Arctic Obsession

by Alexis S. Troubetzkoy

  Despite the challenges of the harsh life, Greenland’s Norse population continued to swell, and by the thirteenth century it numbered 3,500 inhabitants. Christianity came to the land at the time that the Norwegians converted, and by 1125 a bishopric had been established, having within it sixteen separate churches, a monastery, and a nunnery, all of which, incidentally, contributed — rather, were levied — funds for the Crusades. Following Icelandic and Greenlandic acceptance of Norwegian rule in 1262, the king granted a trade monopoly to a coterie of Bergen merchants, who in quick time demonstrated indifference to the far-off island by imposing such extortionate terms upon the Greenlanders that commercial relations withered and all but died. Records indicate, for example, that at one time seven or more trading vessels arrived from Norway each year. In the six-year period following the takeover by the Norwegian merchants, only one ship entered Greenland waters. As the island’s traders suffered, so did the farmers. For centuries, these stalwart tillers of the soil had worked the coastal lands, but then a severe worsening of climate set in, bringing exceptional cold — the “New Ice Age.” For the people, the entire way of life had become altered.

  The short of it is that by the early 1500s, settlements on eastern and western Greenland ceased to exist. The people had quite simply vanished, and what it was specifically that befell them remains a mystery. Quite possibly it was the worsening of climate that caused a disruption in the food supply and brought famine to many parts. Perhaps the tyranny of the Bergen merchants impacted the Greenlanders more severely than acknowledged — their denial to the island of an adequate supply of essential goods. Disease in one form or another was unquestionably a factor in the population’s decimation, with one hypothesis stating that the Black Plague that so devastated Europe at the time eventually hit Greenland. And undoubtedly, the deterioration of relations with the Inuit had become so severe that many European settlements were simply exterminated by them. A saga written in 1379, for example, mentions an incident when “Skrælings assaulted the Greenlanders, killed eighteen men and captured two swains and one bondswoman.”[5] But most probably the disappearance of the early Greenlanders was a result of all these factors.

  For over two hundred years Greenland lay barely inhabited. The Europeans were gone, and for whatever reason the Inuit who at one time had been scattered along the central and southern coastlines, migrated to the far north, with a goodly number crossing the sixteen-mile trait to Ellesmere Island in Canada.

  The country to which Erik enticed settlers and called home is a unique corner of the globe. Greenland is the world’s largest island with a coastline of some twenty-five thousand miles — nearly the same length as the equator — and in area it is approximately the same size as Mexico or Saudi Arabia. Its northernmost point is less than five hundred miles from the North Pole, and the southernmost is on the same latitude as St. Petersburg, Oslo, and Churchill, Manitoba. North–south it stretches 1,700 miles or a distance equal to that of New York to Miami. As part of the Laurentian Shield, the island structurally is part of the North American continent, but historically and politically, it is European, while geophysically and in ethnicity it is undeniably Arctic — virtually all of it lies above the Arctic Circle.

  For the most part, the island is bordered by mountains and fjords, although in some places the coast rises straight up to considerable heights; the highest elevation is 12,200 feet. A vast, asymmetrical, dome-shaped glacier covers 80 percent of the surface, extending over seven hundred thousand square miles, in some places reaching depths of ten thousand feet. It is of such massive weight that a depression has been created in the central part of the island, forming a basin one thousand feet below sea level. Little wonder that the sixteenth-century explorer, John Davis, called the place “the land of desolation.”

  The first Vikings reaching Greenland had travelled west from Iceland; the first reaching Iceland had travelled west from Norway. For the Norse, the lure of the west seems to have been no less strong than for many restless Americans of the nineteenth century — “Go west, young man, go west!” — some irresistible force tugging. The first Greenlander heeding the call was the eldest of Erik the Red’s four children, Leif Eriksson. His boyhood friend, Bjarni Herjolfsson, had once been severely driven off course while sailing from Iceland to Greenland, and in the process he spotted in the far distance an unfamiliar mountainous land, one that was forested and ice-bound. It was an intriguing report, and word of trees was particularly tantalizing as Icelanders were wood-starved. Curiosity got the better of Leif and about the year 1000 he persuaded his elderly father to lead an expedition in search of the mysterious place. Erik agreed with some reluctance, but as preparations for the journey got under way, he tumbled from his horse and sprained an ankle. Deeming this to be an ill omen he begged off the voyage, leaving Leif on his own. Thus it was that the restless young man, accompanied by thirty-five others, sailed from home to explore the prospects of the viewed, but untouched land. The congenital need of Vikings for fame and posthumous reputation was unquestionably as much a motivation for the quest as any.

  Steering by the sun and stars, Leif headed in the direction indicated by his friend and in time a barren country came into view, largely covered by glaciers, “but from the sea to the glaciers was, as it were, a single slab of rock.” The ice-bound land bore little resemblance to Bjarni’s description, for it was neither mountainous nor forested. This disappointing place Leif called Helluland, or “the Land of Flat Rocks,” reckoned to be the southern reaches of Baffin Island. Three more days of sailing brought him to a place that “was flat and covered with forest, with extensive white sands wherever they went and shelving gently to the sea,” and this he named Markland, thought to be southern Labrador.

  Continuing south along the coastline, Leif finally came to a point of land with rolling grassland, spruce forests, and a stream “that glistened with salmon.” So pleasing was this discovery that he determined to winter at the spot, and with no small delight the party set about constructing houses and barns. As they were settling down, one of the crewmembers, thought to be a Hungarian or a German, came upon “wine berries” growing freely. It’s popularly believed that these were grapes, but caution must be exercised here for the Norse called most berries vinbery. Most likely the discovered were cranberries, but be that as it may, Leif called the place “Vinland.” And here the first European settlement in the New World came to be established, nearly four centuries before Columbus “sailed the ocean blue” to America. The life of Leif’s settlement was short-lived, for within two years the would-be colonists forsook the place and returned to Greenland. A further attempt was made by the Vikings to establish in the New World, but here again it was met by failure. The sagas tell us that in both cases fighting broke out with the hostile “Skærlings,” which simply proved too much for the Norse. Today the remains of Leif’s site have been preserved by the Canadian government at L’Anse aux Meadows, at the northernmost point of Newfoundland nearly across from Labrador.

  At about the time that Erik and Leif were planting footprints in the Arctic regions of the New World, other Norsemen were pressing east and infiltrating the territory soon to become known as Russia. Othere’s penetration of the White Sea had been made nearly a century-and-a-half earlier. In the decades that followed, his countrymen arrived in numbers not only into Arctic regions, but into more southern areas below Kola and the White Sea. This was the land of the Slavs, a semi-Asiatic people scattered about in small settlements within an unframed world of endlessly stretching spaces, a harsh land of empty plains, miasmic marshes, forbidding forests, parching summers, and arctic snows. So focused were these people on coping with hostile nature that little energy remained for more refined activity or for the development of social organization. While the Latin and Teutonic peoples were developing dynamically in the west, the Slavs, as one historian put it, “slumbered in oriental seclusion … and pursued their way without Latin or scholasticism, without parliament or university, without li
terature or political debate, or a sustained challenge to religious belief.”[6] The Slavs were in Europe without being European.

  It was in this land, where abundant river systems offered ideal avenues for trade, that the Norse merchant-warriors focused their energies. Trading posts were established, the natives engaged, and with the passing of time a burgeoning commerce developed with Novgorod serving as the pivotal point. This city is one of Russia’s oldest and at its height, along with Kiev in the south, it was the richest. From this eastern-most outpost of north Europe’s Hanseatic League, goods were shipped to the Black Sea and the Mediterranean along the connecting river system, to places as far away as Sicily. Furs, amber, wax, honey, and slaves streamed south in return for spices, wines, silk, and gems, which were then forwarded on to northern European markets.

  Novgorod expanded rapidly from a prosperous commercial hub into a flourishing independent city-state that reached far out into neighbouring territories. By the thirteenth century, its expansionist-minded merchants found themselves hemmed in. To the west the threatening Swedes and the Teutonic knights were well entrenched. To the south and east, the fierce Mongols had established themselves — Genghis Khan’s “Golden Horde” in the world’s largest empire ever. The only direction remaining for Novgorodians to expand was north into the Arctic.

  Thus it was that a migration of sorts got under way with merchants, peasants, and churchmen leaving the city to plant themselves on the shores of the White Sea or along the banks of the numerous rivers flowing into it. For the most part these pioneers were experienced rivermen and now they adeptly navigated the waterways pushing ever north and creating settlements. By late fourteenth century, most of the Arctic regions west of the Urals had come under Novgorod’s control — a continuation of Russian expansion.

  Of Arctic coastal nations today, Russian territory extends along the longest global spread of any — nearly half the world, across ten time zones from the Norwegian border to the Bering Sea. Twenty percent of that immense country is situated in the Arctic with over 10 million Russians calling it home. It has always been the most populated of Arctic lands, not only with indigenous peoples, but with Europeans. The city of greater Murmansk at 68°30' N boasts a population of 850,000.

  The medieval pioneers arriving in those parts were inexperienced in the ways of the Arctic, but they managed masterfully, enduring all the adverse conditions the pitiless Arctic threw at them. Winter temperatures steadily reading -40°F were one thing, but psychologically, imagine the isolation: “As far as the eye could see in the gathering gloom, in every direction lay the barren steppe. There was not a tree nor a bush … only silence and desolation. The country seemed abandoned by God and man to the Arctic Spirit …” It was the early hunters and trappers who penetrated that “gathering gloom,” paving the way for others, and it was they who most forcefully coped with the early challenges of daily life — shelter, food, clothing, firewood, and transport. Lessons were learned through trial and error and one might well wonder why it took these hardies decades to adapt to the ways of the indigenous peoples, the Nanets, who for millennia had been surviving brilliantly in the same demanding conditions. All the while that the trappers and hunters suffered at their tasks, Novgorod merchants, comfortably ensconced in the warmth of their homes, toyed with bottom-lines and hatched fresh schemes for further development and deeper thrusts into the Arctic.

  The Arctic, however, did smile upon these arrivals, and she showered them with rich rewards of luxuriant furs. The exceptional cold of the place is such that fur-bearing animals like ermine, marten, fox, and hare develop thicker coats than those of their southern cousins, therefore making them more desirable and valuable. In addition to furs, walrus tusks were harvested, as well as polar bear skins and the occasional nugget of some esoteric mineral, all in high demand in the parlours of Novgorod, Moscow, and throughout Europe.

  * * *

  With the impetus of Columbus’s discovery in 1492, the “Age of Exploration” quickly got under way. No seafaring nation of importance failed to dispatch one explorer or another to seek out fresh channels to fabled Cathay (China) or Cipango (Japan), or to claim new lands. Relying mostly on the talents of Genoese navigators, Spain and Portugal grabbed the early initiative and before long the two countries had claimed vast areas of South America and Africa. And it was upon these two countries that Pope Alexander VI lavished his munificence in 1494. With a stroke of a pen on a primitive map, he divided the world into two parts, allocating the western hemisphere to Spain and the eastern hemisphere to Portugal — the Line of Demarcation. To these kingdoms now fell the onus of bringing Christianity to the indigenous of lands discovered and uncovered, but in return the two countries were accorded exclusive rights to trade and commercial development in their respective parts. With their advanced fleets and determination of purpose, the Spanish rapidly established supremacy over South America and the Portuguese over Africa — as the navies of the two patrolled the coasts guarding Vatican-granted monopolies.

  Aspiring maritime nations of Northern Europe — England, France, Holland, and Denmark — found themselves locked out from trade as well as exploration in southern regions. If a trade route to the east was to be had, it could only be via a northern passage. The sixteenth-century historian Richard Hakluyt declared, “Beside the portion of land pertaining to the Spaniards … there yet remaineth another portion of that main land reaching toward the northeast, thought to be as large as the other, and not yet known … neither inhabited by any Christian man …”

  Thus a fresh chapter in the biography of the Arctic came to be written as a series of explorations got under way with the English, French, and Danes knocking at the gate of the Northwest Passage, and the Dutch (and later, the Russians) pressing the portals of the Northern Sea Route.

  Notes

  1. J.R.S. Sterrett, The Geography of Strabo, Vol. I (London: Loeb Classical Library, 1917), 261.

  2. Paul Simpson-Housley, The Arctic: Enigmas and Myths (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1996), 24.

  3. Jeannette Mirsky, To the Arctic! (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 18.

  4. Finn Gad, The History of Greenland, Vol. I (London: C. Hurst & Co., 1970), 19.

  5. Ibid., 26

  6. H.A.L. Fisher, A History of Europe (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1955), 374.

  2

  Eastern Thrusts to Cathay

  BY LATE MIDDLE AGES, merchant guilds had come to dominate commerce in most parts of Europe, and in Britain they had developed into a way of life, with most trades being organized — goldsmiths, shoemakers, dyers, stonemasons, bakers, and the like. In 1407, Henry IV approved the formation of a guild to oversee and control overseas trade, particularly in cloth. The Company of Merchant Adventurers, it was popularly called, but its precise name was “Mysterie and Companie of Merchant Adventurers for the Discoverie of Regions, Dominions, Islands, and Places Unknowen.”

  The guild flourished and in time it spawned a number of ancillary organizations, including the establishment of the Muscovy Trading Company, the first major English joint-stock company. By its royal charter, the new entity was granted a monopoly of trade between England and Russia, a privilege it enjoyed for 150 years (ceasing operations in 1917 with the Russian Revolution). Impetus for the organization’s formation came from a trio of adventurous entrepreneurs: Richard Chancellor, Sir Hugh Willoughby, and Sebastian Cabot, son of John Cabot, who was the first European to have set foot in North America since the Vikings.

  Sebastian Cabot, appointed by the king as “Grand Pilot of England,” held but one searing ambition — to secure the passage to Cathay through the “impassable waters” of northern Russia. He successfully persuaded his fellow merchants to finance an exploratory expedition, and in 1553 three ships were procured, outfitted in Bristol, and launched on their journey: the Bona Esperanza of 120 tons, the 160-ton Edward Bonaventure, and the Bona Confidentia, the smallest of the lot at ninety tons. So confident were they of success in reaching the east, Ind
ia in particular, that the hulls were coated with lead as protection against infestation of worms, which they understood were common in tropical waters. Commanding the whole was “Admiral of the Fleet” Willoughby on board the Esperanza. A dubious appointment made, we are informed, because he was “preferred above all others, both by reason of his goodly personage (for he was tall of stature) as also for his singular skill in the services of warre.”[1] Height and service as a cavalry officer was all very well and good, but the ships might have been better served had Sir Hugh “taken to the sea” earlier in his career. With a mere three years of sailing experience, his navigation and piloting skills were anything but developed. At his side was a crew of thirty-eight that included a master gunner, a couple of surgeons, and six merchants. Richard Chancellor, the expedition’s chief pilot, was on board the fifty-crew-member Bonaventure, commanded by Stephen Borough.

  The sixty-four-year-old Cabot judged himself too aged to join the expedition, which promised to be lengthy and arduous. He did, however, oversee every facet of outfitting and provisioning of the small fleet and he also provided detailed “ordinances, instructions and advertisements of and for the intended voyage to Cathay.” Every aspect of the undertaking was touched upon by the comprehensive orders, including exhortations on personal behaviour. When making contact with the locals of the Far East, for example, Cabot instructed that no native was to be trusted and that every effort had to be made to give the impression that nothing in particular was being sought. He enjoined the expedition’s leaders to treat natives courteously and hospitably, suggesting that they be invited on board and offered beer or wine — a bit of drink was a legitimate bargaining tool. Details of the expedition are vividly related by Richard Hakluyt in a book published in 1599, the remarkable title of which runs 123 words — the short title being, The Principall Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries of the English Nation: Made by Sea or Overland to the Most Remote and Furthest Distant Quarters of the Earth. In this singular account, Hakluyt observes that unlike Spanish and Portuguese explorers who were obligated to engage in missionary work, Cabot’s expedition was “not to disclose to any nation the state of our religion, but to pass over in silence, without any declaration of it, seeming to beare with such lawes and rites, as the place hath, when you shall arrive.”[2]