Theater of the World

by Thomas Reinertsen Berg

  On 4 June the same year, Bering set out from Kamchatka with two ships in order to explore the waters to the east. The expedition crossed over to the north-west coast of America–a territory the Europeans were so unfamiliar with at this time that author Jonathan Swift, in his satirical travelogue Gulliver’s Travels from 1726, could locate the enormous fictitious peninsula of Brobdingnag there without anyone questioning it. Bering and his expedition mapped the islands to the south and west of the Alaskan coast.

  The Russian government decided that the results of Bering’s expeditions should be kept secret–something they only partly achieved. When French cartographer Joseph-Nicolas Delisle, employed by the Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg, returned to France in 1747, he took maps and documents from Bering’s expedition with him. He then shared the information with Philippe Buache, France’s leading cartographer at the time, and the pair published a map of North America in 1752. But in creating the map, Delisle and Buache combined the information from Russia with the highly questionable ‘discoveries’ of Spanish explorer Bartolomé de Fuente from 1640. At 53 degrees north on the American west coast, de Fuente was said to have sailed into the continent along a river he called Los Reyes–travelling so far east that he finally encountered a ship from the east coast. Delisle and Buache were more interested in reproducing the non-existent system of lakes and rivers that led to Hudson Bay in the east than the Russian discoveries in the north; British newspapers praised the map because it showed ‘a shortcut to East India’. But in reality, no European before Bering knew anything about the west coast of America above 43 degrees north.

  Jens Munk’s map from the attempt to find the Northwest Passage in 1619. All the way to the right, which on this map is furthest west, is Munkenes Winterhaven, where sixty-two of the expedition’s sixty-five members died while wintering over. In his diary, Munk wrote: ‘On the fourth of June, which was Whit Sunday, I was the fourth person remaining alive. We lay helpless, unable to assist one another.’ Munk and two other crew members finally returned home to Norway, where Munk wrote a travelogue and drew this map.

  In St Petersburg in 1758, Gerhard Friedrich Müller finally published an official map based on Behring’s discoveries. Müller also wrote an open letter in which he criticised Delisle and Buache, snidely remarking that ‘it is always much better to omit whatever is uncertain, and leave a void space, till future discoveries shall ascertain the affair in dispute.’ On Müller’s map, north-west America is almost completely blank.

  James Cook, the English captain who had previously sailed across ocean where cartographers had drawn land, and found land where they had drawn ocean, was lured to the Northwest Passage by a map of the North Pacific that would in retrospect turn out to be rather theoretical. A ‘Map of the new northern archipelago’ by Jacob von Stählin from the academy in St Petersburg was said to be based on discoveries made by a lieutenant in the Russian Navy–but was this was decidedly false. On this new map, ‘Alaschka’ was no longer a peninsula but an island, and between it and the American continent was an open strait leading straight into the Arctic Ocean at 65 degrees north.

  On their way towards this strait, Cook and the crew could only conclude that the coast did not lead directly northwards, as it did on Stählin’s map, but that it curved around to the west. In a letter dated October 1778, Cook wrote: ‘we were upon a Coast where every step was to be considered, where no information could be had from maps, either modern or ancient’. In his log, he described Stählin’s map as ‘a Map that the most illiterate of his illiterate Sea-faring men would have been ashamed to put his name to.’ It was Cook who gave the Bering Strait its name when he and his crew arrived there–only to encounter a Russian officer who was equally perplexed by Stählin’s map.

  Cook and his crew did what they could to correct Stählin’s errors–using chronometers, sextants and observations of the positions of the Moon, they were able to perform many calculations to determine latitude and longitude values along the coast. The maps that were published in 1784 were the first to depict north-west America reasonably accurately, but Cook never found the Northwest Passage. The expedition’s ships were foiled by the ice at Icy Cape, to the north-east of the Bering Strait.

  FAILURES | Meanwhile, the British had also been busy on the other side of the passage. In 1747, explorer Henry Ellis wrote: ‘We may consider Hudson’s-Bay as a kind of Labyrinth, into which we enter through Hudson’s-Straits, and what we aim at, is to get out on the other side.’ But French cartographer Jacques Nicolas Bellin made their blood run cold when he drew the Carte Reduite des Parties Septentrionales du Globe (Reduced Map of the Northern Regions of the World) in 1757. In the north-west corner of the map he wrote: ‘The English are looking for a passage in these regions, but there is none to be found.’

  The British put their expeditions on hold for the twenty years or so that they were at war with France, but three years after Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo new ships were dispatched to resume the search. Captains John Ross and W. E. Parry were instructed to search Baffin Bay for a route to the west, and on 21 August 1818 they sailed into Lancaster Sound–the entrance to the passage Baffin had seen but failed to investigate 200 years earlier.

  The sentiments of the two expedition leaders were strikingly different–Ross was pessimistic, Parry enthusiastic; Ross was certain that Lancaster Sound was only a bay, while Parry felt sure they would discover the west coast of America. Unluckily enough, Ross was in command of the faster ship, and on the afternoon of 31 August, with Parry’s ship out of sight somewhere behind him, Ross went out on deck to observe the view after the fog had cleared, and saw ‘land round the bottom of the bay, forming a connected chain of mountains.’ Ross ordered both ships to turn back–and once again, the British failed to discover the Northwest Passage.

  Many have since wondered why Ross claimed to have seen a chain of mountains where there was nothing but open water. Could it have been an Arctic mirage? And why didn’t he consult the other officers? Parry was bewildered as to why they’d had to turn back.

  Ross had to explain himself at a public hearing, and Parry was made responsible for arranging a new expedition. He prepared for the fact that they might have to overwinter in the ice and the consequent risk of scurvy, taking along supplies of lemon juice, malt extract, sauerkraut and vinegar in addition to canned meats and soups. Canned foods–which would later become a cruicial part of the polar diet–were so new in 1819 that the can opener had not yet been invented, and the cans therefore had to be opened using axes and knives.

  On 28 July, Parry wrote in his log of the ‘almost breathless anxiety’ onboard as the ship sailed into Lancaster Sound. Would they see mountains after all? The masts were full of sailors keeping a lookout, but as they sailed slowly to the west they passed the point at which Parry had previously been forced to turn around without catching sight of so much as a rock. On 4 September they reached Melville Island at 110 degrees west, and twenty days later harboured for the winter, building an observatory. In the bitter cold, they placed a piece of cloth against the sights of their instruments to stop the skin being ripped from their faces–a technique they had developed from experience.

  News of the expedition reached Europe via the whalers. On 14 October 1819, the Norwegian Morgenbladet newspaper reported that ‘whalers recently returning from the Davis Strait give the greatest hope that the Northwest Passage will finally be discovered.’ Parry was hugely optimistic–but it would later appear that 1819 had been a year with abnormally low levels of ice.

  The summer of 1820 was so cold that the ships remained stuck in the ice until August–the waters to the west were so thick with it that the expedition made little progress, moving only sixty miles in seven weeks. They reached 113 degrees west, knowing that almost 130 miles remained before they would reach Icy Cape, where Cook had made his about-turn on his voyage east. Now Parry also made the decision to turn back–he and his crew couldn’t face another winter.

  The expedition w
as both a success and a complete fiasco. Nobody had ever sailed further west, but the amount of sea ice beyond Melville Island had been so overwhelming that Parry concluded finding the Northwest Passage was ‘nearly as uncertain as it was two hundred years ago.’

  Nevertheless, Parry set out on yet another expedition. After sailing around Hudson Bay in the summer of 1821 without finding any new openings to the west he met Iligliuk, an Inuit woman with an exceptional talent for drawing maps, when the ship had harboured for the winter. Parry gave Iligliuk a piece of paper, on which she drew an outline of the coast. Parry was particularly interested in how Iligliuk depicted the coast as curving to the west north of the Melville Peninsula, of which they were on the south side. Here, Parry thought, was the passage, and in July set out towards the north. Iligliuk’s map was accurate–but the strait was once more filled with ice. Yet again, Parry and his crew were forced to return home with unfinished business.

  In parallel with the expeditions at sea, a number of expeditions to map Canada’s northern coastline had also been undertaken on foot, and open ocean had been spotted on several of these. The question, then, was how to get there by ship. In 1819 Parry had sailed down the Prince of Wales Strait, which runs in a southerly direction from Lancaster Sound, but turned back because he wanted to go west. Perhaps the way down to the coast was here?

  In May of 1824, Parry set out on a final attempt. The Prince of Wales Strait was full of ice when they reached it, and so once again the crew harboured for the winter, constructed an observatory–and became the first to discover that the Magnetic North Pole is constantly moving. The distance between it and the true geographic North Pole had increased by 9 degrees since they were last in the same area five years earlier.

  At the end of July 1825, Parry’s crew had to saw the ships loose from the ice. They managed to sail a little further down the strait, but then encountered a violent storm–the ships were battered by huge pieces of ice and rocks blown down from the cliffs. One of the ships sustained extensive damage, and the crew gazed dejectedly down the strait at the open water they were unable to reach. ‘[…] A more promising step towards the accomplishment of a North-West Passage never presented itself to our view,’ wrote one of the expedition’s crew members–but this was wishful thinking. The Prince of Wales Strait is not part of the Northwest Passage.

  CATASTROPHE | ‘I perceive that certain people at the Admty are quite tired of Polar Philosophy,’ wrote geographer James Rennell in the wake of Perry’s last expedition. The maps of the explored areas also revealed a pervading sense of hopelessness–they were full of names such as Repulse Bay, Ne Ultra, Point Turnagain, Hopes Checked, Frozen Strait and so on and so forth.

  But simply accepting defeat was no alternative for the British. In 1844, the First Lord of the Admiralty wrote that it would be senseless to stop the search ‘after so much has been done, and so little now remains to be done.’ The following year, Rear-Admiral John Franklin embarked on what would turn out to be the greatest and most terrible expedition of them all–and all due to an inaccurate map.

  The HMS Terror and HMS Erebus were two wind- and steam-powered bomb vessels weighing 325 and 372 tonnes respectively. With their reinforced bows and hulls strengthened with metal sheeting, these ships would break up the ice, sweep it aside, crush it–and conquer it.

  The unexplored area remaining on the map was one the size of Great Britain, located south-west of the Prince of Wales Strait. Beyond the strait, on the left by Cape Walker, was an unexplored opening that stretched southwards towards this area. The hope was that this would be the strait that led down to the ice-free waters that had been observed from the mainland coast, and on the morning of 19 May 1845, the two ships set sail with twenty-four officers and 110 sailors on board. At Greenland, five sailors were sent home for disciplinary reasons–Franklin refused to tolerate drunkenness and cursing. But these five sailors would be the expedition’s sole survivors. The crew aboard a whaling ship in Baffin Bay were the last Europeans to see the Franklin expedition, and 150 years would pass before details of what happened to the men aboard the two ships would finally come to light.

  By March of 1848 nobody had heard from Franklin or his crew, and so three rescue expeditions were dispatched. The first set sail for the Bering Strait, the second set out on foot along the mainland coast, and the third set out for where Franklin had last been seen. None of the expeditions found any trace of him, but all three mapped large, previously uncharted areas along the way.

  Ironically, the Franklin expedition gave us more geographical knowledge through its tragic end than would have been the case if Franklin had managed to make it safely through the passage. The three rescue expeditions were only the first of many that searched the area looking for the two ships that had disappeared without trace. In 1850, eight new expeditions were sent out, and the first traces of Franklin–the remains of his 1846 winter encampment at Beechey Island in Lancaster Sound–were discovered that summer. But where had he gone from here? Towards the north? West? South? The rescue expeditions searched in all directions, across both the water and the ice on foot and by sled, all the while mapping increasingly larger areas and travelling further west and north than the British had ever gone before.

  Surgeon John Rae concentrated on searching towards the south. In April 1854, he met an Inuit man who told him of thirty or forty white men who ‘had died of starvation, a long distance to the west of where we then were, and beyond a large River.’ Later, he met others who had seen a group of thin white men making their way south, pulling a boat and some sledges and hunting for seals at King William Island.

  John Ross and his nephew James had been in these waters fifteen years earlier. For his Narrative of a second voyage in search of a North-west passage from 1835, he had drawn a map that claimed that it was not possible to sail east of King William Island–Ross’s nephew had believed it to be a peninsula. They had even given names to several of the promontories within what they believed was a bay. But east of King William Island was exactly where Roald Amundsen would sail seventy-three years later. For the second time, John Ross erroneously believed a passage to be closed.

  Orientation map of the second Norwegian Polar Expedition 1898–1902 by Gunnar Isachsen. The expedition discovered and mapped the entire eastern part of Ellesmere Island, Axel Heiberg Island, Amund Ringnes Island, Ellef Ringnes Island and King Christian Island. Hassels Sund, Hendriksen Sd, Fosheims Halvö, Scheis Ö, Svendsens Hö, Baumanns Fj, Bays Fj, Isachsens Ld and Kap Isachsen were named after the expedition’s members.

  Based on Ross’s map, the Franklin expedition had set its course west of the island. Although the waters here are far wider than on the island’s other side, ice is also continuously driven down from the north, and it was here that both ships froze fast. ‘25 April 1848. H.M. Ships Terror and Erebus were deserted on the 22nd April, 5 leagues NNW of this having been beset since 12th Septr 1846,’ stated a message found on the island by one of the rescue expeditions in 1859. The message described how the remaining surviving members of the crew had set out towards the mainland to the south. All of them had either starved or frozen to death.

  The fate of the Franklin expedition, along with the knowledge that the discovery of the Northwest Passage would be of little practical significance when the conditions were so difficult and unpredictable, changed the British view of the region. There would be no more expeditions to the north, and London ceded responsibility for the waters to the local Canadian authorities in 1880.

  Francis McClintock, leader of the expedition that found the Franklin expedition’s final message, reflected on the search after returning to his ship: ‘More than 40,000 miles have been sledged, including 8,000 miles of coastline minutely examined […] sledge parties travelled in every month excepting only the dark ones of December and January, in temperatures not unfrequently 40° below zero, and occasionally even 10° or 15° colder still.’ In 1859, the British map of the area was quite different in appearance than it had been on
the morning that Franklin set out fourteen years earlier. New islands to the north and south of the Lancaster Sound, Barrow Strait, Melville Strait and McClure Strait had been explored, and the British expeditions had reached as far west as Prince Patrick Island and Banks Island. But the maps still remained fairly blank above 78 degrees north.

  NEW LAND | At the end of August 1898, the Fram had harboured for the winter at 79 degrees north. On 16 October Otto Sverdrup wrote:

  What might not these four months’ darkness bring us? Things so terrible have occurred up here in the polar night that they might well make anyone pause and think. Here came Franklin, with a hundred and thirty-eight men. The polar night stopped him; not one returned.

  The following August, the expedition was forced to ‘give up the journey round Greenland’ due to the ice. Instead, Sverdrup and his crew turned to the south, towards ‘Sir Eobert Inglis Peak, the farthest point reached by Inglefield in 1852′ when searching for Franklin. On the south side of Ellesmere Island they harboured for yet another winter. Isachsen and mate Sverre Hassel used what remained of the autumn to map the stretch of coastline to the east and west of their position.

  After several spring reconnaissance trips, they decided to set out on a longer expedition: ‘Tuesday, March 20, was the great day of departure.’ Sverdrup, Fosheim, Isachsen, Hassel and two others forged their way across a sound so difficult to traverse that they christened it Helvedesporten–Hell Gate. Further north, the journey was no easier: ‘The ice […] in some places was so bad that, to be honest, I began to doubt if there were any use in trying to go on,’ wrote Sverdrup. At one point, ‘three men, eighteen dogs, and three sledges with their loads’ fell ‘pell-mell’ down a hole in the ice. But none of this could dampen their spirits: ‘a way was now open to us where we might reasonably expect to make progress.’