According to Apsley Cherry-Garrard, one of the men who went to Antarctica with Captain Scott, ‘Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time that has ever been devised. ’ Despite this there has never been a shortage of volunteers willing to endure the bad times in pursuit of the glory that polar exploration sometimes brings. Nick Rennison’s compelling book tells the memorable stories of the men and women who have risked their lives by entering the white wastelands of the Arctic and the Antarctic, from the compelling tales of Scott, Shacklet on and Amundsen, to lesser known heroes such as Fridtjof Nansen and Robert Peary. A Short History of Polar Exploration also looks at the hold that the polar regions have often had on the imaginations of artists and writers in the last two hundred years examining the pain tings, films and literature that they have inspired.
According to Apsley Cherry-Garrard, one of the men who went to Antarctica with Captain Scott, ‘Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time that has ever been devised. ’ Despite this there has never been a shortage of volunteers willing to endure the bad times in pursuit of the glory that polar exploration sometimes brings. Nick Rennison’s compelling book tells the memorable stories of the men and women who have risked their lives by entering the white wastelands of the Arctic and the Antarctic, from the compelling tales of Scott, Shacklet on and Amundsen, to lesser known heroes such as Fridtjof Nansen and Robert Peary. A Short History of Polar Exploration also looks at the hold that the polar regions have often had on the imaginations of artists and writers in the last two hundred years examining the pain tings, films and literature that they have inspired.
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According to Apsley Cherry-Garrard, one of the men who went to Antarctica with Captain Scott, ‘Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time that has ever been devised. ’ Despite this there has never been a shortage of volunteers willing to endure the bad times in pursuit of the glory that polar exploration sometimes brings. Nick Rennison’s compelling book tells the memorable stories of the men and women who have risked their lives by entering the white wastelands of the Arctic and the Antarctic, from the compelling tales of Scott, Shacklet on and Amundsen, to lesser known heroes such as Fridtjof Nansen and Robert Peary. A Short History of Polar Exploration also looks at the hold that the polar regions have often had on the imaginations of artists and writers in the last two hundred years examining the pain tings, films and literature that they have inspired.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781843440918 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pocketessentials |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2014 |
| Series: | Short History |
| Sold by: | INDEPENDENT PUB GROUP - EPUB - EBKS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 160 |
| File size: | 293 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
A Short History of Polar Exploration
By Nick Rennison, Jayne Lewis
Oldcastle Books
Copyright © 2013 Nick RennisonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84344-093-2
CHAPTER 1
The Arctic Pre-1900
Before 1800
For centuries men entered the North American Arctic not in the hopes of reaching the pole but in quest for what became a Holy Grail of maritime navigation – the Northwest Passage. Somewhere in the wastelands of ice and sea there was, they believed, a navigable route from Atlantic to Pacific. This Northwest Passage, if only it could be found, would open up a new avenue to the riches of Asia. In search of it, the early explorers of the Arctic endured terrible hardships and many of them lost their lives.
The very first expeditions were English. Martin Frobisher was the archetypal Elizabethan seadog – daring, independent and bloody-minded – and he was one of those captains who fought off the Spanish Armada in 1588. He was also an intrepid, if slightly deluded, explorer of the Canadian Arctic. In 1576, backed by the Muscovy Company of London merchants, he sailed north-west and eventually landed on what is now Baffin Island. After an assortment of misadventures, including the capture of some of his men by a group of native people, he returned home, carrying samples of a black rock which, Frobisher was firmly convinced, contained gold enough to justify the despatch of further expeditions. Investors, including the Queen, agreed with him and he led two further journeys to the region. He brought back close to 1500 tons of the mysterious ore but, despite all Frobisher's hopes for it, it proved almost entirely worthless.
None the less, other English mariners followed in Frobisher's wake. Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who was Sir Walter Raleigh's half-brother and had written an influential treatise on 'a new passage to Cathay' in the 1570s, sailed for Newfoundland in 1583 and took possession of it for Elizabeth I. On his way back home, the ship on which he was sailing went down and all on board drowned. John Davis, like Gilbert a Devon man, undertook a series of voyages in the late 1580s to the strait west of Greenland which now bears his name. Perhaps most significantly, Henry Hudson made four journeys into Arctic waters from 1607 onwards, acting on behalf of companies of London merchants in search of a new commercial route. On the last of his voyages, in 1610, he entered the bay now named after him and he and his men were forced by the ice to winter on shore. In the spring of the following year, the captain was eager to explore his bay further but most of the sailors with him were less enthusiastic about the prospect. Cold, miserable and frightened, they just wanted to go home. They mutinied and forced Hudson, his son and a few loyal crewmen into a small boat which was then set adrift. The occupants of the small boat were never seen again. The mutineers returned to London where they admitted what they had done but put the blame on two ringleaders who had conveniently died on the voyage home. Some of the survivors were put on trial but acquitted.
Meanwhile other explorers from other nations were looking for a Northeast Passage that would take them across the top of Europe and down into the Pacific. In the 1590s, the Dutchman Willem Barents undertook three voyages to the Arctic Ocean. On the third of them, he and his men not only made the first indisputable sighting of the island of Spitsbergen but also became the first Western Europeans to survive a winter in the high Arctic. Others followed occasionally in their wake in the seventeenth century but it was not until the 1720s that the Danish-born Vitus Bering, serving in the Russian navy and approaching Arctic waters from the Pacific rather than the Baltic, sailed through the strait that now bears his name. On a second voyage in 1741, Bering made further important discoveries and sighted the southern coast of Alaska but the expedition, struck by illness and sailing in uncharted waters, was soon in trouble. In December 1741, Bering himself died on a remote island, now also named after him. The survivors of his expedition reached safety eight months later.
Hopes of finding a Northwest Passage had not died with Henry Hudson. A few years after he had met his fate, another English navigator, William Baffin, was despatched by London merchants in search of it. In 1616, sailing to the west of Greenland, he came upon the bay that now carries his name and charted it with exemplary thoroughness, naming straits that led off it Lancaster Sound, Jones Sound and Smith Sound after three of the men who had sent him. All three straits were to play a major role in future Arctic exploration. Fifteen years after Baffin's expedition, Luke Foxe, an experienced Yorkshire mariner, sailed north of Hudson Bay and entered the basin of water that is now called Foxe Basin. Ice-bound for most of the year, it none the less offered hopes of locating a Northwest Passage beyond Hudson Bay.
However, after Foxe's return, enthusiasm for exploration in the Far North dwindled. It was commerce rather than discovery which became the priority and the Hudson's Bay Company, founded in 1670, became the focus for fur trading in the vast region around the bay. It was to be another fifty years before anyone made any serious attempt to find a Northwest Passage and then it was to be a man who was very nearly an octogenarian. James Knight, born about 1640, had worked for the Hudson's Bay Company for decades when he began to look around for opportunities to verify rumours he had long heard about an easy and mineral-rich route through to the Pacific. In 1719, with two ships named the Albany and the Discovery, he set out to find it. Foreshadowing another, more famous expedition in the next century, he and his ships were never seen again. Debris from the ships was found and the remains of a camp on a remote island were located more than forty years later but the exact details of the fate of Knight and those with him remain a mystery.
Christopher Middleton was an English navigator who had worked as a ship's captain for the Hudson's Bay Company for many years. His interests in science and exploration were not shared by his employer unless they added to its profits and, in 1741, he took a commission in the Royal Navy in order to lead an Admiralty-sponsored expedition into the far north of Hudson Bay. After journeying to the edge of the Arctic Circle, Middleton found what seemed at first sight to be the entrance into a passage leading westwards and cheerfully named it Cape Hope. Unfortunately, it was no such thing and, after giving the stretch of water he had found the less cheerful name of Repulse Bay, he headed homewards. There he became embroiled in a bitter row with his major patron, the Anglo-Irish politician Arthur Dobbs. Middleton was now convinced that no Northwest Passage existed, at least not one with any outlet anywhere near where he had sailed in Hudson Bay. Dobbs thought that Middleton simply hadn't looked hard enough for it and decided to back another expedition which would be more thorough in its efforts. Led by William Moor, a cousin of Middleton who had sailed on the previous expedition and taken Dobbs's view of his relation's conscientiousness, this voyage was even less successful than its predecessor in finding any trace of what might be the body of water for which they were all searching.
By the 1760s it was clear that no Northwest Passage existed where the expeditions of the last few decades had been looking. 'I am certain and shure,' one senior employee of the Hudson's Bay Company wrote with a better grasp of geography than of conventional spelling, 'that there is no pasage into the Western Ocan in this Hudsons Bay.' One possibility, to which many optimists still clung, was that the entrance to the Passage was located further north than anyone had travelled. The other was that it would be easier to find a route from the Pacific to the Atlantic rather than vice versa. And, if anyone was going to be able to find such a route, it would surely be the man who was widely acclaimed as the greatest navigator of his day. Captain James Cook had already added enormously to the sum of human geographical knowledge in two voyages which had made him the first man to cross the Antarctic Circle and had more or less destroyed the credibility of old ideas about a temperate southern continent (Terra Australis), vast and well-populated, stretching across the bottom of the world. In July 1776, he was despatched on a third voyage which would, everybody at the Admiralty hoped, finally settle the question of the Northwest Passage. He was, according to his instructions, to head for the north Pacific, sail up the coast of north-west America to latitude 65° N and there 'to search for, and to explore, such rivers or inlets as may appear to be of a considerable extent, and pointing towards Hudsons or Baffins Bay'. With two ships, the Resolution under his own captaincy and the Discovery, commanded by Charles Clerke, Cook set out from Plymouth to fulfil these instructions.
After becoming the first Europeans to visit the Hawaiian islands at the beginning of 1778, Cook and his men sailed towards North America and began the job they had been given of mapping the coastline northwards. Over the next few months they made their way steadily up the coast to Alaska and the Bering Strait. Cook was keen to make headway through the Strait but the ships were turned back by ice several times. Eventually he retired to the Aleutian Islands where he made repairs to the Resolution and the Discovery and encountered some Russian fur traders. (The meeting was a frustrating one for both sides since the Russians spoke no English, Cook had no Russian speaker on his expedition and the limitations of sign language rapidly became apparent.) Once the ships were ready, he turned back south, intending to return to the region the following year. The voyage ended in tragedy when the Resolution and the Discovery returned to Hawaii in 1779. Feted initially by the islanders, Cook left to continue his voyage but was forced back by damage to his ship and met with a very different welcome. For reasons still not entirely understood, the Hawaiians were now hostile and, in a confrontation with Cook and his men, they killed the great navigator. Clerke took charge of the expedition and it returned, as planned, to the American Northwest but the new commander was a sick man. After a final attempt on the Bering Strait, he died of tuberculosis in a harbour on the Kamchatka Peninsula. It was left to John Gore, who had sailed with Cook on his first voyage, to take the thoroughly demoralised expedition back to Britain.
Just as he had scotched any ideas about Terra Australis, Cook seemed to have destroyed any hopes that a passage to Hudson Bay or Baffin Bay could be found in the American Northwest but there were still lingering doubts and empty spaces on the map on to which some imaginative geographers could still project their dreams. One final expedition was needed to show conclusively that such dreams did not match reality. In the 1790s, George Vancouver, who had been a midshipman on Cook's second and third expeditions, undertook a voyage of several years which mapped the north-west coastline of America so skilfully that the charts he created were still being used more than a century later. He found plenty of inlets, bays and harbours but no sign of any passage that might lead all the way through to Hudson Bay or Baffin Bay in the east. 'I trust the precision with which the survey of the coast of North West America has been carried into effect,' Vancouver wrote, 'will remove every doubt, and set aside every opinion of a north-west passage.' For the moment it did, and the distractions of the long war with France that had just begun meant that journeys of discovery were largely forgotten, but the longstanding idea of a route between the two oceans stubbornly refused to die.
Ross, Parry and 'The Man Who Ate His Boots'
A new era in Arctic exploration dawned in the two decades after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo as a whole series of British expeditions was despatched northwards. The driving force behind them was Sir John Barrow who held the position of Second Secretary to the Admiralty for nearly forty years in the first half of the nineteenth century. Barrow had sailed on a whaling ship to the Arctic as a teenager in 1780 and travelled in such distant lands as China (where he was a member of the first British diplomatic mission to the country) and South Africa. After Napoleon's defeat in 1815 and his subsequent exile to St Helena (a place of retirement for the Emperor reportedly first suggested by Barrow), peace came to Europe for a generation. Naval officers no longer had the opportunities offered by war to forge successful careers. Barrow saw an alternative arena in which they could shine. Through exploring the unknown regions of the world, they could win the kind of fame and glory that their predecessors had gained in battle. And few lands were quite as unknown as those in the Far North.
The first of Barrow's new expeditions left London in April 1818 under the command of John Ross, a career officer who had joined the Navy in 1786 when he was aged only nine. Much of Ross's recent experience had been in Baltic waters, which was as close as any naval officer of the time had been to the Arctic, and this may have influenced Barrow in his choice. It was a choice which he was to come to regret, although Ross was to go on to have one of the most extensive Arctic careers of the century.
Sailing with two ships, the Isabella and the Alexander, Ross was instructed to sail into Baffin Bay and look for an outlet which might open into the Northwest Passage. His expedition had its minor successes. He made first contact with a group of Inuit who had never before seen white men. Indeed, they believed themselves to be the only people in the world and were much astonished by the appearance of Ross's men. He mapped areas of Baffin Bay that had never been previously mapped. However, his main task was to search for a Northwest Passage and, in that, he failed comprehensively. For reasons that have never been adequately explained, he seemed curiously prepared to accept, on slender evidence, that there was no way through the straits that led off Baffin Bay. Smith Sound and Jones Sound he swiftly dismissed as bays from which there could be no further passage northwards. Lancaster Sound, the third of the straits discovered by William Baffin two centuries earlier, was seen as the likeliest location of a passage that would lead eventually to the Pacific. In September 1818, Ross sailed into it and noted land on the horizon. He was convinced that what he saw was a mountain range and that it blocked any further attempt to travel up Lancaster Sound. Others on board his ships were not so sure. Some thought that what he had seen was a mirage, of the kind all too likely to trouble explorers in the Far North, and that he should have pressed on to make certain of his observations. The controversy that ensued when Ross returned to England was to blight both his career and his relations with many other names now famous in polar exploration.
In the wake of this unsatisfactory voyage, Barrow, who was more angered by Ross's incuriosity than anyone, planned further voyages by both land and sea to explore the Canadian Arctic and search for a Northwest Passage. For reasons that are not entirely clear, John Franklin, a career naval officer, was picked to lead the land expedition. A brave, charming but not very inspiring man who had fought as a teenager at the Battle of Trafalgar, Franklin had already been in the Arctic as captain of one of two vessels under the overall command of David Buchan which had struggled to make headway through the pack ice north of Spitsbergen in the summer of 1818. Now he was given the task of travelling up the Coppermine River to the northern coast of Canada and charting the new territory he discovered. From the beginning, his expedition was a monument to bad planning and it ended in disaster. Franklin was given only a handful of English companions for his journey. (They included George Back and John Richardson, both of whom would have roles to play in more successful expeditions in the future.) The idea was that he would recruit men from the ranks of the voyageurs who worked for the big Canadian trading companies. With a motley collection of followers, Franklin headed off into the wilderness, unprepared, in the summer of 1821 and almost immediately hit difficulties. Food supplies had not been properly organised and the assumption that hunting for game en route would keep them well fed soon proved nonsensical. The party was starving even before it reached the Arctic coast and matters only got worse as they undertook a dismal retreat to civilisation. They were forced to subsist on little more than handfuls of lichen which they called tripes de roche. Indeed, on some occasions, even that failed them. As Franklin later noted laconically in his account of the expedition, 'There was no tripes de roche so we drank tea and ate some of our shoes for supper'. Meanwhile the voyageurs, when they had the strength, regularly threatened mutiny and Richardson shot one of their number whom he suspected (probably correctly) of cannibalism. Before the party eventually reached safety, with eleven out of its twenty men dead, the survivors had endured terrible sufferings which were largely the fault of the poorness of the original planning or the ineptness of its leader's decisions at times of crisis. None of this mattered when Franklin returned home. In newspapers and the popular mind, he was now identified as 'The Man Who Ate His Boots' and he was a hero. He was not finished with the Arctic nor was it finished with him.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Short History of Polar Exploration by Nick Rennison, Jayne Lewis. Copyright © 2013 Nick Rennison. Excerpted by permission of Oldcastle Books.
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Table of Contents
Introduction 11
Chapter 1 The Arctic Pre-1900 13
Chapter 2 The Antarctic Pre-1900 53
Chapter 3 First to the North Pole: Arguments and Debates 63
Chapter 4 The Race for the South Pole 71
Chapter 5 The Arctic 1910-1960 89
Chapter 6 The Antarctic 1912-1960 99
Chapter 7 The Poles in the Last Fifty Years 113
Chapter 8 The Poles in the Imagination 115
Polar Explorers: A Brief Biographical Dictionary 123
Bibliography 151
Index 153