Off the Map

by Fergus Fleming

  Although Heemskerck was a leader of men and an experienced sailor, he was not, like Barents, a navigator, so the two boats fumbled their way through the ice, past Vaigach Island to the Russian coast, steering by compass and guesswork until they crossed a body of water they assumed was the White Sea. Landing on its westernmost promontory on 15 August, they congratulated themselves on being, at most, two days from the ports of Kola and Vardø. They were wrong. The captain of a passing Russian ship explained that they were not in the White Sea, but in Cheshskaya Bay to the east. He gave them as much food as he could spare and, having ensured that they would not starve, and with business pressing, he sailed eastwards. Wearily, Heemskerck led his boats in the opposite direction. He reached the White Sea, crossed it and sailed into a bay where two Russian ships were anchored. The Russians had food – which they shared willingly – and most importantly they had stoves. After 11 months cramped either in the behouden huis or on their boats, the Dutchmen experienced the unfamiliar sensation of warmth.

  Living alongside the Russians was a small group of impoverished and diminutive Laplanders, one of whom Heemskerck hired to guide the fittest member of his crew overland to Kola. It was several weeks before a lone figure sprang over the hills and ran back towards them. Although he had jogged most of the way, the Lapp was not out of breath and informed them that he had reached Kola; that he had left his companion there because he was too weak to travel; but that the man had written a note for Heemskerck. When Heemskerck read the note he learned that a Dutch ship was at Kola and that its captain, none other than Jan Corneliszoon Rijp, was sending a boat to rescue them. Rijp came, gave them food, spent a night in their camp, then took them to Kola, on to Vardø and finally to Amsterdam, which they reached at noon on 1 November. In a civic version of a court-martial, the city elders called Heemskerck to account for losing the ship and its cargo of valuables. He responded in style. Dressing his men in the fox-skin hats and the greasy rags that they had worn for more than 12 months, he paraded them before his inquisitors. He was acquitted by smell alone.

  Barents’s failure did not disrupt the quest for the North-East Passage. In 1580 Mercator was still optimistic. ‘The voyage to Catheio by the East’, he wrote, ‘is doutlesse verie easie and short.’ Many people tried it, battling through the sea – now called the Barents Sea – that led to Novaya Zemlya, but their attacks were fruitless and in the end they gave up. In the 18th century a series of Russian expeditions took boats down the great Siberian rivers to chart most of the Arctic coastline. Not until 1878, however, was the North-East Passage finally completed.

  MUTINY IN THE ARCTIC

  Henry Hudson (1610–11)

  According to the papally sanctioned Tordesillas Treaty of 1494 the undiscovered world belonged to Spain and Portugal. To the east of a certain line everything was Portugal’s; to the west everything was Spain’s. The nations of northern Europe – England and Holland in particular – refused to accept the Pope’s edict. They too wanted a share of the pie and, calculating that the earth’s circumference was shorter across the Poles than it was at the equator, they decided they were in an advantageous position to reach the Indies. While some sought Cathay via the North-East Passage, others suggested a more practicable route might be found to the west. One of the earliest advocates was a Venetian named John Cabot, born in 1455, who at the age of 30 settled in Bristol with the idea of finding the ‘Island of Brasil’, which rumour placed somewhere to the west of Ireland. But as reports seeped in of Columbus’s discoveries in the Caribbean, it became clear that ‘Brasil’ did not exist – or that if it did it was not where everyone said it was supposed to be. In 1496, therefore, Cabot persuaded King Henry VII of England to sponsor a voyage in search of the North-West Passage. He sailed in May 1497 on the Matthew, with 20 men and instructions to investigate ‘whatsoever islands, countries, regions or provinces of heathens and infidels, in whatsoever part of the world placed, which before this time were unknown to all Christians’. Anticipating a lucrative trade, Henry told Cabot that he could dock in Bristol free of charge, but that the Crown would take 20 per cent of the profit. Cabot discovered neither the North-West Passage nor anything that even remotely resembled profit. He did, however, discover Newfoundland in June 1497 and claimed it for England. When he returned that same year he was given £20 for his trouble. Convinced that he had found the north coast of Asia, he sailed again in 1498 with five ships. They encountered stormy weather, and only two of the ships survived. The others – with Cabot aboard – vanished without trace.

  For some reason, the North-West Passage exerted a particular fascination for navigators. No matter that the North-East Passage was more convenient and its approaches better charted; they insisted on sailing across the Atlantic. In 1502 the ‘Company of Adventurers to the New Found Land’, was formed with the object of pursuing Cabot’s discoveries. Two years later a pair of English ships returned from Newfoundland, carrying not gold or gems but a cargo of fish, mostly cod, which were so plentiful that even the dullest fisherman could fill his hold. From Spain, Britain and Portugal ships sailed for North America. They were interested solely in the fishing, but John Cabot’s son Sebastian left Bristol in 1508 to continue his father’s work. He went as far as Labrador before skirting down the coast and returning to Bristol in 1509. After a disastrous period in the employ of Spain he returned older and wiser to England, where he helped outfit Chancellor’s voyages to the North-East Passage in 1553 and 1556.

  By 1576 interest in the North-West Passage was riding high: as one Englishman pointed out, its discovery would be ‘a great advancement to our Countrie, wonderfull inriching to our Prince, and [offering] unspeakable commodities to all the inhabitants of Europe’. In that year his fellow countryman Martin Frobisher seemed to prove him right. A man of immense physical strength, warlike disposition and rudimentary education (he seems to have written little save his name, which he spelled in a variety of ways), Frobisher was by nature a privateer rather than an explorer. Nevertheless, armed with an outdated and inaccurate map dating from the 14th century, he sailed with the Gabriel and Michael up the Labrador coast and crossed to what is now Baffin Island, where he found and named (after himself) a strait that appeared to be the door to the North-West Passage. He penetrated 180 miles before being blocked by ice, whereupon he sent his men ashore to gather souvenirs. The local Inuit were at first friendly, but then turned hostile. Five of the Gabriel’s crew were kidnapped, never to be seen again, and in one encounter Frobisher received an arrow in the buttocks.* Returning to England, he presented his sponsors with his findings. Apart from the discovery of Frobisher Strait – which was later found to be a bay – they did not amount to much: a few Inuit artefacts, one Inuit, and a small but strangely heavy lump of rock that two assayers declared was iron pyrites but that a third said was gold. Naturally, Frobisher accepted the last man’s judgement as the most accurate. With its help, he was able to raise the money for two more journeys, in 1577 and 1578, on both occasions returning with his hold stuffed with ore.

  The belated realization that it was, indeed, fool’s gold brought an end to Frobisher’s Arctic career. However, he did leave an important navigational legacy. On his 1578 expedition – in which he was given the title High Admiral, in charge of a fleet of 15 ships – he lost his way in a storm, and instead of hitting Frobisher Strait found himself in a seaway on the Labrador coast to the south of Baffin Island. It was broader and more promising than Frobisher Strait, but had remarkably powerful tides. ‘Truly it was wonderful to heare and see the rushing and noise that the tides do make in this place,’ wrote one of his more literate companions, ‘with so violent a force that our. ships lying a hull were turned sometimes round about even in the manner of a whirlpoole, and the noise of the streame no lesse to be heard afarre off than the waterfall of London Bridge.’ He went down it for 200 miles before returning to the south coast of Baffin Island – Meta Incognita – where he began gathering rocks again. His turbulent discovery, which he named Mi
staken Straits, would play an important role in the quest for the North-West Passage.

  The episode of Frobisher’s gold having bankrupted most of his investors – or ‘adventurers’, as they were called – silence fell on the North-West Passage. For several years nobody was willing to touch it, but eventually new money was found and new expeditions were despatched. The first was that of John Davis, a gentler, more inquisitive character than Frobisher, who in 1585 took the Sunshine and Moonshine to the southern tip of Greenland. All he saw was ‘mightie mountains all covered with snowe, no views of wood, grasse or earth to be seen, and the shore two leagues off into the sea so full of yce as that no shipping could by any meanes come near the same. The lothsome view of the shore, and irksome noise of the yce was such that it bred strange conceits among us, so that we supposed the place to be wast and voyd of any sensible or vegetable creatures, whereupon I called the same Desolation.’ Entering the strait between Greenland and Baffin Island that now bears his name, he sailed up Greenland’s west coast before crossing to Baffin Island, which he followed as far north as Cumberland Sound. It looked a likely opening for the North-West Passage, but the winds were not in his favour. He returned that year with the news that ‘The North West Passage is a matter nothing doubtful, but at any tyme almost to be passed, the sea navigable, voyd of yce, the ayre tolerable, and the waters deepe’. In 1586 he made a second trip to Greenland, discovered nothing new, and returned via Labrador, where he encountered Frobisher’s Mistaken Straits. He gave it a new name: Furious Overfall. Yet again English investors were disappointed. So was Davis. He did not return to the Arctic, preferring instead to find an easier route to Cathay via South America. His efforts led, in 1592, to the discovery of the Falkland Islands.

  The journeys of Frobisher and Davis dampened slightly England’s ambitions for the North-West Passage, but they did not quench its desire to find a passage of some sort. Authorities were beginning to question Mercator’s view that there was a body of land at the North Pole. Although they knew no more about the Pole than Mercator, they hazarded that it might not be a continent but an open sea. Samuel Purchas, one of England’s most prolific travel writers, described it – very accurately – as ‘a Pointe, but Nothing but Vanitie’. Purchas and others, however, subscribed to the theory that the Pole sat in temperate waters. If a ship could break through the Pole’s protective tonsure of ice, whose lower fringes reached to 70 N, it would be rewarded by fair seas all the way to the Pacific. In 1607, therefore, the Muscovy Company sent Henry Hudson ‘to discover a passage by the North Pole to Japan and China’.

  TOP Marco Polo arrives at Hormuz en route from China from China to Italy, C.1291

  ABOVE Christopher Columbus lands on Hispaniola, 1492.

  RIGHT The departure of Vasco da Gama’s fleet in 1497.

  Ferdinand Magellan’s assault on Mactan Island, 1521.

  OPPOSITE

  ABOVE A polar bear attacks William Barents’s men, 1595.

  BELOW Barents’s hut at Ice Haven during the winter of 1596–7.

  Charles-Marie de la Condamine’s descent of the Amazon, 1743.

  TOP Captain James Cook’s death in Hawaii, 1779.

  ABOVE The ascent of Mont Blanc by Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, 1787.

  Alexander von Humboldt’s sketch of a Mexican river. (1799–1804).

  TOP Escaping a grizzly bear: Lewis and Clark’s 1803–6 traverse of North America.

  ABOVE W. E. Parry’s Hecla being sawn into an ice harbour, 1824.

  TOP A canoe strikes a tree and overturns: Lewis and Clark’s 1803–6 traverse of North America.

  ABOVE One of John Franklin’s camps during his retreat through the Badlands, 1821.

  Little is known of Hudson’s background – not even the date of his birth – but by 1607 he must have been in his late thirties or forties because he had three sons, the eldest of whom made him a grandfather the following year. He was, however, an experienced navigator, obstinate and determined, somewhat in the same mould as Barents. He sailed for the Pole in April 1607 aboard the Hopewell, a small ship whose ten-strong crew included his son John – ‘a boy’. The Hopewell went up the east coast of Greenland, possibly reaching a record north of 80° N before being driven back by ice, then spent a month probing the pack off Spitsbergen, where Hudson noted the presence of many whales and walruses, before returning to London. The Muscovy Company was not downcast. In 1608 it sent Hudson and the Hopewell on a second voyage, this time to the North-East Passage.

  Hudson left on 22 April with a crew of 14 (including again his son John) for the north cape of Novaya Zemlya. He failed in the attempt and recorded little of worth save the sighting by two crewmen of a mermaid. She poked her head out of the water to peer at them before ‘a sea came and overturned her: from the navill upward, her back and breasts were like a woman’s ... Her skin very white; and longe haire hanging downe behinde, of colour blacke: in her going downe they saw her tayle, which was like the tayle of a porposse, and speckled like a mackrell.’* He also found on Novaya Zemlya ‘a good store of wilde goose quills, a piece of an old oare and some flowers’, which he took aboard as evidence that he had been there. He did not linger. ‘I thought it my duty to save victuals, wages and tackle by my speedy return,’ he wrote, ‘and not by foolish rashness, the time being wasted, to lay more charge upon the action.’ On the way home the Hopewell was caught in ice and was saved only ‘by the mercie of God and his mightie help’.

  The Muscovy Company wanted the ‘action’. It did not want goose quills, old oars and flowers. Neither did it appreciate Hudson’s methods. There was a suspicion that he had driven his men too hard. Having found the North-East Passage impassable, Hudson had apparently decided to take the Hopewell across the Atlantic to the North-West Passage, ‘[resolving] to use all means I could to sail to the north-west... and to make trial of that place called ... the furious overfall, by Captain Davis, hoping to run into it an hundred leagues’. When the men threatened to mutiny, he was forced to sign an embarrassing affidavit: ‘I gave my company a certificate under my hand, of my free and willing return, without persuasion or force of any one of them.’ Disappointed in their choice of commander, the Muscovy Company did not send Hudson north again the following year.

  Turning to the Dutch, Hudson was given command of the Half Moon, in which he sailed on 25 March 1609 for the North-East Passage. Again his crew mutinied, but this time they allowed him to take the ship across the Atlantic. Perhaps fearing a second mutiny, Hudson did not head for Davis’s Furious Overfall, but investigated reports of a transcontinental waterway further south. He explored the mouth of what is now the Hudson River, but soon realized that it was not the channel he sought. He returned to England on 7 November, having discovered little of interest save an island in the Hudson River that would later become the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam – and later still New York. He immediately despatched his log to Holland, with the request that they send him on a second attempt at the North-West Passage.

  Hudson was by now one of the most experienced ice captains in Europe – a fact to which the English suddenly awoke. He was forbidden to go to Holland and was instead offered employment by a consortium of merchants – Sir Thomas Smythe, Sir Dudley Digges and Sir John Wolstenholme – who sent him, as he desired, to the North-West Passage. He left the Thames on 17 April 1610 aboard the Discovery. His 23-strong crew had varying qualifications. Five of them had served under him before: his son John, the carpenter Philip Staffe, the mate Robert Juet and two seamen, Arnold Lodlo and Michael Perse. Among the newcomers were John King the quartermaster; Robert Bylot, an experienced navigator who came aboard as an ordinary seaman; Thomas Woodehouse, ‘a student in the mathematics’; Francis Clements, bosun; Bennet Mathews, cook and trumpeter; plus Abacuck Pricket, Dudley Digges’s footman, who was there to safeguard the investors’ interests and who became the expedition’s chronicler. There was also Henry Greene, a powerful and hot-tempered wastrel who had ingratiated himself with Hudson (indeed, lived in his
home) and who arrived unexpectedly at Gravesend to replace a man named Coleburne who had been appointed as an ‘assistant’ to help Pricket keep an eye on proceedings.

  Hudson’s goal was the Furious Overfall, or Mistaken Straits, which both Davis and Frobisher had marked as a potential avenue to the Pacific. By the time he reached it, via southern Greenland – Davis’s ‘Desolation’ – the crew were in disarray. Greene picked a fight with one man before they were even clear of England, and came to blows with another when they stopped at Iceland. Juet had begun to prepare the men for a mutiny, telling them that the mission was a waste of time, that they should keep their weapons by their beds, and that Greene had been put in their midst as the captain’s spy. When Hudson entered the Furious Overfall, and became temporarily trapped by the ice, matters came to a head. Juet and his supporters rebelled at being taken through such a ‘great and whurling sea’.

  Mutinies of the time were not as criminal as they would later become. It was understood that a captain relied on the goodwill of his men. They sailed of their own free will; if they did not wish to continue they said so; and their words were generally listened to. In this case they had every reason to turn back. The ice was terrifying, and ‘the more he [the captain] strove, the worse he was, and the more enclosed, till we could go no further’. Hudson, therefore, asked them openly if they wished to carry on or not. ‘He brought forth his card [chart], and showed all the company that he was entered above an hundred leagues further than any Englishman ever was; and left it to their choice whether they would proceed any further, yea or nay,’ Pricket wrote. ‘Whereupon some were of one mind and some of another, some wishing themselves at home, and some not caring where, so they were out of the ice. But there were some who then spake words which were remembered a great while after. There was one who told the master that if he had an hundred pounds, he would give fourscore and ten to be at home. But the carpenter made answer that if he had an hundred he would not give ten upon any such condition, but would think it to be as good money as ever he had any, and to bring it as well home, by the leave of God.’ The carpenter, Staffe, won the day and, after ‘much labour and time spent’, the Discovery emerged on the western side of the Furious Overfall.