1876. In the Alert he reached 82°45′, on the northern shore of Ellesmere Island; the whole of the strait separating Ellesmere and Greenland was later named Nares Strait in his honour. Sledging parties travelled northwards as far as 83°20′ before turning back, again exhausted by a generally poor diet (which induced scurvy), unsuitable clothing, inadequate snowshoes, and over-heavy sledges. His attempt on the Pole failed, but valuable scientific work was done, with geological and natural history specimens being collected. In 1881 the otherwise disastrous expedition led by Adolphus Washington Greely, in the same area, managed to add a few more miles to the record, setting a furthest north of 83°24′.

In 1879 George Washington De Long attempted to reach the North Pole from another direction, sailing the Jeannette into the Arctic Ocean through the Bering Strait and heading north. His ship was beset off Siberia, drifted for 21 months, and was finally crushed by the ice. Several years later, remains of the Jeannette were found in an ice floe off the coast of Greenland. The Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen realized that the remains could have passed near the North Pole and, reasoning that if a floe could drift across the polar region, a ship could too, he built a specially strengthened ship, the Fram, and allowed her to become frozen into the pack ice, hoping that she would drift across the Pole. It was a feasible, indeed noble attempt (1893-1896), but Nansen’s farthest north of 86°14′, recorded after he and a companion left the ship and proceeded with sledges on foot, was still 416 km (258y mi) short of the Pole.