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Many advances in geographic knowledge came about directly or indirectly because of the whale fisheries that flourished in the Arctic for three centuries. Much of the geographic knowledge accumulated by the whalers was never recorded and died with them; some, especially in the early days, was deliberately suppressed so as to keep it from competitors, but a great deal did find its way onto the maps. The coasts of Svalbard were first mapped by Dutch and English whalers, and the Dutchman Cornelis Giles discovered an island east of Svalbard that was long known as Giles (Gillis) Land, now Kvit Island. Later details were added by Norwegian sealers. The considerable part played by whaling captains in the Franklin search has already been noted; in addition, the names of many whalers are perpetuated on the maps of Baffin Island and Hudson Bay. A whaler, William Adams, established the insularity of Bylot Island, and another, George Comer, made the first complete map of Southampton Island. Farther west, Wrangel Island was discovered by Thomas Long, an American whaler.
By far the most famous of the whalers were the William Scoresbys, father and son. Scoresby Sr., a farmer’s son, was a first-rate navigator, invented the crow’s nest and other aids to ice navigation, and was the first to suggest the use of sledges to reach the pole. His son, who inherited his father’s talents and added to them a scientific education, wrote two important books on the Arctic. In 1806 the Scoresbys reached latitude 81°12′ N, north of Spitsbergen, a record northing at the time, and in 1822 the younger Scoresby made a detailed map of the east coast of Greenland from 75° to 69° N.
Just as whaling led to improved knowledge of the coastlines, the fur trade helped to open the interiors of Arctic lands. The formation of the Hudson’s Bay Company was a direct result of the 17th-century voyages into Hudson Bay in search of the Northwest Passage. Following an exploratory British voyage by Capt. Zachariah Gillam in 1668, the company was incorporated in 1670 and a trading post established at the foot of James Bay. Soon posts were set up on the west side of the bay at York Factory and Churchill, and these served as bases for further exploration. Samuel Hearne was sent to look for a source of copper that had been reported by Indians who traded at the coast; he set out from Churchill with a band of Indians in 1770–71 and with them made a remarkable journey to the mouth of the Coppermine River, returning by way of Great Slave Lake. In 1789 Alexander Mackenzie of the rival North West Company of Montreal traveled by canoe from Lake Athabasca down the Mackenzie River to the sea, establishing a second known point on the Arctic coast. By the time the two companies merged in 1821, there were trading posts on Great Slave Lake and down the Mackenzie to Fort Good Hope; it was the existence of these posts that made possible the overland expeditions of Franklin and his successors, among whom were many Hudson’s Bay Company men.
Pushing westward from the Mackenzie through the mountains and into Alaska, the Hudson’s Bay Company met Russian traders working from the west coast. The Russians had established a colony in Alaska toward the end of the 18th century and carried on a vigorous trade at Kodiak, Sitka, and other settlements. In 1831 Ferdinand Petrovich Wrangel, governor of the colony from 1829 to 1834, established a post on St. Michael’s Island and had the lower Yukon explored. Competition and strife between the Russian and British traders ended when the United States purchased Alaska in 1867, and the Alaska-Yukon boundary was jointly surveyed.
The North Pole
Attempts from Svalbard and Greenland (Kalaallit Nunaat)
The North Pole did not become in itself a goal of exploration until fairly late; the few early expeditions that tried to reach the pole were looking for a polar route to the East rather than for the pole itself. After Hudson’s first attempt in 1607, nearly two centuries elapsed before the next one. The initiator of this attempt was Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov, who, like so many others at the time (and for the following 100 years), firmly believed in the existence of an open polar sea. Implementing Lomonosov’s plan, in 1764 the Russian Admiralty dispatched an expedition to establish an advance base at Bellsund in Svalbard under the command of Vasily Yakovlevich Chichagov. The next year, with three ships, Chichagov pushed north to 80°26′ N before being forced by ice to retreat. Seven years later Capt. John Constantine Phipps of the Royal Navy, in two ships, Racehorse and Carcass, tried to reach the pole from the same starting point but fared no better; in 1818 David Buchan and John Franklin in Dorothea and Trent were no more successful.
All these attempts had been in the area between Greenland and Svalbard, which actually was not the accessible route to the Arctic Ocean that it appeared to be, owing to the strong southerly drift of the ice. The Franklin search opened a new route, up the west coast of Greenland (Kalaallit Nunaat). In 1860 American Isaac Israel Hayes attempted to reach the pole by this route in the schooner United States. Hayes was a firm believer that the polar sea was ice-free and that it could be reached by breaking through the fringing belt of pack ice. Ironically, he met with unusually heavy ice conditions and got only as far as Etah on the coast of Smith Sound. In 1871 Charles Francis Hall, another American, with more luck and a better ship, reached 82°11′ N and charted both sides of the channel to its northern end at the entrance to the Lincoln Sea. Hall himself died during the winter, and his ship, the Polaris, was caught in the ice on the voyage south and drifted to Smith Sound, where it was almost wrecked. A party of 19, including an Inuit mother with a two-month-old baby, became separated from the ship and drifted all winter on an ice floe before being picked up by a whaler off the coast of Labrador in April 1873.
In 1875–76 a British expedition under Capt. George Strong Nares in the Alert and Discovery reached the Lincoln Sea by ship, the Alert wintering near Cape Sheridan on the north coast of Ellesmere Island and the Discovery farther south at Lady Franklin Bay. Sledge parties in the spring traced the coasts of Ellesmere Island and Greenland to Yelverton Bay and Sherard Osborn Fjord, respectively, and one, under Comdr. Albert Hastings Markham, reached 83°20′ N over the pack ice, a new record northing.
In the meantime, the Svalbard route was not neglected. In 1869–70 a German expedition under Karl Koldewey in the Germania sailed up the east coast of Greenland to 72°30′ N and traced it by sledge to Cape Bismarck. A second ship, the Hansa, became separated and was crushed in the ice, and the crew drifted south on a floe around Cape Farewell, reaching the settlement of Frederiksdal in safety. Baron Nordenskiöld made two journeys toward the pole from Svalbard, in 1868 by ship and in 1873 by reindeer sledge.
The Fram expedition
An entirely new approach was tried in 1879 by a U.S. expedition in the Jeannette, led by George Washington De Long. In the belief that Wrangel Island was a large landmass stretching far to the north, De Long hoped to sail north as far as possible along its coast and then sledge to the pole, but his ship was caught in the ice near Herald Island and drifted west for 22 months, passing north of Wrangel Island and revealing its limited extent. The Jeannette sank near the New Siberian Islands, and the crew traveled by boat and sledge to the Lena River delta, where many of them died, including De Long himself. A search expedition under Robert Mallary Berry surveyed Wrangel Island in 1881.
Wreckage from the Jeannette was found later on the southwest coast of Greenland, having apparently drifted right across the Arctic Ocean. Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen conceived the daring idea that a ship might be made to do the same, thus providing a base for scientific investigation of the Arctic Ocean and incidentally a means of reaching the pole. In a new vessel, the Fram, specially designed to rise under lateral pressure and so avoid being crushed, Nansen left Norway in 1893 with Otto Sverdrup and sailed into the Kara Sea. Near the place where the Jeannette sank, they drove the Fram into the pack and began a drift that lasted almost three years and ended with the safe release of the vessel north of Svalbard in 1896; a formidable amount of scientific data was collected. Nansen himself left the Fram in 1895 with one companion, Hjalmar Johansen, in an attempt to reach the pole by sledge, starting from 84° N in the longitude of Franz Josef Land and setting a new record of 86°13′ N before having to turn back and winter in Franz Josef Land. In the spring, by a strange and lucky coincidence, he met Frederick Jackson, a British explorer, and returned home in his ship. Jackson was investigating Franz Josef Land as a possible stepping-stone to the pole but, on hearing Nansen’s account, gave up the polar attempt. In his three-year stay (1894–97), however, Jackson revolutionized the map of this complicated collection of islands and did a great deal of valuable work.