(a) Arctic

Following the new enthusiasm for Arctic exploration undertaken for purely scientific purposes, the British Government despatched three expeditions between 1773 and 1779. The first, under Captain Phipps, was stopped by ice off the north-west of Spitsbergen; the second, that of James Cook with the vessels Discovery and Resolution, sent to search for either a north-west or a north-east passage by the Bering Sea route, met, as has been seen (Chapter VIII.), with a measure of the success characteristic of his work, but his death at Hawaii put an end to the hope that further research in the Arctic lay before him, and the voyage continued under the command of Captain Clarke was carried only a little north of the 70th parallel in the ice-bound Bering Strait, where Clarke also died. Till 1815 little was done to elucidate the still unsolved question of the north-west passage, owing to the disturbed state of Europe and America, but the offer of a reward (the result of the exertions of Sir John Barrow in 1818) of ￡20,000 for the discovery of the passage and ￡5,000 for reaching 89° N., led to the sailing of expeditious to the American Arctic region under Lieut. J. Franklin, Captain Ross, and Lieut. E. Parry. Ross on his first123 voyage took Baffin Bay and Lancaster Sound to be land-locked on the north, and thus missed his chance of forcing the passage.

Parry in two voyages, on the results of which he gained the ￡5,000 reward, succeeded in passing through Lancaster Sound, and reaching and naming Melville Island, thus proving Baffin’s discoveries. Meanwhile Franklin attempted to reach the north shores of America by land; he explored 550 miles of the coast and discovered and named Cape Turnagain, though he and his party suffered great privations on the return journey. Then the energies of explorers were directed towards combining the results obtained by Parry and Franklin; further stretches of the north coast of America were explored, and Point Barrow was reached in Bering Strait. In 1829 an expedition was undertaken by Captain John Ross and his nephew James Clark Ross; the opening of the passage was again missed (though the most northerly part of America was passed), and it was not discovered till 1851 by Kennedy on his search for Franklin. J. C. Ross, however, fixed the position of the north magnetic pole on this voyage of five years’ duration, and other valuable observations were made. The work of tracing the northern shores of America was nearly finished by 1847, chiefly by travellers in the Hudson Bay Company’s service. During this period the north coast of Siberia had also been traced almost in its entirety by the Russians, though they had not succeeded in rounding the most northerly point.

In 1845 Sir John Franklin started on the voyage from which neither he nor any of his companions returned. It is not known exactly what he achieved before he was lost, but he came nearer to accomplishing the north-west124 passage than anyone before him. The expeditions of Sir John Richardson, Dr. John Rae, and others, sent by land in search of his party, filled in the last gap in the northern coast-line of America. The different expeditions, under McClintock and others, sent by sea in the fifties for the same purpose not only decided the fate of Franklin’s party and extended knowledge over a vast area, but also at last rounded the north of America. The passage found by Kennedy in 1851 was traversed in 1853 by McClure, though part of the journey was made by travelling over the ice. An expedition under Captain Inglefield determined the northern point of Smith Sound. Elisha Kent Kane extended the knowledge of Grinnell Land and Greenland towards the north, and opened the way to others who followed the waterways he discovered. In 1871 Charles Hall sailed 250 miles up Smith Sound and reached the hitherto inaccessible polar sea; he touched a more northerly point than had previously been reached by any ship (82° 11′ N.).

Stirred to action by these fine achievements of the Americans, England sent out the important expedition under Captain George Nares in 1875 which obtained very valuable scientific observations, taken on the frozen polar sea, and under Albert Markham reached the furthest point north yet attained—83° 20′ N.—after battling with immense difficulties caused by bad conditions of the ice and scurvy. Meanwhile much good work had been done in the Arctic from the old world. A purely scientific expedition had been sent to the Spitsbergen seas as early as 1827 from Norway; but from then till 1858 the work of exploration was chiefly carried on by the men engaged in the seal-hunting and fishing, in the interests of their trade. Before 1872, however, several Scandinavian125 expeditions which visited Spitsbergen and Greenland brought back valuable scientific results. The most noteworthy expedition of this period, however, was Austrian; it was captained by Lieutenant Julius Payer, who had previously been on an expedition in Greenland. He and Lieutenant Weyprecht sailed in 1871 to search for the north-east passage. They were beset by ice off Novaya Zemlya, and drifted till they came to a mountainous country which they called Franz Josef Land. They believed it to consist of two large masses of land, instead of perceiving it to be an archipelago, and much of the country they thought they saw has been since proved not to exist. Franz Josef Land was not visited again till 1880, when a large part of it was surveyed by the Englishman Leigh Smith. The north-east passage was made in 1879 by A. E. Nordenski?ld, who accomplished the journey which led so many before him to failure without loss of life or vessel, and almost in one season. He had made several previous voyages in Greenland and Spitsbergen; he had also twice successfully reached the Yenisei through the Kara Sea. Captain Joseph Wiggins, an Englishman, also made several voyages through the Siberian seas, which, together with Nordenski?ld’s accomplishment of the north-east passage (1878–9), proved the route to the mouth of the Yenisei to be practicable from a commercial standpoint. Fired by Nordenski?ld’s example, the Danes made several remarkable journeys to the interior of Greenland.

A new interest was given to polar research by the establishment of the international circumpolar stations in 1883. The idea was mooted first by Weyprecht, and eventually twelve expeditions of various nationalities were sent out to erect observatories at different126 points within the polar circle, so that simultaneous and continuous observations might be taken. A great deal of valuable work was done. An American expedition, led by Lieutenant A. W. Greely (1881–4), to Grinnell Land almost perished from starvation.

Greenland was crossed for the first time by Fridtjof Nansen in 1888. In 1886, and again from 1892 to 1895, Robert E. Peary, an American civil engineer, made several brilliant journeys in Greenland, and extended the knowledge of the country more than two degrees to the north. It was Nansen and Peary who were destined to draw the veil from the great polar area itself, towards which so many fruitless journeys were made. From 1817 onwards many voyages were undertaken with the object of reaching the pole—as by Parry, Scoresby, Markham, and Jackson from England, Nordenski?ld from Sweden, and Koldewey from Germany. These explorers mostly started from Spitsbergen; but Nansen worked on an original plan—that of utilizing the drift of ice, which had been proved to take place right across the polar sea, to carry his ship with it. The plan was so far successful that the Fram passed from the New Siberian islands right over to Spitsbergen in three years, without, however, reaching a higher latitude than 85° 55′ N. Nansen, with Lieutenant Johansen, made a dash northwards from this point, reaching 86° 5′ N., the “farthest north” attained up to that date; he met with Frederick Jackson’s expedition in Franz Josef Land, and returned safely to Norway. This brilliant journey led to no discovery of land in the polar basin, which proved to consist of a sea of great depth, increasing towards the pole. The Duke of Abruzzi’s expedition in 1899 reached 86° 34′ N.

Meanwhile much good work was being done in other127 directions in extending Arctic research. Franz Josef Land was explored, chiefly by Austrian, British, and American expeditions. Nathorst, a Swede, circumnavigated the Spitsbergen archipelago in 1898, and discovered and mapped King Oscar Fjord in Greenland in the following year. Sverdrup, Nansen’s friend and companion, sailed up Jones Sound and charted many previously unknown parts in 1899 and the following years. The story of a continent existing to the north of Bering Strait and extending right across the pole to Greenland, which was believed by many explorers, was disproved by De Long in his ill-fated voyage in the Jeannette in 1879, during which the whole party perished, though the ship’s books were afterwards found. This voyage and the journeys of the ships sent in search of De Long proved that north of Siberia lay an ocean dotted with islands. Much work was done in exploring the New Siberian Islands by the Russian, Toll, who lost his life in an effort to reach the most northerly and unknown portion of the group. In 1903–4 Amundsen in the Gj?a undertook an expedition to the North Magnetic Pole, where he carried out a continuous series of observations for two years with important scientific results. He returned by Bering Strait, thus for the first time completing the navigation of the North-west Passage. The Danes worked hard at charting the east coast of Greenland, and the outline of the north-eastern extremity of the country was accurately delineated for the first time by the expedition of L. Mylius Erichsen (1905–07), on which he and his companions perished, though their splendid records and observations were found by a relief expedition. The crowning achievement of reaching the pole itself was accomplished in 1909 by Peary, after several128 previous journeys. He had spent four consecutive winters in the Arctic regions exploring Smith Sound and the north of Greenland, from 1899 to 1902; and in 1905 he had again attempted to reach the pole by Smith Sound and Grant Land, touching 87° 6′ N. At or near the pole there was no land to be seen, and the sea was 1,500 fathoms deep. Thus there remains no Arctic problem of the first magnitude to-day. The main outline of the Arctic region as a great and deep sea surrounded by the northern shores of Europe, Asia, America, and Greenland, is known, though there is still a large portion of the polar basin north of Alaska as yet untouched ............