(a) Arctic: The North-East and North-West Passages.

Although polar exploration is not very directly associated with geographical theory at large, it has been associated with certain individual geographical theories which occupy important positions in our history as having held the minds of men for long periods, and as owing their proof or disproof to some of the most noteworthy exploits in the story of exploration. There is sometimes a tendency to suppose that polar, or at any rate arctic, exploration has always been concerned mainly with the attempt to penetrate as far north as possible along one meridian or another, and that any discoveries made en route have been merely incidental. But the mere desire to set a more northerly or southerly limit to human travel, and ultimately to reach the Poles, really belongs to a relatively late period in the history of arctic and antarctic work. Taking arctic exploration first, we find that its object was in its early stages mainly commercial; from that object there naturally developed a desire to extend geographical knowledge, and, lastly, the extension of many branches of scientific knowledge was served by that particular branch of exploratory work.

Some reference has already been made to the early75 knowledge of arctic lands acquired by Scandinavian seamen, who in the second half of the ninth century had carried not only their commercial explorations but also their actual rule round the North Cape and as far as the White Sea. At this period they also reached Iceland; but they had been preceded there by holy men from Ireland, as is stated by Dicuil about 825. In the tenth century Greenland became known to the Norwegians, and during its ninth decade Eric the Red visited the western coast of that land, and colonization and more or less regular intercommunication were carried on thereafter until the early part of the fifteenth century. In the year 1000 Leif Ericsson reached that part of the North American coast which he named Vinland. A second expedition under Thorfinn Karlsefne reached the same coast by way of Labrador and Newfoundland, but these discoveries were not followed up. In the northerly direction Spitsbergen was found by the close of the twelfth century, and, in the easterly, Novaya Zemlya a little later.

We have already seen something of the effect which these discoveries had upon European geographical studies and cartography; and it has been pointed out that their effect is still more to be observed when, in that brilliant final decade of the fifteenth century which witnessed the triumphs of Columbus and Gama, John Cabot was despatched by a company of Bristol merchants across the Atlantic, and reached Cape Breton and Nova Scotia as some believe, or at least Newfoundland, for at Bristol many Scandinavian merchants were settled, and doubtless helped to inspire this and succeeding journeys. A second journey was made by Cabot in 1498, and in 1500 to 1501 a Portuguese, Gaspar Cortereal, visited eastern Greenland and76 Newfoundland, and these voyages had the incidental result of opening up the important Newfoundland fisheries. But the ultimate object of exploration in this direction, which now and for a long succeeding period possessed the minds of men, was to discover a north-west passage which was held to exist and to be feasible for commerce between Europe and the Indies; and we shall presently see that a similar north-east passage along the north coast of Europe itself and Asia to the same goal was no less eagerly sought after. Cortereal may have seen the opening of Hudson’s Strait, and, though he was lost on a second voyage (as was his brother who sought him), the possibility of finding a practicable north-west passage attracted the Portuguese as well as others, but only for a little while—their instincts like their interests led them southward, not northward.

We cannot here detail all the work of explorers who, in the sixteenth century and after, extended discovery in one or another of these directions; nor, indeed, in the case of some of the earlier journeys, do the records admit of doing so. It is thus probable that in the second half of the sixteenth century Portuguese sailors had anticipated Henry Hudson in acquiring considerable knowledge of Hudson Bay, but it is not possible to say how far they had penetrated it. In 1558 Nicolo Zeno of Venice put forth a forged narrative of a fictitious journey which he attributed to an ancestor of his own. He attached a map to it, and showed thereon an imaginary land named Frisland to the south of Greenland, and other equally false details which set many later travellers and geographers astray. Sir Martin Frobisher, holding that the discovery of the North-West passage was the crowning piece of77 exploratory work remaining to reward the adventurer, secured Queen Elizabeth’s and other powerful interests, and led an expedition to the north-west in 1576. Zeno’s map put him wrong when he discovered Eastern Greenland and thought it to be Frisland, and he subsequently reached the southern part of Baffin Land; but this was supposed to be Greenland. He made a second voyage in 1578. Frobisher’s successor, John Davis, another explorer of high scientific standing, misinterpreted some of Frobisher’s results, as other geographers did, thus placing Frobisher Strait not in Baffin Land but in Greenland, where it long appeared in maps. Davis made voyages in 1585, 1586, and 1587. He passed along Davis Strait, and explored both its eastern and its western shores, extending the knowledge of the west coast of Greenland on his third voyage as far north as 72° 41′. Henry Hudson, in his two earlier voyages in 1607 and 1608, was concerned with the seas of the north-east, and we shall consider them later. But in 1610 he sailed west and entered Hudson Bay, where, after many sufferings, he was set adrift by a mutinous crew and was lost. Following him Sir Thomas Button, in 1612, became acquainted with the west coast of the bay, and maintained the belief, which was upheld for more than a generation following, that the North-West passage to the Indies would be found to open from this coast. In 1615 and 1616 William Baffin made a voyage which brought within men’s knowledge the channels which ramify northward and westward from the head of Baffin Bay; but this knowledge was not appraised at its true value; indeed, even the authenticity of his work came to be doubted, notable though the voyage was for many important discoveries, including, among others, remarkable78 magnetic observations, for in Smith’s Sound Baffin discovered the greatest known variation of the compass. His explorations carried him more than three hundred miles beyond Davis’s northern limit. In spite of these discoveries, which gave no impulse towards theoretical discussion of the North-West passage along right lines, and in spite of the opportunity for investigation to the west of Hudson Bay by the early servants of the Hudson’s Bay Company, which was established in 1670, the theory that the passage lay westward from that bay was still alive in 1722, when the voyage of John Scroggs, in search of two ships previously lost, was held to prove the existence of a strait leading into the Pacific; but in 1742 Christopher Middleton made further acquaintance with the inlets on the west shore of the bay, and later in the century some of the servants of the Company began to arrive at a conception of the north-westward extension of the continent. Thus about 1770 Samuel Hearne reached its arctic shore by way of the Coppermine River, and in 1789 Alexander Mackenzie came to the mouth of the great river which bears his name. The North-West passage had now ceased to be sought as a highway of commerce, though as a matter of scientific interest James Cook, on the third of his great voyages (1776), which will be dealt with in a later chapter, was instructed to find it from the Pacific, but was stopped by the ice in 70° 41′, beyond Bering Strait, having been the first English navigator to observe the western extremity of Alaska, which had, however, been known for a century or more to the Russians.

The exploration for the North-East passage, though of considerably greater importance to commerce, was hardly of equal importance with that of the North-West79 passage from our present standpoint, for it could scarcely have been preceded by that complete ignorance which the voyages to the North-West just mentioned did so much to dispel. Some general idea of the coasts of northern Europe, based upon early Scandinavian and possibly Russian work, may be supposed to have existed even when, in 1484, the Portuguese are said to have endeavoured to find a route in this direction to the Indies, and when in the first half of the following century the feasibility of such a route came to be seriously discussed in England. From that country an expedition, in the arrangement of which Sebastian, son of John Cabot, took a leading part, started in 1553 under Sir Hugh Willoughby, with Richard Chancellor commanding one of the ships. Willoughby was lost on the Kola peninsula; Chancellor succeeded in entering the White Sea, travelled to Moscow, and made arrangements for the opening of a commercial route between England and northern Russia. The Muscovy Company of merchants was founded; and, after Chancellor had been lost on a second expedition in 1555, the Company sent out one of his companions, Stephen Borough, in 1556, with the river Ob as his goal. From this voyage information was first disseminated about the Kola region and Novaya Zemlya, though these had been known long previously to Russian fishermen and hunters. The Company also sent out Arthur Pet and Charles Jackman in 1580. They entered the Kara Sea, but only Pet returned. At this period the Dutch entered the field; they were trading in the White Sea towards the end of the century, and in 1582 Olivier Brunel, and in 1594 and 1596 William Barents and others, penetrated far eastward. In 1596 an expedition with Barents as pilot discovered Spitsbergen, and one80 of the ships proceeded eastward to Novaya Zemlya, where Barents died; but the rest of the party withstood the winter and won their way back to the Lapland coast in boats. It was found that Russian trading vessels were making regular journeys to the Ob and the Yenisei, and in the two following centuries the Russians were chiefly instrumental in extending knowledge of the northern coast of Asia. In 1648 Simon Dezhnev may have passed through the strait which afterwards bore the name of Vitus Bering. In 1735 the northernmost promontory of Siberia was rounded in sledges by Lieutenant T. Chelyuskin, and his name was given to it; and in 1728 and 1740 Bering explored both the strait and the sea which bear his name.

Meanwhile Henry Hudson had done for the Muscovy Company and for England what Barents had done for the Dutch, for in 1607 he reached a ............