THIS title embraces the Antarctic as well as the Arctic seas and lands; but we mean to confine ourselves mainly to the North Polar Regions, which, cold and inhospitable as they are, have witnessed many of the most strenuous and masterly efforts of British seamen, placed under circumstances of extraordinary peril and privation. The intensely interesting narratives of the exploits of these "marine worthies" will continue to incite the youth of the land to deeds of daring enterprise as long as Britain enjoys the blessings of free government, and its accompanying liberty of thought and action.
From the ancients we get but a few glimpses of the northern regions. It is true that in the very dawn of history the tin of Cornwall and the amber of the Baltic were known on the coasts of Palestine and Asia Minor, and that the Phœnicians,1 and after them the Carthaginians, extended their commerce and commercial establishments coastwise from Tartessus or Gaddir, in the Bay of Cadiz, to the Estryrnades, Cassiterides, or Fetis, in the south of Albion. These skilful mariners may even have penetrated in their coasting voyages into the Baltic through the Sound or Belt; but there is no evidence of their ever having crossed, or even approached, the Arctic Circle.2 Commercial jealousy kept the secret of these voyages concealed from the Greeks, but at a later period the conquest of Britain must have given to the Romans some knowledge of the seas which wash its shores; yet it was not until 138 years after Cæsar had first ventured across the Straits of Dover that Agricola circumnavigated the island. In process of time, the Roman seamen espied the Scandinavian peninsula, which they believed to be a cluster of islands; but they did not cross the Arctic Circle, that feat being reserved for a harder race of mariners, nurtured in a ruder clime, and on more stormy seas. After Roman civilization had been overthrown in England by invading hordes of Jutes, Angles, and other heathen tribes, and the Saxon dominion in that island was acquiring strength under the authority of one ruler, the raven flag of Scandinavia appeared in the narrow seas, carrying terror and rapine to all the coasts of Europe. Considering warfare the only honourable employment, death in the battle-field the only desirable termination of a hero's
life, and accustomed to all the vicissitudes of a variable sky, the Northmen were no summer sailors; but, on the contrary, often chose the winter time for their piratical descents, as being the season when they were least expected. And so it happened that, either from being casually driven out of their course by tempests, or urged by the spirit of daring enterprise to roam over the waters in quest of new lands,—the mythic white islands and seas of the early ages,—they acquired a general knowledge of the coasts of the Northern Ocean.
About the year 890, "Ochter (alter Audher) said to King Alfred that he dwelt the furthest north of any other Norman at Helgoland" (on the coast of Norway, in Lat. 66. N.), and that "upon a time he fell into a fantasie to prove and know how far that land stretched northwards;" whereupon he made sail directly to the north for six days; then, after delaying till he had another fair wind, plain east for four days more; and, lastly, after waiting again for a wind, went due south, to the mouth of a large river, from whence he turned back. (Hakluyt, i. 4, 235.) Ochter must have sailed 60 miles a day to have doubled the North Cape, which is a large allowance; yet as an Arctic summer would give him light enough by night, he might have gone at that rate for the twenty-four hours, and have reached the Varanger Fiord, or perhaps the mouth of the Kola; but the time is evidently too short for him to have traversed the White Sea, and attained the mouth of the Dwina, as Hakluyt supposes. Ochter found the banks of the river from whence he returned so well peopled by Biarmes that he was afraid to land. The country he had previously coasted was very sparingly inhabited by fishermen, fowlers, and hunters, who were all Fynes or Terfynes. The Quenes (Kwens, Kainulainen, or Fins of Latham), he further stated, were in the habit of crossing the mountains at times to the maritime coasts of Norway, for the purpose of invading and spoiling the Normans.
In 860, or thirty years before Ochter made this communication to King Alfred, Iceland was discovered by the Norwegian Naddodr, visited in the following season by Gardar, a Swede, and colonized in 874 by Ingolf and other Norsemen. Some years later, one Gunbiorn having been driven by a storm to the westward of Iceland, dis-
1 Such voyages in the Northern Atlantic from one advanced commercial colony to another would be easy to the seamen who, by command of Pharaoh Necho, had in the seventh century B.C. sailed from the Red Sea round the south end of Africa, and in the third year of their voyage entered the Mediterranean by the Pillars of Hercules. Herodotus, from not being able to understand one of the physical phenomena reported by the mariners, discredits this voyage; but the very circumstance of the sun having had a northerly bearing as they rounded South Africa is an evidence of its truth, and full credit is now given by competent geographers to the report. (Rawlinson's Herodotus, Introduction; Prideaux's Connect., Ezekiel, c. xxvii., &c.)
2 The volumes of Reeren on the African and Asiatic Nations (translated in 1832) contain references to all the known authorities on this subject. We there find that Gades (Gaddir) and Utica were founded about the same time, and 270 years prior to the building of Carthage, or 1130 B.C. Aristotle, quoting from the Phœnician annals, also records the foundation of Utica. (Diod. Siculus and Pomponius Mela.) Pestus Avienus, in his Oræ Maritima, composed after consulting the Punic records, mentions the naval armaments of Hanno and Himilco, sent from Africa to found colonies outside of the Straits of Gibraltar, the former on the African coasts, and the latter on the western shores of Europe. A record of the widely-diverging Phœnician trade is supposed to be preserved in the peculiar and very ancient glass beads still in existence on the western coast of Africa, in Cornwall, and in Ireland. (Rawlinson's Herod. ii. p. 50.) The Carthaginian vessels were flat-bottomed barks, so constructed for more conveniently navigating shoal waters. Himilco's voyage northwards lasted four months, when he reached the country which yielded tin and lead. From the Estryrnades, whether these were promontories or islands, communication with the rest of Albion was kept up in skin boats by the natives, whose chief employment was commerce. Diodorus also mentions that the inhabitants of Britain were very skilful in obtaining tin, which they conveyed at low-water to the island of Fetis (supposed to be St Michael's Mount). Much of the Cornish tin seems to have been carried across Gaul to Massilia (now Marseilles); and Pythiss, a Massilian Greek, is reported to have sailed in the year 333 B.C. out of the Straits of Gibraltar along the coasts of Spain, Gaul, and Jutland to the Scaw, where he turned to the east, and passed onwards into the Baltic. This voyage was probably prompted in part by a wish to visit the amber coasts at the mouths of the Vistula. Herodotus seems to have been much puzzled by the Greek name of Eridanus applied to that river, but the appellation of Rho-daus or Rauden is still that of one of the affluents of the Vistula. (Larcher in Beloe's Herodotus; circa, 111-106 B.C.) G. Cornewall Lewis does not believe that the Phœnicians reached the Baltic, but thinks that the ancients acquired their knowledge of that sea solely from the overland traders. Yet Pliny, speaking of the Basilica of Timæus, a navigator who succeeded Pytheas, says that it is the same island with the Baltia of others. If the word Baltia did not originate in the latter name, the similarity of sound is at least remarkable. (See a paper on the Amber Trade, Notes and Queries, 2d series, vi. 131 and 134; by G. C. Lewis.) Juba, the Mauritanian prince, sent ships to examine the Canaries; and Sertorius, a general under Marius, meditated a retreat to these "Fortunate Islands" in the year 82 B.C.
covered first a few low rocks or skerries, and afterwards an extensive land, whose remarkable snowy southern headland he named Heidsærk (White Shirt); and about 982 Erik Raudí, being banished for a term from Iceland for manslaughter, sailed in quest of Gunbiorn's Land, and having found it, coasted along towards the south, and rounding the promontory of Hearf, or "the turning point," spent three years in exploring the country; then returned to Iceland, where he made so favourable a report of the western land, that in 985 or 986 twenty-five vessels, carrying colonists, set out with him on his second voyage. Half of these ill-fated ships perished in the ice, but the remainder reached their destination, and in a few years thereafter all the habitable spots of Greenland were occupied. A barren district of about 80 miles divided the settlements into two groups, named the East and West Bygd, both being, nevertheless, on the western coast. Lieutenant Graah, after criticising elaborately the published accounts of these voyages, concludes that Heidsærk (aliter Muckla Johel and Blaasærk) is the lofty island now known as Cape Farewell, which is visible at the distance of 80 miles; Hearf is Cape Egede, or some promontory near it; and Herjulfnes (Hernoldus Hook), lying between the two, is the southern point of the East Bygd. The West Bygd was included within the parallels of 62 and 66 N. Lat. One of the colonists who accompanied Erik to Greenland was Herjulf Bardson, a descendant of Ingulf, the first settler in Iceland. This man's son, Bjarni, was in Norway at the time of Erik's migration; but returning from thence in the spring of 985 or 986 to Eyra in Iceland, he found that his father had sailed for Greenland, and immediately resolved on following him, that they might spend the winter together. The crew of his ship consenting to his proposals, they put to sea again; but encountering thick, stormy weather, were driven far to the southward and westward. On the sky clearing, they found themselves in sight of a wooded part of the American coast, which, not agreeing with the description Bjarni had received of Greenland, they turned their prow northwards; and after passing several of the projecting headlands of Newfoundland and Labrador, but without landing on any, or even naming them, they finally came in sight of White Sark, where they fortunately met with a boat, and were directed to Herjulfnes, his father's new abode.
Erik's son Leifr, who had gone to Norway at the close of the tenth century, being, by command of the king Olaf Triggwesson, instructed in the principles of Christianity, was by him sent back to Greenland, attended by a priest, who baptized Erik and his followers. In the year 1000, Erik having purchased the ship in which Bjarni had traded with Norway after his discovery of America, sailed to acquire more perfect knowledge of the western country. He wintered in Vinland, now recognised by its position and productions as comprising Rhode Island and Massachusetts. The peninsula named at present Nova Scotia he called Markland, on account of its woods. Newfoundland and Labrador were termed Litla Helluland and Helluland it mikla, or the Lesser and Greater Slaty Lands. Leifr's Booths, the wintering station of the expedition, is identified by Professor Rafn with the banks of Taunton River; Straumfjord of the Norsemen with Buzzard's Bay; and Kialarnes with Cape Cod. Leifr, on his way back to Greenland, rescued the crew of a Norwegian vessel that had struck on a rock, and being enriched by the salvage of her merchandise, took thenceforth the appellation of Leifr hin hapni, or Leifr the Fortunate. Vinland was afterwards sought with the view of
forming settlements by Thorwaldr Erikson, Leifr's brother, Thorfinn Karlsefne, and others; but the hostility of the Skrællings frustrated all attempts at permanent habitation. In 1008 Snorre Thorfinnson was born at Thorfinn's Buðr, near Taunton, being the first child of European extraction born in America. The intercourse between America and Greenland seems to have been kept up as late as 1347, chiefly, it would appear, to procure wood for building purposes.
In the palmy days of the Greenland Icelandic colonies the West Bygd had 4 churches and 90 farms (some authors say 110); and the East Bygd a cathedral, 11 churches, 190 farms, a town, and at least 2 cloisters. The Kongskugg-sið, or Speculum Regale, supposed to have been written in the twelfth or thirteenth century, mentions that the interior of Greenland is covered with ice, but that the habitable banks of the fiords abound in good pasturage, and that the colonists subsisted by raising cattle and sheep, and by the chase of the rein-deer, walrus, and seal, the climate being adverse to the production of grain. The country was governed by Icelandic laws, and had a series of bishops, beginning with Arnold, who was elected at the instance of Sokke, Leifr's grandson, in 1121, and ending with Endride Andreason, who was consecrated in 1406.1 Before this date the colony had begun to decline. In 1348 a black pestilence had committed wide ravages among the people of the North; and in 1379 the Skrællings had utterly destroyed the West Bygd. Ivar Bere or Bardson (translated Boty by Barentzoon)2, a principal man in the bishop's court, sailing to the rescue with a levy of East Bygd people, found no man, neither Christian nor heathen, but only sheep running wild, of which he brought away as many as he could. The East Bygd held out some time longer; but in the beginning of the fifteenth century Margaret, the Queen of Denmark and Norway, called the "Semiramis of the North," having imprisoned the merchants who traded with Greenland on the charge of intercepting the tribute due to her from the colonists, and interdicted all her subjects from going thither, the settlement languished away. The final blow was, according to a pastoral letter of Pope Nicholas V., given by a hostile fleet (suspected by Graah to have been English), which in 1418 laid waste the country, and carried into captivity all the vigorous inhabitants that were found, a few dwellers in remote parishes only escaping. By a treaty between our Henry VI. and King Erik of Norway in 1433, the captives in England were set at liberty; but nevertheless the neglect of the mother country continuing, the colonists either returned to Iceland or perished under the repeated assaults of the Skrællings. Vestiges of the ancient colonization have been traced in ten different localities within the bounds of the West Bygd; and the ruins are yet more numerous and in better preservation in the East Bygd, where the walls of several churches are still standing. Runic inscriptions have moreover been discovered at the ancient episcopal site of Gardar in Eriksfjord, and in other places. One of these, found by an Eskimo Greenlander named Pelinut, at Kingitorsoak, in Lat. 72. 55. N., Long. 56. 5. W., bears the date of 1135, and informs us that on the Saturday before gangday of that year, Erling Sigvatsson, Bjarni Thorðarson, and Eindrid Oddsson, cleared the ground and raised these marks. This inscription is important, as furnishing incontestable evidence of the Norænu Greenlanders having carried their sealing expeditions into Baffin's Bay. The usual summer resort of the sealers was Greipar, whose site is placed by Rafn in Lat. 67., to the south of Disco, where the fiords resemble the intervals between a man's fingers, which
1 Professor Finn Magnusen and several other learned Icelanders deduce their pedigree from a couple who were married in Greenland in 1409 by Bishop Endride. The sculptor Thorwaldsen also traced his descent from these ancient stocks. See Kongskugg-sið, Islands Landnamabók, and Rafn's Antiquitates Americanæ. For translations, see Beamish, 1841; Blackwell's Mallet, 1847; Geograph. Journ., 1858.
2 Purchas, ii., p. 518. In the Relation du Groinland, par Isaac de La Peyrère, Paris, 1663, Ivar Bardson's name becomes Iver Bert.
greipar signifies. Disco itself was called Bjarney by the old colonists, meaning "bear island." We learn further from the Hauksbok that in 1266 the priests of Gardar, in consequence of information obtained from those who returned from Norðursæta, or the northern summer haunts, sent out a vessel on discovery, which, leaving Greipar far behind, came to an inlet that was named, from its curvature, Kroksfjord, beyond which they were driven in thick weather by a southerly gale. On the weather clearing, the mariners found themselves in an archipelago, amid much ice, with the sun as high above the horizon at midnight as it is in the inhabited parts of Greenland when in the north-east quarter of the sky in the same season of the year. It is unsafe on such data to fix on the sound into which this vessel was driven, as Rafn has done; but we must conclude that these adventurous Northmen, passing far within the Arctic Circle, had seen much of the shores of Baffin's Bay upwards of three centuries before it received the latter appellation.
The fate of the Greenland colonies, and the existence of the western land, had been almost wholly forgotten until the success of Columbus produced a search for ancient records, which, however, instead of being honestly published, were quoted as vouchers for many fables and much inaccurate cosmogony.1
During the latter third part of the thirteenth century, when Venice was in the zenith of its prosperity, and monopolized the overland trade of Europe with India, Marco Polo, following the steps of his uncles and other merchants, travelled across Asia to Khan-balik, or Pekin, the seat of the Tartar conqueror of China, Kublai-khan. By his narratives Europe became acquainted with the condition and, approximately, with the position of China; but the project of reaching the fabulously rich lands of the extreme East by sea does not seem to have presented itself at that time to northern navigators; and maritime enterprise lay dormant until the middle of the fifteenth century, when Prince Henry of Portugal gave the impulse by which his countrymen went forth to trace the western coast of Africa down to the Cabo Tormentoso, the haunt of the Genius of Tempests, that most poetical creation of Camoens. In 1492 Columbus made his glorious discovery of the Western Indies; and six years afterwards Vasco de Gama, doubling the storm-beaten extremity of Africa, which had become the Cape of Good Hope, reached India by an eastern route. These splendid achievements of the peninsular mariners stirred the spirit of northern adventure; and the sagacity of Henry VII. secured to England the services of John Cabot, and of his greater son Sebastian. How far the doings of the Norsemen in the Greenland seas were known at this period to the English cannot be easily ascertained, but it is difficult to believe that the merchants of Bristol, who traded to Iceland in the time of Edward IV., did not retain some memorials of Engröneland, Helluland, Markland, and Vinland, of which they must have heard; yet in the absence of correct topographical description, and the entire defect of astronomical observations, these words would be mere names of remote places. No printed detail of the Norwegian discoveries was given to the world until 1705, more than two centuries after Columbus had made the first
of his great voyages across the Atlantic, though, as mentioned below, some obscure notices had appeared in authors after the middle of the sixteenth century.2 Certain it is, however, that from the Columbian epoch, whether in the spirit of enterprise inherited from their ancestral Scandinavian kindred, or, what is more likely, in pure rivalry of the Portuguese and Spaniards, the project of a passage to China in a high latitude, either by the N.W. or by the N.E., or directly across the Pole itself, began to stir the minds of English seamen. Robert Thorne, a merchant of Bristol, who had dwelt long in Spain, was the first who distinctly proposed the bold speculation of a north polar passage, which he did in two letters, one of them addressed to Henry VIII. in the year 1527, and the other to the ambassador of that monarch residing at the court of the Emperor Charles V. He adduces as one of his chief reasons for sending a naval armament that way, the discovery of three parts of the world by other princes; so that the fourth way by the north was the only one that remained to be tried. His second letter is accompanied by a map,3 in which Asia is drawn 120 degrees of longitude too far to the east, and the North-East Passage consequently abbreviated to that extent; while China is placed far to the west of oriental Cathay.
It does not enter into the plan of this article to give a chronological list of all the voyages to the Arctic regions which, with short intervals of rest, have succeeded each other from the time of Henry VII. down to the reign of Victoria; but having already mentioned those of former ages as fully as our limits would allow, we purpose to notice those merely of the post-Columbian ones which have brought material additions to our knowledge of the coasts of the Northern Ocean. The reader desirous of entering fully into the interesting histories of Arctic exploits may have recourse to the many valuable compilations which have of late years issued from the press.4
On the 5th of March 1496,5 Henry VII. granted letters patent to John Cabot, a Venetian, and to his three sons English Lewis, Sebastian, and Sancio, to sail with five ships to all parts and seas of the East, of the West, and of the North, and to discover and possess all lands previously unknown. The expedition did not sail until the following year; and the most explicit account of its doings, though a very brief one, is that which Hakluyt copied from an engraving by Clement Adams of a map drawn by Sebastian himself, in which the discovery of the land named Prima Vista, and the island of St John lying off it, are ascribed to John Cabot, and Sebastian his son, as having been made on the 24th of June 1497, at five in the morning. In his translation of this Latin manuscript, Hakluyt has interpolated in brackets "with an English fleet from Bristol;" and Master Robert Thorne, above mentioned, in his letter to the English ambassador in Spain, states that his "father, a merchant of Bristowe, and Hugh Eliot, were discoverers of the Newfound lands" (being doubtless adventurers in the fleet of John Cabot). Master Thorne further intimates that if the seamen would have followed their pilot's mind, they would have gone southward, and discovered the West India
1 The adventures of the Zeni in Friesland, Eslanda, Engrovianda, Estotilanda, Droego, and Icaria, under the Arctic pole, in 1380-93, but not published till 1558, are evidently a compilation of reports, mostly fabulous, collected probably in Bristol or Scandinavia. Szkolai (Scolvus, Selolvus, or Selve), a Polish pilot in the service of Christian II. of Denmark, is said to have landed in Groetland in 1476 or 1477, after visiting Greenland. Master Thorne's map places Groetland in Lat. 72.; but its position is wholly uncertain, there being no authentic details of the voyage extant. Sir Humphrey Gilbert calls him Scolmus, and says that he entered far into the North-West Passage.
2 The discovery of America by the Scandinavians is alluded to by Adam of Bremen in his Hist. Eccl. Hamb. et Brem., written in 1073-6, printed in 1579; by Ortelius in his Theat. Orbis, 1601; by Mylius, De Antiq. Ling. Belg. 1611; and by Grotius, De Orig. Gent. Amer. 1642 (Major. l. c. xii.). See also Torfeus, Hist. Vinlandior. 1705; and Olaus Magnus, Hist. Gent. Sept., lib. ii., c. ix.
3 For a fac-simile of the chart, see Voy. to Am., Hakluyt Soc. pub. 1850. A map of North America, dated 1544, or 17 years after the date of Thorne's, is published in the Atlas of Baptists Agnese, of which Trinity College, Dublin, possesses a copy, and contains evidently the discoveries of the coast as far as Newfoundland and Labrador, made by Cabot, Cortoreale, and the Basque and Breton fishermen, up to the time of its construction; but there is no indication of land as high as Hudson's Strait.
4 Not 1495, as in Hakluyt. Consult Dr. Voy., Hakl. Soc., ed. J. W. Jones, Esq., p. lxxvii.
Islands. Sebastian's map is not known to be in existence now, though Hakluyt says that in his time it was in many ancient merchants' houses, as well as in "Her Majesty's privie galerie" at Westminster. The name of the English vessel that first touched the American shore is said to have been the Mathew of Bristol.
A second patent was granted in February 1498 to "John Kabotto, Venecian," in which reference is made to the "londe and isles of late found by the said John." It was probably under this patent that Sebastian armed two ships at the expense of King Henry VII., as related by Pietro Martire. This author, who was a member of the Council of the Indies to the Catholic king, says that "Sebastian Cabot, his very familiar friend, was called out of England after the death of Henry VII., and made one of our council and assistants as touching the affairs of the Indies," and further that he was told by him, that at the time in question, having two ships manned by 300 men, he directed his course towards the North Pole, and found, even in the month of July, in a manner continual daylight, and monstrous heaps of ice swimming in the sea, so that he was enforced to turn his sails and follow towards the west, along the land, where the heat of the sun had melted the ice. He coasted this land, which he named Bacchalaos, until he reached the same parallel of latitude as the Straits of Gibraltar, in the longitude of Cuba. Authors disagree as to the northern latitude attained by Sebastian. Pietro Martire, as reported by Hakluyt, and by Ramusius in one part of his compilation, says that it was 55° N. Butrigarius, the Pope's legate, who had his information from Sebastian himself, calls it 56° N.; and Gomara states it to have been 58° N., beyond the Cape of Labrador. Ramusius, again, in his Discorso sopra la terra ferma dette del Lavorador et de los Bacchalaos, says that Sebastian searched the land up to the 67th degree; and in his general Preface to the same volume he informs us that "Il Signor Sebastian Gabotto nostro" wrote to him many years past that, having sailed a long time W. and by N. behind the islands of Nova Francia up to the 67. 30. N. Lat., he found the sea open, and would have gone on to Catalo Orientale, if the malignity of the shipmaster and mutinous seamen had not forced him back. Sir Humfrey Gilbert, in his Discourse on the North-West Passage, published by Hakluyt, uses nearly the words of Ramusius, stating the latitude reached by Cabot to be 67½ degrees, and referring, like Hakluyt, to the map in the Queen's private gallery as his authority. Sir George Peckham, in a treatise on the same subject, also in Hakluyt's collection, mentions 63 degrees as the northern limit of the discoveries of the Cabots. Sebastian's "owne mappes and discourses, drawn and written by himself," were, Hakluyt says, "in the custodie of the worshipful Master William Worthington;" and though it is probable that they were, as
Mr Biddle conjectures, afterwards suppressed at the instance of Philip II., they appear to have been accessible to geographers in the time of Elizabeth. Mr Richard Willis, in his argument on a North-West Passage (in Hakluyt), mentions the "table of our countryman Sebastian Cabot, which the Earl of Bedford hath at Cheynes, in which a gulf is left between 61° and 64° N., as Gemma Frisius also hath it in his globes." Taking these various reports into account, it seems probable, but by no means proved, that Sebastian Cabot anticipated Frobisher in the discovery of the strait now known as Hudson's. Thorne's chart carries the land up to the North Pole; Ramusius' stops short at the Arctic Circle; but it was evidently the custom of the map-makers of the times to carry the contour of the land a few degrees beyond the limits of the coasts actually traced. Ramusius, though he corresponded with Cabot, does not seem to have been accurately acquainted with the dates of his several voyages; and being consequently ignorant of his claim to the discovery of Labrador, he says that Gasparo Cortoreale was, as far as he knows, the first who sought to find a short way to the Spice Islands by the N.W.1
This able and adventurous navigator, he tells us, sailed Cortoreale from Portugal with two caravels in 1500, and discovered of Terra Verde lying between the N. and N.W., coasting it gal. from Rio Nevado (Hudson's Straits), in Lat. 60, to Rio San Lorenzo and its gulf, called Quadrato, which turns at the end of Los Bacchalaos, whose highest point, named Cabo di Buenovista, lies in 48½°2.
The memorial of Master Thorne, mentioned in a preceding page, took, as Hakluyt says, present effect; and in May 1527 King Henry VIII. sent forth two ships, well manned and victualled, to seek strange regions. These ships were the Sampson, which was lost in a storm, and the Mary of Guildford, which returned to England after touching at Newfoundland, when her master, John Rut, gave a very meagre account of the voyage. Other Englishmen made at this time private adventures to the new continent, some of which Hakluyt mentions;3 and Rondelet, whose work appeared in 1554, states that even thus early the fishery for cod had been established by the Bretons and Normans on the banks of Newfoundland.4 The enterprising seamen of Bristol are not likely to have been tardy in seeking the same lucrative employment.
The first expedition, however, which we have specially to mention is that of which Sir Hugh Willoughby was captain-general, and which sailed in 1553, after preparations on a scale beyond all previous example. The fleet, consisting of the admiral, named the Bona Esperanza, the Edward Bonaventure (Captain Richard Chancelor), and the Bona Confidentia (Cornelius Durtoorth master), dropped down from Ratcliffe to Greenwich, passing under the windows of the young king, then confined to his chamber
1 When the war with Scotland engaged Henry VIII.'s attention, to the exclusion of enterprises of discovery, Sebastian Cabot went to Spain, and was employed in exploring the Brazil coasts, nominated one of the Council of the Indies, and finally salaried as pilot-major. In 1548 he returned to England, was made grand pilot by King Edward VI., receiving, for that age, a large pension; and in the reign of Philip and Mary was invested with the office of "Governor of the Mysterie and Companie of Merchant Adventurers for the discovery of New Trades." Ramusius, in the Discorso prefixed to his third volume, attributes to Cabot a desire of discovering a short way to Catalo Orientale as the motive of his voyages; so that it must have been from ignorance or inattention to dates that he gave Cortoreale the credit of being the first to seek a passage to China by the north-west.
2 Ramusius quotes Cortoreale's letters to the King of Portugal; but Mr P. Frazer Tytler, in his Progress of Discovery in the Northern Parts of America, says that the most authentic account of Cortoreale's voyage is to be found in a letter of the Venetian ambassador residing at Lisbon to Pietro Pasquiligi, written only eleven days after the return of Cortoreale to Portugal. The Terra Verde (which must not be confounded with the Scandinavian Grönländ), is named, according to Mr Tytler, Terra Cortorealis in a Roman map dated 1508, which we have not seen. The name is preserved in Michael Ick's map of 1582. In Thorne's map of 1527 the whole coast is designated Nova terra laboratorum dicta ab Anglis primum inventa. Baptista Agnese's map of 1544 represents Labrador (but not so naming it) as a very broken coast, with the bottoms of the very numerous inlets left open. Its most northern part is a gulf or strait called La Fortuna, and probably intended for the Golfo di Castell (the Straits of Belleisle). Bacchalaos is a small island lying south of Islas de los Aeos, and five or six degrees north of Terra de los Bertones (Cape Breton). A chart in Ramusius, designed to illustrate the narratives of Verrazzano and Jacques Cartier, represents a large Isola de Demoni immediately to the north of Terra Neosa, which is smaller, but still a large island. Bacchalaos is one of several islets, Cabo de Ras (Cape Race) being the most southern of them; Isola de Bertoni is more to the west, and Cape Breton adjoins the mainland of Nova Francia or Terra de Nurusobega. In the French charts of early date Nurusobega is identified with the territory of the present state of Maine.
3 Hakl. ii., p. 129; Purchas, iii., p. 809; Div. Voy., Hakl. Soc., p. 54.
4 Rondeletius (Ramusius, iii., p. 419).
Arctic Regions. by illness. The outfit was carefully directed by Cabot, who, as Mr Richard Eden has recorded, had long before had the secret of this voyage to Cathay in his mind; and he also drew up a detailed code of instructions for the mariners. On the 2d of August Sir Hugh took a departure from Seynam in Lat. 70. on the coast of Norway; and on the 14th saw land, computed to bear from that place E. by N. 160 leagues, and lying on the 72d parallel of latitude. This discovery, named "Willoughby's Land," is on the S.W. coast of Novaya Zemlya, between the North and South Gousinoi Nos, and has been named by Lütke the "Goose Coast," because of the numbers of these birds which breed there.1 After plying about and sighting the land on various days, he finally bore round, and returned to the haven of Arzina in Lapland, which had been previously examined by him. Here he and his whole crew, and that of the Bona Confindentia, were miserably frozen to death, as was ascertained in the spring by some Russian fishermen. The English agent at Moscow, on hearing of the sad event, sent men to conduct the ships, the goods, and the dead bodies to England; but the ships, having become leaky, sunk by the way, carrying to the bottom both dead and living navigators. From the recovered papers, it appeared that Sir Hugh Willoughby and most of his company were alive in January 1554; but as the provisions, though calculated to last eighteen months, were found to be in part corrupt, it seems probable that the crews, weakened by low and bad diet, and their sure concomitant scurvy, were rendered incapable of resisting the severity of the climate. The great expenditure of carbon by respiration in the high latitudes, and the consequent requirement of a large increase of food, was not understood in those days, and is even at the present time seldom sufficiently provided for in regulating the diet of seamen employed within the Arctic Circle; nor are recent instances wanting of the food being bad as well as scanty.
The Edward Bonaventure, under command of Chancellor, captain and pilot-major, was better, or, at all events, more fortunately managed. A storm off Seynam having driven the other two ships out of sight, Chancellor made for the rendezvous at Wardhuis, from whence, after waiting seven days for the admiral, he again sailed, and eventually reached St Nicholas in the White Sea. From that place he proceeded overland to Moscow, delivered his credentials to the Czar Ivan Vasilovitch, and obtained from him many privileges for Cabot's company, which thereafter assumed the appellation of the Muscovy Company. In the following season he returned to England with his ship.
In 1556 Stephen Burrough, otherwise Burrough or Burro, late master of Chancellor's ship, and William his brother, subsequently comptroller of the navy, were furnished with the pinnacle Serchthrift for the further prosecution of the North-East Passage. On Monday the 27th of April, the right worshipful Sebastian Cabot went on board with divers gentlemen and gentlewomen, who, after they had tasted of the cheer, and viewed the pinnacle, gave to the mariners right liberal rewards; and the good old gentleman, Master Cabot (then eighty-eight years of age), gave to the poor most liberal alms, willing them to pray for the success of the Serchthrift. Then he and his friends banqueted at the sign of the Christopher, and for very joy of the forwardness of the intended discovery, he entered into the dance himself among the young and lusty company. Up to the 7th of June the Serchthrift was accompanied by the
Edward, Captain Chancellor, and another of the Muscovy Company's vessels on their way to the White Sea, afterwards it held on its course alone to the Petchora and Waigatz Straits, which it passed through; and Stephen Burrough thus became the discoverer of the south-eastern extremity of Novaya Zemlya. Accumulations of ice prevented further progress; and the Serchthrift returned to England. Richard Johnson, one of the mariners, wrote at a later date some notices of Novaya Zemlya, and of the customs of the Samoeids, which are to be found in Hakluyt. Chancellor, on the other hand, bringing back an ambassador from Russia, together with commodities to the amount of £20,000, had a most disastrous voyage. Only one of his ships reached the Thames, two were wrecked on the coast of Norway, and the Edward was driven ashore in a very dark night at Pitsligo in Scotland, when the ambassador succeeded in reaching the land, but Chancellor himself was drowned.
Though the Muscovy Company were much occupied in prosecuting their inland commerce through Russia to Persia, they renewed from time to time their attempts to find a passage eastward along the northern coasts of Europe and Asia. With this view, they instructed their agents to collect information respecting the mouths of the Ob and other large rivers that flow into the Arctic Sea; and they sent out at least two sea expeditions, one in 1568, under Bassendine, Woodcocke, and Browne, of whose proceedings nothing is now known; and the other in 1580, under two able and persevering seamen, Arthur Pet and Charles Jackman, but they also, after visiting Novaya Zemlya, and entering the Sea of Kara by the opposite side of Waigatz Island to that by which Burrough had passed, were arrested in their progress eastward by large masses of ice. Purchas has preserved some papers written by Antonie March, a chief factor of the Muscovy Company, from which it is clear that, previous to the year 1584, an English vessel had crossed the Sea of Kara to the mouth of the Ob, where it was wrecked, and the crew murdered by the natives.
The Netherlands had witnessed with no small commercial jealousy the progress of the English in Russia, and north-east after trying in vain, through the agency of John de Walle, merchant-ambassador at the court of the Czar, to shake the credit of the Muscovy Company, determined to compete with them in the search for the North-East Passage. Middleburgh, Enkhuysen, and Amsterdam were the towns chiefly concerned in this enterprise; and the citizens of the latter wisely entrusted their ship to William Barentzoon (by abbreviation Barentz),2 who was peculiarly fitted to direct an expedition of discovery, being endowed with courage and perseverance, to which he united nautical and astronomical skill, with great fertility of resource. His writings, preserved by Purchas, further indicate that he had prepared himself for such a service by consulting the Icelandic records of the ancient voyages.3 In his first voyage, performed in 1594, Barentzoon rounded the north end of Novaya Zemlya, to the islands of Orange, at its extreme point. In the second, undertaken in the succeeding year, Barentzoon was nominated pilot-major of a squadron, of which Cornelius Corneliszoon was admiral-superintendent. The fleet entered the Sea of Kara, but effected no discovery. In the third and most memorable of these Dutch voyages, Barentzoon was again chief pilot, while Jacob Van Heemskerck and Jan Corneliszoon Rijp were captains. It was Barentzoon's intention to have proceeded to Cape Taimur4 by the
1 Randall, Voy. to North-East, Hakl. Soc., p. ii, introd.
2 Meaning the son of Barent, or Bernard. Purchas, iii., p. 518. Beke, Three Voy., &c. Hakl. Soc. 1853.
3 Ivar Bardsen, a Greenlander by birth, mentioned in a previous note, was proctor of the episcopal city of Gardar about the beginning of the fifteenth century. His description of Greenland was preserved by Erik Wakkendorph, Archbishop of Drontheim, and a translation of it occurs in Torfens' Greenlandia. Purchas calls the author Ivar Bety, and gives a translation of an imperfect copy of the work found in the Ferde Islands, made out of High Dutch into Low Dutch by William Barentzoon, and out of Low Dutch by Mr Styhre in 1608, for one Henrie Hudson, &c.
4 De Caep Tabijn, the N.E. end of Siberia, the Tatü of Pliny, Beke, &c.
north end of Novaya Zemlya; but, yielding to the urgency of Rijp, he kept much to the westward, and on the 9th of June discovered Bear Island, which seven years later was named Cherie Island by Stephen Bennet, a shipmaster in the service of the Moscovy Company. From Bear Island Barentzoon held a northerly course; and on the 19th of the same month fell in with land in 74. 49. N. Lat., being the N.E. land of Spitzbergen, but thought by him at the time to be part of Greenland. Passing to the S. of this land, through Vaigats or Henlopen Strait, he rounded the north end of that island now known by the appellations of New Friesland and North Spitzbergen, and passing a few miles above the 80th parallel, and then steering S. along the western shores of Spitzbergen, he returned to Bear Island on the 1st of June. Here Rijp separated from him, and sailed to Bird Cape, in the north of Spitzbergen, and from thence home; while Barentzoon, resuming his original design, made for the north end of Novaya Zemlya, which he succeeded in doubling, but was eventually ice-bound on the 26th August in Ice Haven, lying in Lat. 75. 45. N. There he and his companions were forced to stay, "in great cold, poverty, misery, and grief all that winter," till the 14th of June 1597, when, having previously buried two of their company, and being all reduced by scurvy to a state of extreme weakness, they departed in two open boats or schuits, to retrace the W. coast of Novaya Zemlya, and to strike over to the Russian and Norwegian coasts. The death of William Barentzoon almost at the commencement of this perilous boat voyage, says Gerit de Veer, one of the company, put us in no small discomfort, as he was the chief and only pilot on whom we reposed ourselves under God. Deprived of their skilful leader, the survivors made a greater circuit than they intended, and suffered grievously from want of provision; but at length they reached the river Kola, where they were most unexpectedly welcomed and tenderly relieved by Corneliszoon Rijp, from whom they had parted the year before at Bear Island, and who had, fortunately for them, come that year to Lapland on a trading voyage.1
The further exploration of the seas and coasts of Northern Europe and Siberia having been made at much later dates by the subjects of Russia, we now turn to the English voyages undertaken for the discovery of a North-West Passage; and first in order are the three voyages of Sir Martin Frobisher in the years 1576-77-78, and consequently eighteen or nineteen years prior to those of Barentzoon, above mentioned. Frobisher's projected enterprise was met at the outset by strong opposition on the part of the Moscovy Company, which was overcome by a mandate from the lord treasurer; and Michael Lok pledged his means and credit for the equipment of the ships. The first expedition, projected on a small scale, consisted of two barks of 20 or 25 tons a piece, and a pinnace of 10 tons, manned by 35 men in the aggregate, victualled and found for twelve months. At Greenwich the mariners, apparelled in sky-coloured cloth, discharged their ordnance, "according to the order of war;" and Queen Elizabeth, standing at an open window, returned the salute by waving her hand. On the 11th of July land was discovered in Lat. 61., "rising like pinnacles of steeples, and all covered with
snow," which is now known to have been Cape Desolation, or Torsukatek, at the N.W. extremity of the deserted colony of East Bygd in Greenland, but which was thought at the time by our navigators to be "Frisland." At this period Greenland was supposed to lie to the N., in the position of what was afterwards ascertained to be Baffin's Bay. Off Friesland the pinnace foundered in a storm, carrying down her crew of four men; and the Michael, one of the barks, "mistrusting the matter," returned to England, and reported that Frobisher had been cast away. Frobisher, however, stood on to the westward in the Gabriel, and, "knowing that the sea at length must needs have an ending, and that some land should have a beginning, determined therefore at least to bring true proof what land and sea the same might be, so farre to the north-westwards beyond any man that has heretofore discovered." On the 28th of July (20th, G. Best) he saw a headland which he named "Queene Elizabeth's Foreland," but was prevented from approaching the coast by ice till the 11th of August, when the latitude at noon was 63° 8', and that day he entered the strait, "which he named after his name, Frobisher's Straights, like as Magellanus at the S.W. end of the world." So he entered the same, and passed above 80 leagues therein, having on the "right hand as he sailed westward a great maine, which he judged to be Asia, there divided from the firme of America, which lieth upon the left hand."2 The strait was subsequently ascertained to be bounded on both sides by islands and not by continuous land. The entrance is described by Best in his account of the second voyage as follows:—"About noone we made the North Foreland (Cape Labrador of Hall), otherwise called Halles Island; also the small island bearing the name of the said Hall, whence the ore was taken. . . . This North Foreland is thought to be divided from the continent of the northerland by a little sound which maketh it an island, and is thought to be little less than the Isle of Wight, and is the first entrance of the straights upon the norther side, and standeth in the latitude of 62° 50' N. . . . Queene Elizabeth's Foreland being the entrance of the straights of the southerland, standeth in the latitude of 62° 30' N., northwards of Newfoundland, and upon the same continent, for anything that is yet known to the contrary. . . . The narrowest place of the straights from land to land, between Jackman's Sound and the Countesse of Warwick's Sound, which is reckoned scarcely thirty leagues within the straights from Queene's Cape, was judged nine leagues over at least." Gabriel's Island is 10 leagues within the straights, and Prior's Sound 10 leagues farther. Beyond that is Thomas Williams' Island; and N.W. from it, at the distance of 10 leagues, is Burcher's Island, which is the farthest land attained by Frobisher. Trumpet Island is between Williams' and Gabriel's islands, Mount Warwick is on the S. side of the straights, and Leicester Island and the Countess of Warwick's Sound on the N.
Frobisher, on his first return to England, "was highly commended of all men for his great and notable attempt, but specially famous for the great hope he brought of the passage to Cataya;" and the queen condescended to name the islands on both sides of the straights Meta Incognita. A piece of black stone, brought home by one of the company,
1 The most remarkable event during the winter in Novaya Zemlya was the unexpected re-appearance of the sun on the 25th of January 1597, indicating a refraction of 3° 49'. (For explanations and comments on this occurrence, we refer to the pages of Dr Beke, ib. cit.)
2 The true position of Frobisher's Straits was long debated, and some charts placed them at the southern point of Greenland; but by the aid of Sir Humphrey Gilbert's map, bearing date 1576, and of modern surveys, they are doubtless correctly laid down in the Admiralty circumpolar chart of 1855. Hakluyt gives two narratives of each of Frobisher's three voyages, which do not always coincide in the dates and names of places. The astronomical observations appear to have been ascertained, or at least recorded, chiefly by Christopher Hall, master of the Gabriel in the first voyage, of the Ayde in the second, and chief pilot of the fleet in the third. Lieutenant George Best occasionally quotes the sayings of Frobisher, his chief, but seems to have copied Hall's latitudes. Neither Master Dionise Settle nor Thomas Ellis notice the latitudes or longitudes. The latitudes were taken with the staff rather than the astrolabe, because the degrees of the latter were too small to observe minutes.
being submitted to one Agnello, who (by coaxing nature, as he privately said to Michael Lok) obtained therefrom a grain of gold; thereupon the gold-finers promised great matters for more of the same, and a greater opinion was kindled in the hearts of many to advance the voyage again. On the second and third voyages, accordingly, discovery was repressed, cargoes of ore being the sole object; fifteen sail were engaged to bring home this worthless stuff in 1578; and luckless Michael Lok again pledged his credit for the outfit. On this third voyage, off the Queen's Foreland, the fleet encountered a great storm, in which the bark Dennis foundered. A swift current from the north-east meanwhile carried the fleet into Frobisher's Mistaken Strait, now known by the name of Hudson's Straits. Part of the fleet following the general, "entered within the said doubtful and supposed straights, having always a faire continent upon the starboard, and a continuance still of an open sea before them; and had it not been for the charge and care he had of the fleet and fraughted ships, the general both would and could have gone through to the South Sea, and dissolved the long doubt of the passage which we seek to find to the rich country of Cataya; . . . and where in other places we were much troubled with yce, as in the entrance of the same, so, after we had sayed fifty or sixty leagues therein, we had no lets of yce." After many days, Frobisher turned through a great sound into Frobisher's Straits; and the Gabriel having been sent round, proved the Queen's Foreland to be an island.1 Best tells us nearly as much of Meta Incognita, its natural productions and inhabitants, as we know in the present day. "It is now found," he says in one passage, "that Queene Elizabeth's Cape, being situated in latitude , which was before supposed to be part of the firme land of America, and also all the rest of the south side of Frobisher's Straites, are all several islands and broken land, and likewise so will all the north side of the said straites fall out to be; and some of our companions being entered above sixty leagues within the Mistaken Straites, in the third voyage mentioned, thought certainly that they had despyed the firme land of America towards the south, which I think will fall out to be. These broken lands and islands being very many in number, do seem to make there an archipelagus, which, as they all differ in greatness, form, and fashion, one from another, so are they in goodnesse, colour, and soyle much unlike. They are all high lands, mountanous, and in most parts covered with snow all the summer long."2
On each of the three voyages, "Frizeland," as they continued to call the Greenland coast, was seen; and on the third voyage, on the 20th of June, after sailing for a time along "a very hie and cragged land, almost cleane covered with snow," they landed on a place somewhat void of ice. There they saw certain tents made of skins, and boats (kayacks), much like those of Meta Incognita; but along with the usual Eskimo furniture there was found a boz of nails, whence it was conjectured that the natives had traffic with other nations. Ellis, who mentions this fact, adds no description of the nails, from which we might learn whether they had been extracted from some ancient colonial buildings, or from the timbers of some wreck. Frobisher was the first who is known to have landed on Greenland after
the Scandinavian settlements had perished, and he took possession of the country in the name of Queen Elizabeth, calling it West England, and naming a high cliff "Charing Crosse."
The search for the North-West Passage was again promoted in 1585-6 and 1857 by the merchants of London, who committed the charge of the enterprise to Master John Davis. In his voyages, as in Frobisher's, the coast of Greenland was always either sighted or landed upon, though it was generally named Frizeland, the appellation of Greenland (Danice Grönland) being at that epoch restricted to the coasts opposed to Iceland, and lying in the vicinity of Cape Farewell. A portion of the west coast was, as has been mentioned, named West England by Frobisher; and Davis called a part of the same coast, still further north, the Land of Desolation. On one fiord, lying in Lat. 64. 15., which he termed Gilbert's Sound, and where he had many interviews with the Eskimos or Skrællings, the Moravian missionary settlements of Godhaab and Nye Hernhut have been established in modern times. Leaving this fiord, Davis stood to the westward, and discovered land in 66. 40. N. Lat., altogether free from the "pester of ice, and ankered in a very faire rode, under a brave mount, the cliffs whereof are orient as golde." This conspicuous hill was named Mount Raleigh, the anchorage Totnes Rode, and the sound which compasses the mount, Exeter Sound; the foreland towards the north was called Dier's Cape, and the southern one, which projected farther, Cape Walsingham. Coasting the land southwards, Davis came to the Cape of God's Mercy; and keeping close to the north shore because of fogs, found, when clear weather came, that he had shot into a very fair passage, in which he sailed sixty leagues, when he arrived at certain islands having an open passage on both sides. These islands were named, on the third voyage, in honour of the Earl of Cumberland; and Davis then ascertained that the inlet was separated merely by a chain of islands from Frobisher's Straits, which was renamed by him Lumlie's Inlet, and described as a great passage twenty leagues broad. The southern headland of Lumlie's Inlet, named Warwick's Foreland, stands near the 62d parallel of latitude. This headland is also the north promontory of another very great inlet, whose southern cape he terms "Chidley." Warwick's Foreland is evidently the north or back of Resolution Island of the modern charts, and Cape Chidley the south portal of the Mistaken Strait of Frobisher, or Hudson's Strait. Cumberland Strait has of late years been explored by the whale fishers, and chiefly by Captain Penny, who has named an arm of it running to the north Hogarth Sound. There he has wintered for several years, and carried on a very successful fishery.
In the earlier part of his third voyage, Davis, keeping near the Greenland coast, as the whalers are at the present time accustomed to do, in the spring reached Lat. 72. 14. N., and on the 30th of June had the sun five degrees above the horizon at midnight. The land lying to the east he named the London Coast, and a passage south of Upernavik, called by him Sanderson's Hope, is now identified with the Kosarsuk of the natives.3
Of the northern passage now known as Davis' Straits,
1 In Peyrouse, on his way to attack the Hudson's Bay Company's forts, entered Frobisher's Straits by mistake, but afterwards found his way into Hudson's Straits and Bay probably by the sound through which Frobisher passed.
2 The ore which Frobisher had hazarded so much to procure was found to contain no metal, and poor Michael Lok, being unable to redeem his suretyship, was shut up in the Fleet Prison, and himself and his fifteen children involved in ruin.
3 In the narrative of the first of Davis' voyages, the necessity of increasing the daily allowance of food in high latitudes is made evident, and incidentally the existence of the Newfoundland cod fishery is indicated in the following passage:—"The men fell in dislike of their allowance, because it was so small, on which every mess of five had four pounds of bread a day, twelve wine quarts of beer, six Newland fishes, and on the flesh days a gill of peas more; so we restrained them from their butter and cheese." Part of Davis' fleet was employed in fishing for cod on the Labrador coast while the rest were on discovery in the north; and he mentions that in Lat. 52. he met a "Biskaine" fishing, as he judged, for whales, of which there were many in that sea. Another passage deserves to be quoted. "While the captain was rowing to the shore (of Greenland), our men saw woods on the rocks, . . . but I could not discern them." This illusive vision of woods was evidently an instance of the strange effects of refraction so common
Davis himself says,—"I departed from the London Coast (of Greenland), thinking to discover the north parts of America; and after I had sailed towards the west forty leagues, I fell upon a great banke of yce (the middle ice of the whalers): the wind being north, blew much, and I was constrained to coast the same towards the south, not seeing any shore west from me, neither was there any yce towards the north, but a great sea,—free, large, very salt and blew, and of an unsearchable depth. . . . By this last discovery it seemed most manifest that the passage was free and without impediment toward the north; but by reason of the Spanish fleet and unfortunate time of Mr Secretarye Walsingham's death, the voyage was omitted, and never sithens attempted." Mr Sanderson, however, Davis' steady friend, had a globe constructed, exhibiting all that navigator's discoveries, and which is said to be still preserved in the Middle Temple.
Henry Hudson is the next north-west discoverer of note. His first voyage, in 1607, was a bold attempt to cross the Pole. After passing the latitude of Iceland, he held to the west, with the intention of rounding the north end of Greenland, but on the 14th of June he descried a high and bold headland, with a castellated hill behind it, which he named the Mount of God's Mercy; and afterwards he came, in Lat. 73. 30., to a cape, which he named Hold with Hope. Steering from thence north-eastward, he had a faint view of Spitzbergen enveloped in fog; and pushing onwards as the ice and weather permitted, he reached the parallel of 81, and saw continuous land stretching to 82. N. This land must have been a north-easterly extension of Greenland, for Spitzbergen does not go beyond 80. N.; and granting the correctness of his latitudes, Hudson's extreme is the most northerly land known, except Mount Parry of Kane's Grinnell Land. His further progress being barred by ice, he came home, and reported most favourably of the Greenland seal fishery.
Another voyage of Hudson had for its result the discovery of Hudson's River, at whose mouth the most important city of the New World has since arisen; but his fame rests chiefly on his last voyage, on which he perished miserably through a mutiny of his men. Previous to this most lamentable end of his honourable career, he had sailed through Hudson's Straits into the bay which also bears his name, its northern and southern portals being called respectively Wolstenholme and Sir Dudley Digges. Turning to the south, past the latter, he coasted the western shore of Labrador; but at this point his own narrative closes, and for the rest we have only the doubtful story of Abbacuck Prickett, one of the mutineers, though, he avers, an unwilling one. He reports that a convenient winter harbour was not found till the 1st of November; that the crew suffered greatly from their ignorance of the climate, and became discontented, disobedient, wasteful, and selfish. On the 21st of June, when they had left their harbour, the mutiny came to a head; and Hudson was seized, bound, and driven, along with his son, into the shallop. The carpenter being overpowered, after a gallant defence, insisted on sharing the fate of his master; and six sick and infirm seamen were also forced into the boat. None of the party thus inhumanly abandoned were ever heard of again; but retribution speedily fell on the leading mutineers, who were killed at Cape Digges in an assault of the Eskimos. After great sufferings from famine, the survivors reached England, Bylot, who became a celebrated pilot, being of the number.
Sir Thomas Button, accompanied by Bylot and Prickett, prosecuted the discovery in 1612-13, taking the route of
Hudson through the straits. Passing a southern point of Southampton Island, which he named Cary's Swan's Nest, he reached the western coast of the bay in Lat. 60. 40., and because it arrested his progress in that direction, he called it Hopes Checked. Turning southwards, he entered Nelson's River in Lat. 57. 10., and there wintered. The estuary of the river he named Button's Bay, and the adjacent country New Wales. His crew experienced the usual miseries of scurvy, but were recruited by the large quantities of birds and fish which they procured in spring, and were able to resume the voyage in the summer of 1613. In advancing northwards along the coast of the continent, a strong tide was felt off the mouth of the Mississippi or Churchill river, and being considered by the pilot to be a favourable sign, the locality was designated, after him, Hubbart his Hope. On the 29th of July the voyage out ended in Lat. 65., somewhere near Whale Point, and the land south of it was named Ut Ultra. On the homeward voyage Cape Southampton was rounded, and an island to the eastward of it discovered, and named Mansel, since erroneously written Mansfield on our charts.
In 1612 further acquaintance was made with the coast of Greenland by James Hall and William Baffin, who went thither to look for a gold mine reported to have been worked by the Danes, probably under Admiral Munck. This was sought for at Cunningham's river or fiord, in the district of Holsteinburg; but no metal was found, though traces were discovered of former diggings. Baffin, associated with Bylot, afterwards passed through Hudson's Strait; and Mr Randall has published an unmutated version of Baffin's journal, together with his chart, which furnish conclusive evidence of his knowledge of the art of navigation, but add nothing to Sir Thomas Button's previous discoveries. One passage, however, of the journal deserves quotation:—"Doubtless there is a passadge, but within this straye, whom is called Hudson's Straytes, I am doubtfull, supposing the contrarye. But whether or no I will not affirm, . . . and my judgment is, if any passadge within Resolution Island, it is but some creek or inlet, but the mayne will be up Freum Davis."1
In accordance with the above opinion, the same navigators sailed in 1816 up Davis Strait, and coasted the whole of Baffin's Bay, naming in succession Woman's Islands, in Lat. 72. 45.; Horn Sound, in 73. 45.; Digges Cape, in 76. 35.; and 12 leagues onward, Wolstenholme Sound, having an island in its entrance. They were next embayed during a storm at the entrance of Whale Sound, in Lat. 77. 30.; and after passing Hakluyt's Island, saw another great sound running to the north of 78°, and observed with surprise that their compass varied five degrees to the westward. This sound was named after Sir Thomas Smith. Descending along the western side of Baffin's Bay, Carey's Islands were next seen; and, on the 10th of July, the boat being sent on shore at the entrance of a fair sound, to which they gave the name of Alderman Jones, brought back a report of plenty of sea-morses, but no inhabitants. On the 12th, Sir James Lancaster's Sound was discovered, but a ledge of ice then lying across it prevented Baffin from crossing the true threshold of the North-West Passage. In his letter to his patron Sir John Wolstenholm, this able and adventurous navigator explains why these various sounds were not explored. Off Wolstenholm the ship drove with two anchors ahead, and was obliged to haul off shore with a low sail. At Whale Sound an anchor and cable were lost; and the wind continued to blow so strongly when he was off Sir Thomas Smith's and
in an icy sea, and so well illustrated by Dr Scoresby, which was denominated Fly-land by Lake Fox, and may be called Fata glacialis, being as marvellous and equally beautiful as the Fata Morgana of the Faro di Messina. Moreover, it furnishes a solution to the story of woodlands seen from the Busse of Bridgewater, one of Probrisher's fleet, and the fable of the Sunkenland of Busse.
1 Randall, Hakl. Soc.
Whale sounds that the ship could not remain at anchor, and the crew of seventeen were wholly employed in working her during the rough weather. Baffin, however, came to the conclusion that he had been coasting a great bay, and that there was no passage, nor hope of a passage, that way,—an opinion now known to be erroneous, but singularly coincident with that of a late navigator who retraced Baffin's course. The chart of Baffin's voyage was subsequently published by North-West Foxe. Nothing further was effected in this direction till 1819, notwithstanding that the Davis Strait whale-fishery was actively carried on during the two intervening centuries; but no charts were published by the whalers, either through incapacity, or from the narrowness of commercial jealousy, and geographers continued to give fanciful delineations of James's Island, and of the position of Baffin's Bay, till a recent date. The strongly-expressed opinion of Baffin had probably much weight in turning the search for a passage from this quarter to the northern outlets of Hudson's Bay; and thither, accordingly, various expeditions were directed.
The Danes had not seen unmoved the efforts of England; and Jens Munck, who had previously made some voyages to Greenland, entered Hudson's Bay in 1619, and wintered in Churchill River, to the estuary of which he gave the name of Munckenes Winterhaven. The neighbouring coasts were called New Denmark; and in like manner he bestowed the name of his sovereign Christian IV. on Hudson's Strait and Bay, but discovered no new lands. All his people, except two, perished of famine, or its dire attendant, scurvy; but with these two he managed to navigate the smaller of his vessels back to Europe.
The voyages of Captain Luke Foxe, or, as he delighted to call himself, "North-West Foxe," and of Captain James, undertaken independently in 1631–32, aided the search for a North-West Passage by negating a westerly outlet from Hudson's Bay, below the highest latitudes to which they attained. Foxe in his first year went to the westward of Southampton Island, and named a small island, lying in Lat. 64. 10., Sir Thomas Roe's Welcome, a designation which was afterwards transferred to the channel in which the island is situated. In the following season he tried the other side of Southampton Island, and coasting the eastern shore of Bylot and Baffin's North Bay, attained the latitude of 66. 47., which became Foxe's Farthest. The various headlands of a large island lying across the western extremities of Frobisher's and Cumberland straits were named by him King Charles his Promontory, Cape Maria, Lord Weston's Portland, and Point Peregrine; the latter being the northern extremity of the island. By a deep arm of Cumberland Sound, running to the westward, and bearing the native name of Tenuiakbeek, there is an Eskimo route from Davis Strait to the coast near Point Peregrine, a large sheet of water named Lake Kennedy, lying midway.
For almost a century after these voyages, or from the time of Charles I. till after the accession of George I., civil wars and revolutions at home, and the wars of Marlborough abroad, engaged the attention of the nation, to the exclusion of maritime discovery, the only effort in that cause being an abortive attempt by Captain James Wood in 1676, undertaken through the influence of the Royal Society, to make the North-East Passage by way of Novaya Zemlya.
In 1719 the Hudson's Bay Company fitted out an expedition of discovery, consisting of a frigate commanded by Captain George Barlow, and a sloop by Captain David Vaughan, but placing over both Mr James Knight, ex-governor of several of their factories, who had attained the mature age of eighty years. This expedition sailed northwards between Southampton Island and the main; but not
returning when expected, was at first supposed to have reached the Pacific. In 1722, however, one Scroggs being sent to look for them, found himself to be incompetent to contend with the shoals and rocks of that coast, and returned after having picked up some fragments of ships' fittings on Marble Island, which is identical with the White Island and Brook Cobham of Foxe. In 1747 other remains were found on the same island by Captain Smith; but it was not until 1748 that a Hudson's Bay sealing-smack discovered the wrecked ships lying under water in a cove of the island, and ascertained the fate of the crews from the Eskimos. That people reported that when the English entered the cove, with their vessels much damaged, their numbers were about seventy. At the close of the winter only twenty remained alive, though they received occasional supplies of provision from the natives, in exchange for articles of iron, which the blacksmith was constantly employed in forging. A second winter made a still greater breach in the numbers of the unfortunate outcasts, and when the Eskimos next visited them in summer, only two remained alive. These sad survivors went frequently to the top of a rock, and gazed earnestly to the S.E., as if they expected relief from thence, but seeing no friendly sail, they sat down and wept. At length one of these melancholy men died, and the other, exhausted in the attempt to bury him, fell into the unfinished grave, and therein breathed his last.1
In 1741–42 Captain Middleton, a shipmaster of the Hudson's Bay Company, was engaged by the Admiralty to attempt further discoveries up the Welcome, as the passage to the west of Southampton Island had come to be called. After wintering in Churchill River, he proceeded northwards, and discovered Wager Inlet and Repulse Bay, the south headland of which he named Cape Hope. Further advance being impeded by ice, he walked over high land to the north-eastern extremity of the bay, and from thence beheld a frozen strait running round the north end of Southampton Island towards Cape Comfort and the North Bay of Baffin. Sir Edward Parry, eighty years afterwards, proved the perfect correctness of Middleton's report; but Mr Dobbs, who had stood out as the patron of the voyage, could not brook his disappointment in the result, and became a bitter controverter of Middleton's honest and seaman-like statements. The voyages of the Dobbs and California in 1746–47, in the same direction, fell short of Repulse Bay, but, as far as they went, the reports made of them agreed with those of Middleton. Dobbs, who took an active part in sending the ships out, seems to have infused a spirit of contention among the officers, and, as a result, we have a double set of names imposed on the headlands, and two polemical narratives. James Douglas Bay is synonymous with Rankin's Inlet, Chesterfield Inlet with Bowden's Inlet, and so on. (The correct positions of the inlets and promontories of this coast have been very recently ascertained by Dr Rae, chief factor of the Hudson's Bay Company. This enterprising and skilful traveller in 1854 ascended the River Quoich, from the north side of Chesterfield Inlet, for two degrees of latitude, until he crossed the parallel of Wager Inlet, passing within about 20 miles of its head waters, and at about 80 geographical miles direct from the nearest bend of the Great Fish River.)
After slumbering for a quarter of a century, the spirit of North-West discovery was again awakened by the Hudson's Bay Company, who sent Samuel Hearne to the mouth of the Coppermine River. This fur-trader had few of the qualifications of a discoverer, except a knowledge of the customs of the country and some acquaintance with the native languages. His astronomical observations were altogether erroneous, and he placed the junction of the river
with the sea in Lat. 71. 54. N., and Long. 120. 30. W.; while the true numbers, as afterwards ascertained by Sir John Franklin, were 67. 48., and 115. 47. The latter saw the sun set there on the 17th and 18th of July, while Hearne reports it to have been "some height," or, in his manuscript, "a handspike" high at midnight on the same day of the year. Hearne's narrative of his journey is interesting; but that he was able to reach the Coppermine at all was owing to the energy of his guide and leader Matonabee, an intelligent Northern Indian chief.1
The Admiralty expedition in 1773 to Spitzbergen, under Captain Phipps, afterwards Lord Mulgrave, effected nothing in the way of discovery; but the press at this period teemed with publications on the probability of a North-West Passage; and this expedition was a feeble compliance with the public desire for an effort towards its accomplishment.
We turn to the progress of Arctic discovery on the coasts of the Russian empire; and it may simplify our statements if we premise that we know now the Sierero Vostochnoi Nos, or the "North-East Cape," to be the most northerly point of Asia. It lies on the 100th meridian, and reaches the 78th parallel of latitude, extending higher than Cape Taimura, is much to the N. of any part of the American continent, and has never been doubled in a sailing-vessel or boat. It is the Cape Cheliuskin of Middendorf and Peterman.
No ship coming from Europe has passed to the eastward beyond the Sea of Kara or Korskoe, and the whole N. coast of Asia has been discovered exclusively by Russian subjects, mostly Cossacks, employed to compel the Samoëids, Ostiaks, Tunguses, Jakuts, and Tchukches, to acknowledge the imperial authority, and pay the customary yassak or tribute. In 1598 Fedor Dyakov demanded yassak from the Samoëids of the Jenisei; and in 1610 some fur-hunters descended to the mouth of that river, and traced the coast-line eastward to the Pissida. The Cossacks in 1630 discovered the Lena; and in the course of a few years thereafter, that river, the Olekma, and the Lana, were pursued down to their efflux in the Arctic Sea, the Tunguses of the district being then for the first time subjected to yassak. At the same epoch Ivanoio discovered the Indigirka, and carried the survey of the coast onwards to the Alasca, 153 degrees E. of Greenwich. In 1644 the Cossack Michael Staduchin formed a winter establishment on the delta of the Kolyma, which has since expanded into the town of Nijnei Kolymsk; and this adventurer was the first who got intelligence of the Tchukches who inhabit the north-eastern extremity of Siberia. The same Staduchin afterwards navigated the Polar Sea eastward to Cape Chelagskoi or Erri Nos; and in 1648 Semen Desniew, also a Cossack, sailing from the Kolyma, rounded the north-eastern corner of Asia, and passing the strait now bearing the name of Bering, entered the Gulf of Anadyr, where he suffered shipwreck. The Swatoi Nos, or Sacred Promontory of this voyager, is the same with Cape Chelagskoi; but the true Swatoi Nos, so named by the Russians because of its dangerousness, projects between the Indigirka and the Lena, and was first doubled by the Cossack Timolei Buldakov in 1650.
In 1728 Captain Bering2 and Lieutenant Tchirikow sailed from Nishnei Kamtschatka Ostrog, on the E. coast of the peninsula of Kamtschatka, and coasted the W. side of the straits which divide Asia from America, leaving St Lawrence Island on the right, seen dimly through a fog. Other portions of the northern coasts have been traced by traders or officials in the employ of the Russian govern-
ment, among whose names those of Demetrius Laptev and of the merchant Liakhov stand out prominently. The efforts of the former were chiefly directed to doubling the Sierero Vostochnoi Nos, but he could not bring his vessel within two degrees of latitude of its extremity, and therefore he crossed the promontory on sledges, by which he reached Lake Taimura and the bay of that name. Liakhov also partially explored the islands that lie to the N. of the Swatoi Nos, which, by decree of the Empress Catherine, were named after him. He likewise coasted the continent to the eastward of the Kolyma. Much of the survey here briefly alluded to was very imperfectly mapped, and as the narratives were scanty and vague, it was not until Baron Wrangel and Lieutenant Anjou had accurately surveyed the coasts between the 125th meridian and Bering's Straits, that it was possible to understand what their predecessors had effected.
Until the eighteenth century, expeditions of discovery from England had been equipped chiefly by private adventurers, with ulterior mercantile views, and even when the sovereign countenanced the enterprise, it was as patron merely, or as a small shareholder. Captain Middleton's voyage to Repulse Bay began a new order of things, in which naval expeditions, fitted at the national expense, sailed under the direct authority of the Admiralty. Later in the century voyages round the world were made in king's ships by Byron (1764), Wallis (1768), Carteret (1769), and on a more systematic plan, and with more important results, by Cook in 1768-71. The third voyage of this great navigator was undertaken in 1776, mainly for the purpose of ascertaining the existence or non-existence of a passage between the Northern Pacific and Atlantic oceans. His careful examination of the American coasts from the 58th parallel of latitude northwards, proved that there was no passage lower than Icy Cape, which was the limit of his voyage within Bering's Straits. He was, it is true, prevented by a gale of wind from examining the place of the pretended Strait of Da Fonte, supposed to lie between the 50th and 55th parallels; but he considered the reports of its existence to be "improbable stories that carry their own refutation with them;" a judgment which was confirmed by Vancouver's minute and accurate survey, made between the years 1790 and 1795. The Russian surveyor Gwosden had seen the American side of Bering's Straits in 1730; and Bering, Tchirikow, and De Lisle had rounded the peninsula of Alaska, and touched on the coast near Mount St Elias, and also in Lat. 55. 30. in 1741; but Cook was the first who made a continuous and effective survey of those coasts. The failure of Phipps in the Spitzbergen seas, of Cook by way of Bering's Straits, and of vessels sent on two successive seasons to Davis Strait to co-operate with him, satisfied the Admiralty of the day; and for forty years the North-West Passage was unheard of in the government bureaus.
In 1789 Sir Alexander Mackenzie, a member of the North-West Fur Company, trading from Canada, discovered the great river which continues to bear his name, and traced it to its termination in the Arctic Sea; and in 1790-3 the Hudson's Bay Company sent out Mr Duncan to seek a passage by following in the track of Middleton; but his crew mutinying when he had got as far as Chesterfield Inlet, compelled him to return. Lieutenant Kotzebue of the Russian imperial navy made a voyage, at the cost of Count Romanzoff, in 1815-17, from the Baltic to Bering's Straits, in which he discovered Kotzebue Sound, but added
1 Matonabee was much attached to the English, and when La Peyrouse attacked Fort Churchill, he offered to cut off the assailing party with his Indians. Hearne, who had charge of the fort, preferred surrendering without striking a blow, which Matonabee took so much to heart that he committed suicide.
2 Bering was a Dane, and his family retain the orthography we have adopted. (Bær Nachricht, &c.)
Arctic Regions. nothing else to the surveys of Cook on that coast. This Russian enterprise, however, together with the publications of Dr Scoresby and the personal influence of Sir John Barrow, secretary of the Admiralty, incited the British government to undertake a new series of enterprises, which have resulted in the discovery of the entire northern coasts of the American continent and of the islands beyond it up to a high northern latitude. The annexed list1 of the ships and overland expeditions connected with this movement is long enough to show the impossibility of describing the doings of each within the compass of a few pages; and we shall therefore confine ourselves to the simplest sketch of the actual geographical discoveries.
The Trent and Dorothea, sent out in 1818 to attempt the Polar route, failed, owing to damage received by the former in the ice; but the Isabella and Alexander, which took the route of Davis Strait, were more fortunate, in being able to return without injury to England before the close of the season. By this voyage Baffin's survey of the bay which bears his name was confirmed, and the various sounds that he had described were found in the exact positions he had assigned to them. Lancaster Sound was closed to Baffin by a barrier of ice, and this was the only inlet attempted by Captain John Ross, who sailed without impediment to Long. 81. 30. W., in Lat. 74. 3. N., a short way within its headlands, Capes Charlotte and Fanshawe. But his progress on so promising a course was suddenly arrested by the vision of a mountain barrier closing the bottom of the sound, seen by few or none in the ship except himself. Without ascertaining by a nearer approach whether the Croker Mountains were firm land or merely one of the atmospheric deceptions so common in those seas, he forthwith returned to England, tracing on his way the W. coast of Davis Strait; but too cursorily, and at too great a distance, to negative the existence of passages through that line of coast.
Doubts of the reality of the Croker Mountains being entertained by most of Captain Ross's associates, and the
report of that officer not being thought conclusive by the Admiralty, the Hecla and Griper were despatched, in 1819, to clear up the matter, which they did triumphantly by sailing westwards to Melville Island. After being inclosed in the ice of Winter Harbour for ten months, and making new but fruitless attempts to penetrate the icy barrier to the westward, the expedition returned to England. The success of this voyage, so far exceeding every previous attempt, the preservation of the health of the crews during the long Arctic winter, and the perfection of the commanding officer's general arrangements, placed Lieutenant Parry at once in the van of Arctic discoverers; and he was speedily raised, amid the congratulations of his country, through the grade of commander to that of captain. Reckoning in round numbers the distance between Baffin's Bay and Bering's Straits at 110° of longitude,—viz., from 60° W. to 170° W.,—Captain Sir William Edward Parry explored his way up to Cape Dundas through 54 of these degrees, or nearly a half of the whole distance; and he saw on the verge of his western horizon, Banks' Land, 2½° farther off. He also laid down the chain of islands on the N. side of his track, with the openings between them, including the entrance of Wellington Channel, and on the S. side Regent's Inlet, North Somerset, and Cape Walker. By his subsequent voyages, enumerated in the table, he effected the surveys of the upper end of Regent's Inlet, and of the eastern side of Melville Peninsula from Repulse Bay to the Fury and Hecla Strait, leading into the above-named inlet; confirming completely the accuracy of Middleton's account of Repulse Bay. Finally, having found no navigable passage to the westward in those latitudes, he attempted, in 1827, to make the Polar voyage in boats, and actually reached Lat. 82. 40. 30. N., being the highest authentic position attained by any voyager.
At the same time that Sir Edward Parry was seeking a passage through the Arctic archipelago, Lieutenant (afterwards Captain and Rear-Admiral Sir) John Franklin was prosecuting the survey of the northern shores of the con-
1 LIST OF MODERN NORTH-WEST VOYAGES.
| 1818 | Trent.....Comm. David Buchan. | 1848-1850 | Overland (boats).....Sir John Richardson. |
| Dorothea.....Lieut. John Franklin. | 1849-1851 | North Star.....Master Saunders, R.N. | |
| 1818 | Isabella.....Capt. John Ross. | 1849 | Advice (whaler).....Dr R. A. Goodsir. |
| Alexander.....Lieut. William Edward Parry. | 1850-1855 | Enterprise.....Comm. Robert M'Clure. | |
| 1819-1822 | Overland (canoes).....Lieut. John Franklin. | Investigator.....Capt. Richard Collinson. | |
| 1819 | Hecla.....Lieut. W. E. Parry. | 1850-1851 | Resolute.....Capt. Horatio Amsten. |
| 1820 | Griper.....Lieut. Mathew Liddon. | Assistance.....Commander Omanney. | |
| 1821 | Fury.....Comm. W. E. Parry. | 1850-1851 | Lady Franklin.....Master Wm. Penny. |
| 1823 | Hecla....." G. F. Lyon. | Sophia....." Alex. Stewart. | |
| 1824 | Griper.....Capt. G. F. Lyon. | 1850-1851 | Felix (yacht).....Capt. Sir John Ross. |
| 1824 | Hecla.....Capt. W. E. Parry. | 1851 | Dedalus.....Capt. G. G. Wellesly. |
| 1825 | Fury....." H. P. Hoppner. | 1851-1852 | Prince Albert.....William Kennedy, master. |
| 1825-1827 | Overland and Boats { Capt. J. Franklin. | Lieut. Bellot. | |
| { Dr John Richardson. | 1852-1853 | Amphitrite.....Capt. Chas. Frederick. | |
| 1825-8 | Blossom.....Capt. W. F. Beechey. | Isabel.....Comm. E. A. Inglefield. | |
| 1827 | Hecla.....Capt. W. E. Parry. | 1852-1855 | Plover.....Comm. Rochfort Maguire. |
| 1829 | Victory.....Capt. John Ross. | Boat.....Dr M'Cormick. | |
| { Lieut. James Clark Ross. | 1853 | Phoenix.....Capt. E. A. Inglefield. | |
| 1833-1835 | Overland and Boats.....Capt. George Back. | Assistance.....Capt. Sir Edward Belcher, C.B. | |
| 1836 | Terror.....Capt. George Back. | 1852-1854 | Resolute.....Capt. H. Kellett, C.B. |
| 1836-1839 | Overland and Boats { P. W. Desse and Thomas Simpson, | Pioneer.....Lieut. Sherard Osborn. | |
| { Esq., Hudson's Bay Company. | Intrepid.....Comm. M'Clintock. | ||
| 1845 | Erebus.....Capt. Sir John Franklin. | 1853 | North Star.....Comm. W. J. S. Pullen. |
| 1850 | Terror....." Crozier. | 1853 | Breadalbane.....Lieut. Fawcner. |
| 1846-1847 | North Pole (tugger).....Dr John Rae, Hud. Bay Co. | 1853 | Diligence.....Lieut. Elliott. |
| 1848-1852 | Plover.....Capt. Thomas Moore. | 1853 | Battlesnake.....Comm. H. Trollope. |
| 1848 | Herald.....Capt. Henry Kellett. | 1853 | Boats.....Dr John Rae, Hudson's Bay Co. |
| 1852 | Nancy Dawson (yacht).....Shedden, Esq. | 1854 | Phoenix.....Capt. E. A. Inglefield. |
| 1848-1850 | 1857-1859 | Fox.....Capt. M'Clintock. | |
| (not yet returned). |
Arctic Regions. continent. In 1819-1822, after travelling overland from Hudson's Bay to the Coppermine River of Hearne, he descended to the mouth of that stream, and traced the coast of Cape Turnagain through nearly 7° of longitude; but owing to the deep indentations of the coast-line, having actually performed a sea voyage in canoes of 550 geographical miles in the seven weeks during which the navigation was open. In 1825-7 Franklin descended the Mackenzie, and traced the coast westward to Return Reef, 158. 52. W. Long., or about 22½° from the principal mouth of the Mackenzie. In connection with this expedition, Captain Beechey, in the Blossom, had gone through Bering's Straits, and by means of his boats, had explored the American coast to Point Barrow, 120 miles beyond Cook's Ice Cape, and only 160 miles distant from Franklin's Return Reef.
While Franklin was employed to the westward of the Mackenzie, Dr John Richardson was tracing the coast between that river and the Coppermine, comprising, to Cape Krusenstern, his most easterly point, 21 degrees of longitude in a direct line, having seen in his passage through Dolphin and Union Strait a considerable portion of Wollaston Land. This officer also circumnavigated Great Bear Lake, and ascertained the geographical positions of its headlands, being aided in the sea voyage and in part of the lake survey by Lieutenant Kendall. In Franklin's two voyages, therefore, including the operations of the detachment under Dr Richardson, the Arctic coast was surveyed to the extent of 50 degrees of longitude, making, with the portion examined by Beechey, more than half the distance from Bering's Straits to Baffin's Bay, and considerably overlapping Parry's tract, but in a lower latitude; his surveys, moreover, included a very long inland navigation, comprising Winipeg, Athabasca, Great Slave and Great Bear lakes, with the Mackenzie and Coppermine rivers. A passage lying N. and S., connecting the tracks of Parry and Franklin, would have solved the North-West problem; as would also an easterly continuation of Franklin's discoveries.
In the years 1829-33, funds having been provided by the munificence of Sir Felix Booth, Bart., Captain Sir John Ross, accompanied by his nephew, Lieutenant James Clark Ross, passing through Lancaster Sound, surveyed the west side of Regent's Inlet, Lieutenant Ross carrying on the survey on foot southwards to Lord Mayor's Bay, and westwards to the western side of Boothia, the magnetic pole, and Cape Nikolai; also rounding Maty Island, and tracing the northern coast of King William's Island. This voyage was remarkable for the number of winters spent in a high latitude; and fears being at length raised for the safety of the party, an expedition was organized for their rescue, commanded by Captain (now Rear-Admiral Sir) George Back, funds being raised by public subscription. During the prosecution of his humane enterprise this officer surveyed the east end of Great Slave Lake, previously unknown, and the Great Fish River, to its estuary, bounded by Cape Britannia and Point Richardson, but still leaving a small space incomplete between his northern limits and the southern ones of Lieutenant Ross. Having been made acquainted, on the eve of his summer voyage, with Sir John Ross's safe return, Captain Back's further extension of the voyage was no longer desirable except for geographical purposes.
To complete the intervals left between these surveys of the northern coasts of the continent, the Hudson's Bay Company employed in 1836-39 one of their chief factors, P. W. Dease, and Mr Thomas Simpson, a junior officer of great activity and enterprise. Proceeding first from the Mackenzie, they succeeded in reaching Point Barrow, thus finishing the discovery of the coast-line on that side, and then, after passing two winters at the north end of Great Bear Lake, they descended the Coppermine, and sailing eastward far beyond Franklin's Point Turnagain, crossed the estuary of Back's Great Fish River, and traced the coast
Arctic Regions. some way farther to the eastward; but owing to the rapid approach of winter, and strong contrary winds, they were under the necessity of turning back without having actually reached Captain Ross's discoveries in the peninsula of Boothia. On the homeward voyage to the Coppermine, Simpson, on whom the geographical survey devolved, laid down most of the south coast of Victoria Land. A small part of this extensive island had been seen by Franklin's party from the lofty summit of Cape Barrow, but it was somehow omitted from his map; and Simpson duly exercised the right of a discoverer by naming it, though, as it is now known to be continuous with Wollaston Land, this appellation has the priority.
In 1845-7 Dr John Rae, in the employment of the Hudson's Bay Company, by a most hazardous enterprise considering the means at his command, and after wintering in Repulse Bay, where for ten months the lives of his party were dependent on his personal skill in the chase, surveyed the bottom of Regent's Inlet up to Fury and Hecla Strait of Parry, on the east, and on the west to James Ross's Lord Mayor's Bay, thereby ascertaining that an isthmus 4 degrees of longitude wide interposed between the bottom of Regent's Inlet, or the Gulf of Boothia, as it was re-named by Ross, and the eastern part of the sea explored by Simpson.
At the beginning of this period,—that is, in 1845,—the Admiralty, after having for a time intermitted the prosecution of a North-West Passage, commissioned the Erebus and Terror to renew the attempt under the command of Capt. Sir John Franklin, who had recently returned from Tasmania, of which colony he had been lieutenant-governor for five years. The two ships were made as strong as the skill of the shipwrights, perfected by previous experience, could effect, and were crammed full of stores and provisions, not, however, amounting in all to three years' consumption, at full allowance. This expedition was seen in Davis Strait, in the same year, proceeding prosperously; but three years having elapsed without further intelligence, active measures were taken by the Admiralty in 1848 for tracing and relieving it.
The Herald and Plover were despatched, towards the close Searching of the year just mentioned, to Bering's Straits, with orders expeditions. to remain there, and afford aid to the expedition, should it have succeeded in accomplishing the passage. In 1849 Captain Kellett, in the Plover, discovered a group of high islands in Lat. 71. 20. N., near the meridian of the Asiatic Cape North; also the loom of distant mountains, probably part of the chain which Baron Wrangel mentions as visible at times from Jakan.
Sir John Richardson, accompanied by Dr Rae, left England early in 1848, and having landed at New York, proceeded without delay to the head waters of the Mackenzie, where, having joined their boats that had been sent out to Hudson's Bay in the previous summer, they descended the river just named, and minutely examined the coast eastward to the Coppermine, which they ascended and fixed their winter quarters at the north end of Great Bear Lake. Lieutenant Pullen, despatched in the succeeding year (1849) from the ships in Bering's Straits, passed in boats along the coast from Point Barrow to the Mackenzie, but neither he nor Sir John Richardson found any vestiges of Franklin's ships, nor did they receive any intelligence of them from the Eskimos. The search was at the same time proceeding by way of Lancaster Sound under the direction of Captain Sir James Clark Ross. This officer wintered with his ships at Leopold Harbour, on the extremity of North Somerset, having previously examined various points on both sides of Barrow's Strait. In the spring he sent exploring parties in several directions; and himself headed a sledge expedition along the west side of North Somerset, down to Lat. 72. 38., within a short distance of Bellot Strait, which is said to separate North
Arctic Regions. Somerset from Boothia Felix. No traces of the Erebus and Terror were found, though it is now known that at that very time they were on or near the west coast of Boothia, or off King William's Island. Next summer Sir James, on leaving Port Leopold for the purpose of continuing the search, was suddenly inclosed in a pack of drift ice, and carried helplessly out of Lancaster Sound into Davis Strait. His ships were not released until the 25th of September, when the navigation for the season having come to a close, he reluctantly bore up for England. The want of success of the land and sea searching expeditions did not diminish the desire of the people of England to carry succour to their countrymen imprisoned in the ice; on the contrary, the popular feeling raised by the devoted exertions and pathetic appeals of Lady Franklin was expressed in terms that would admit of no denial. The Admiralty accordingly prepared again for the search on a most extensive scale, regardless of expense. The Enterprise and Investigator (late Ross's ships) were despatched on the 20th of January 1850, to enter the Arctic Sea by way of Bering's Straits, and to pursue the search eastward from thence. In the same year a large force was sent to Lancaster Sound,—viz., Captain Horatio Austen, with two stout vessels and two steam-tenders under his command; Captain William Penny, of the mercantile navy, with two vessels, also under the directions of the Admiralty; Captain Sir John Ross in the Felix schooner, equipped principally by the Hudson's Bay Company; the Albert, Commander Forsyth, sent out at the expense of Lady Franklin; and two vessels from the United States, under the command of Lieutenant De Haven, and equipped by the munificence of Mr Grinnell, a New York merchant. Such a squadron, though it did much, might, if it had been well distributed, have effected more; but, as it happened, they all, with the exception of the Albert, pressed on directly to the westward, and at the close of the season were congregated on the coast of North Devon. The Admiralty showed a want of judgment in sending officers of the royal navy and of the merchant service with independent commands to the same quarter, and prepared the way for misunderstandings and bickerings which did not fail to follow. Captain Ommaney, on the 23d of August, in one of Austen's tenders, found traces of one of Franklin's encampments on Beechey Island, but hastened on after his commanding officer without exploring the island further. The American expedition also landed at the encampment; but it was reserved for Captain Penny, who made a more leisurely and extensive search, to discover Franklin's winter quarters, and the tombs of three of his men, who had died early in 1846; yet no memorial was found of Franklin's proceedings, nor any indication of the course he intended to pursue on leaving that harbour. The American vessels, when the navigation was about to close, bore up to return home, when, being caught in a floe, they were carried by the winds and currents first into Wellington Sound, by which they became the discoverers of Grinnell Land, and the lower part of that channel; next into Baffin's Bay, and there, and in Davis Strait, they remained shut up in the ice, drifting all the time to the southward, until the approach of the following summer released them. Captain Penny during the winter explored both sides of Wellington Sound with his sledge parties in the spring, to beyond the straits formed by the chain of islands named by him Dundas and Baillie Hamilton. Captain Austen, also, by a skilfully combined system of sledge expeditions, examined the north shore of the sea named in the Admiralty charts Melville Sound; also the openings northwards on each side of Byam Martin Island, which were followed for some way. He likewise traced the coast of Prince of Wales Land on the south of Melville Sound, down to the 72d parallel of latitude on the west, and to the 73d parallel on the east. This survey embraced a visit to Cape Walker, which
is the eastern extremity of Russell Island. The examination of this line of coast was most important, as it was towards Cape Walker that Franklin's instructions directed him to go, but no indications were discovered of the missing ships having touched at any part of the coast thus minutely explored. To Captain Austen the merit is certainly due of having brought the sledge equipments to a degree of efficiency that they had not previously attained on the ice of the Arctic Sea, and he was well seconded by his officers and men, who made journeys remarkable both for the number of days that they were absent from the ships, and for the great extent of coast that was traversed. This year, also, the North Star, Master Saunders, carrying stores to Lancaster Sound, was driven by stress of weather into Wolstenholme Sound, and wintering there, surveyed that indentation of the Greenland coast.
On the return of the various ships employed in Lancaster Sound to England, at the close of the summer of 1851, complaints were made by Captain Penny that he was prevented from proceeding as far up Wellington Sound as he could have done, had he received the assistance that he asked from Captain Austen: the public press took up his cause warmly; and many writers, led away by their imaginations, expressed their opinions that Franklin had sailed far north into a Polynia, or open Polar sea, the existence of which was supported by plausible reasons. This line of argument, perseveringly urged, had an injurious effect on the future arrangements for continuing the search; and notwithstanding Franklin's known strict adherence to orders, which, as we have said, were to get to the southward from the neighbourhood of Cape Walker, search in that direction was comparatively neglected by the ships which left England in 1852, being pursued only by Lady Franklin's schooner the Albert, and by her but for a short way.
The preparations in 1852 were more complete than in any previous year, and Sir Edward Belcher sailed in command of a most thoroughly efficient squadron. Pursuing the plan that had been recommended to the Admiralty by General Sabine, and practised by Captain Austen, of employing the ships merely as a base of operations, and seconded by able officers already trained to conduct sledge parties, Sir Edward explored the upper outlets of Wellington Channel, and mapped the archipelago of Parry's Islands, from Prince Patrick Island, on the west, to Polynia Islands and North Cornwall, not far from the 78th parallel, on the north, and nearly to Jones' Sound on the east. The lower part of this sound had been entered by Captain Austen on his homeward voyage; Wolstenholme Sound was fully explored by Master Saunders; and at this period three of Baffin's five sounds had therefore been partially or fully examined. The other two, Whale Sound and Smith's Sound, were also looked into this year (1852) by Commander Inglefield, in charge of Lady Franklin's screw-steamer Isabel.
Lady Franklin's other vessel, the Albert, which left England in 1851, wintered that season in Regent's Inlet, and Mr Kennedy, her commanding officer, aided by the gallant Lieutenant Bellot of the French navy, a volunteer, made a winter journey of sixty-three days, in which they discovered a strait to the north of Boothia Felix, to which the name of Bellot was given; then crossing and re-crossing Prince of Wales' Land diagonally, they touched at Cape Walker; and after rounding the end of North Somerset, regained their vessel on the 30th of May 1852. The great length of this journey, performed in the severe cold of the early months, is highly creditable to the ability and endurance of the party; but had it been directed to the examination of the lower end of Peel Sound, and the channels round King William's Island, it is more than probable that the fate of Franklin's party would then have been ascertained by the discovery of the remains of the ships, though two years too late to have found any of the crew surviving.
Mr Kennedy did not know that the north part of Peel Sound had been surveyed by Captain Austen's officers; and on looking in that direction from the west end of Bellot Strait, the islands appeared like a continuous barrier denying a passage to ships. He therefore thought it needless to search the southern part, though that was more open. Lieutenant Bellot was unfortunately drowned after the breaking up of the ice in Wellington Sound, to the great regret of all who knew him.
In 1851 Dr Rae, who, in 1850, had been frustrated by ice in an attempt to reach Wollaston's Land in a boat, proceeded thither from the Coppermine river on foot before the opening of the navigation, and traced the coast from Simpson's most westerly point of Victoria Land to Prince Albert Sound of Wollaston Land, proving that Victoria and Wollaston are parts of the same island. Crossing again to the Coppermine, he rejoined his boat, descended the river in her, and steering to the eastward through Dease Strait, turned towards the north, round the east end of Victoria Land, as far as Pelly Point. The state of the ice prevented him from proceeding farther than Lat. 70. 2. 30. and Long. 101. 18. W., in that direction, or from crossing over to King William's Island, which he was very desirous of doing. Previous to turning back, he picked up a bit of the stanchion of a ship's ice-plank, doubtless a fragment of the fittings of the Erebus or Terror.
The Enterprise and Investigator, commissioned in 1849 to take part in the search for Franklin by way of Bering's Straits, sailed from England in January 1850, the former under the command of Captain Richard Collinson, C.B., the latter under that of Commander Robert Le Mesurier M'Clure. The latter was fortunate in being able to pass through Bering's Straits a year before his senior officer, and, pushing along the north coast of the continent in the summer of 1850, discovered the south end of Banks' Land, and the strait between that island and Wollaston or Albert Land, for the parts of the coast bearing the latter name are continuous with Victoria Land. His officers surveyed the north shore of Wollaston Land as far eastward as Point Reynolds, which is situated in the same parallel of latitude with Osborn's extreme point, and at the distance of 4° of longitude, or about 65 geographical miles. The existence of a passage in this unexplored interval, through which Franklin's ships may have gone, if they did not pass southward by Peel's Sound, is still an open question. Captain (Sir Robert) M'Clure also surveyed the west coast of Albert, or rather Wollaston Land, down to Prince Albert Sound; and Lieutenant Haswell reached the north side of that inlet exactly ten days before Dr Rae arrived on its southern shore, as already mentioned. Failing in an attempt to enter Melville Sound from Prince of Wales' Strait, Captain M'Clure circumnavigated Banks' Land by the west, and the Investigator, after narrowly escaping shipwreck, was finally shut up in the Bay of Mercy at the northern point of the island. Here, in 1853, the ship was abandoned, and the debilitated crew, travelling over the ice to Dealy Island, were received into the Resolute, and tenderly cared for by Captain Kellett. No one can deny the merit of great nautical skill, resolution, and perseverance to the commanding officer of the Enterprise, who was admirably supported by his officers and crew, nor that the parliamentary grant and other rewards which they received were fully merited; but it is surely a misnomer to describe this voyage as the "Dis-
covery of a North-West Passage." Sir Edward Parry alone, of several navigators from the eastward, was able to conduct his ship as far as Cape Dundas, from whence he looked over an impenetrable waste of ice, his view being bounded by the land rising over the Bay of Mercy. From that bay Sir Robert M'Clure and his followers travelled eastwards on foot, and the space intervening between the points reached by his ship and Parry's has never been crossed even by a boat, nor seen in a navigable condition. Sir Edward Parry was stopped by fast ice in the summers of 1819 and 1820; Sir Robert M'Clure found it equally impassable in 1850-51 and 1852; Captain Collinson adds the weight of his testimony to the same fact; Captain Austen, in 1850-51, was unable to advance westward beyond Cape Cockburn; and Captain Kellett got no farther than Dealy Island.1
To Captain Collinson belongs the credit of having made the longest voyage along the northern shores of America in a ship. A year later than M'Clure in getting round Cape Barrow, like him he failed in passing beyond the northern end of Prince of Wales' Strait; and after wintering on the west side of Wollaston Land, he carried his ship, in the summer of 1852, through Dolphin and Union straits eastward to Cambridge Bay, on the south side of Victoria Land. His sledge parties came upon the traces of Dr Rae, and learnt from one of his records that he had already examined that coast, but were not able to extend the search farther than Gateshead Island, or 20 miles beyond him. Between this and the 72d parallel of latitude, where Kennedy crossed Peel Sound, there is a space of 92 geographical miles not yet explored, in which, as we have already said, a passage from Osborn Bay, at the south side of Melville Sound, may exist. The west shore of Boothia Felix, from Cape Nikolai of James Ross to Bellot Strait is also unknown to the extent of about 90 miles; but that there is a strait here continuous with Peel Sound, there can be no reasonable doubt, and it has been named Victoria Strait in Kennedy's account of his voyage. Captain Collinson's voyage, though the longest in the Arctic seas, was, owing to his late arrival in the field of search, productive of but few additions to the map. The Eskimos who visited his ship in Cambridge Bay, had in their possession a piece of an iron bolt, and a fragment of a hutch-frame, which are believed to have come from the Erebus or Terror. A deficiency of coals induced Captain Collinson to return by the way he came, instead of spending another year in forcing a passage to the eastward, and after a third winter in the Arctic seas, he brought his ship safely to England.
In 1854 Dr Rae returned to Repulse Bay for the purpose of ascertaining beyond cavil the continuity of the neck of land that separates Regent's Inlet, or the Gulf of Boothia, from the bay into which the Great Fish River falls, and also in the hope of carrying the search for the Erebus and Terror along the west coast of Boothia up to Bellot Strait. Part of this design he effected, establishing the absence of a passage through the isthmus; and crossing from Pelly Bay to Inglis' Bay, he traced the west side of Boothia Felix until he connected his surveys of that coast with Sir James Ross's in 1830. Continuing his route northwards to a little beyond Cape Suisse, he was there compelled to turn back by the state of the weather, the failure of his commissariat, and the sufferings of one of his crew from frost bite. By this journey, however, in com-
1 Sir Edward Parry says,—"It now became evident, from the combined experience of this and the preceding year, that there was something peculiar about the south-west extremity of Melville Island, which made the icy sea there extremely unfavourable to navigation, and which seemed likely to bid defiance to all our efforts to proceed much farther to the westward in this parallel of latitude." (North-West Passage, 1819-20, p. 241.) Captain Osborn, in his narrative of M'Clure's voyage, also remarks,—"The heavy pack of Melville Strait, lying across the head of the channel, was supposed to be the reason of the ice of Prince of Wales Strait ceasing to move on to the north-east; and the impassable nature of the pack in the same direction in the following year confirmed this hypothesis." (P. 114.) A writer in the Natural History Review for April 1858 attributes the fixity of the packed ice in this quarter to the meeting of the Atlantic and Pacific tides in Banks' Strait.
Arctic Regions. bination with his voyage of 1851, he ascertained the insular character of King William's Land, though from its distance he could not lay down all its coast-line. From a party of Eskimos that he met on this journey, he learnt that in the spring of 1850 another small party of that nation were killing seals on the north shore of King William's Land, when they saw about forty white men travelling to the southward along the west side of the island, and dragging a boat and sledges. None of the white men could speak Eskimo so as to be understood, but by signs they intimated that their ships had been crushed by ice, and that they were going where they expected to find deer to shoot. All the men, with the exception of one officer, were hauling on the drag-ropes, and were looking thin. The Eskimos sold them a piece of seal. At a later period in the same season, but before the ice broke up, some thirty dead white men were discovered on the continent a long day's journey to the west of the Great Fish River, and five more bodies lay on an adjoining island. Some of this unfortunate party must have survived till the end of May or beginning of June, when wild fowl arrive, as the neighbouring Eskimos heard shots at that period, and feathers of geese and fresh bones of birds were found by the natives at the spot. From the Eskimos Dr Rae purchased so many pieces of silver plate, and such a variety of other articles that were recognised as having been the property of officers of both ships, as to lead to the conclusion that the party who there perished were the sole remnants of the two crews. None of the Eskimos with whom Dr Rae spoke had seen the white men alive or dead, and the information they gave him, through an able interpreter, had been got by them from others of their nation.
In consequence of the intelligence brought to England by Dr Rae, the Hudson's Bay Company, at the instance of government, despatched Mr Anderson, one of their chief factors, down the Great Fish River in 1855, to visit the spot where the party had perished, and to communicate with the neighbouring Eskimos. Unfortunately, no interpreter could be procured, there being in fact none within 2000 miles; and the only conversation Mr Anderson could carry on with the Eskimos he saw at the mouth of the river, was by the unsatisfactory medium of signs. From them, however, he obtained many additional articles found on the deceased; and on Montreal Island he discovered the spot where the boat had been broken up by the natives for its wood and nails. By expressive and unmistakable pantomime, the Eskimos told him that the white men had died of hunger. A minute and patient search of the whole peninsula of Point Ogle, and an adjacent island to the westward, as well as of Montreal Island to the eastward, revealed to him neither books nor scraps of paper, nor arms, nor a single human bone or grave. His supposition, that all the dead were concealed by drift sand can scarcely be acceded to; and the more obvious conclusion is, that he had not arrived at the exact place of the death of the party. The fact of an enfeebled party having dragged a ship's boat to Montreal Island leads fairly to the inference, that no land was crossed by them, and that their weary journey was wholly over ice. Their ships must have been abandoned in the unexplored space of about 90 miles diameter above mentioned, and their journey southward discovered an ice-bound strait forming a link or a barrier (according as it is permanently closed or occasionally open) in the North-West Passage, some months earlier than Sir Robert McClure crossed one of a similar character in a higher latitude. A regard for the fame of her gallant husband and his brave companions has led Lady Franklin to seek for written records of this discovery by a further search, and perhaps the humane promptings of a hope surviving in her breast, though extinguished elsewhere, that even yet relief may be carried to some forlorn survivor of the catastrophe.
Government having declined any further proceedings, Lady Franklin, in 1857, placed the Fox yacht under charge of Captain McClintock, who volunteered once more to encounter the hardships and hazards of an Arctic search. He sailed, with a crew of twenty-four, including Anton Christian, a Greenland Eskimo, intending to seek the remains of the ships in the unexamined space already several times alluded to as lying to the N. of King William's Island. That summer he was unable to cross Baffin's Bay, but being caught in the "middle ice," he drifted with it to the southward all the winter, during which northerly winds blew almost continuously. On being released in the summer of 1858, with his crew in good health and spirits he touched on the Greenland coast for supplies, and afterwards gained the west side of the bay, being, when last heard of, near Pond's Bay.
Arctic Regions. The narrative of this melancholy search, which has added so largely to the geography of the Polar seas, has led us to postpone the notice of an enterprise the most remarkable of all, and prior in point of time to some of those above mentioned. We allude to Dr Kane's wonderful exploration of Smith's Sound. That he should have sought the Erebus and Terror at all in such a direction is due perhaps to the adoption of the Russian theory of a Polynia, and the arguments of a party expounded in the periodical press, forgetting that Franklin would unquestionably pursue, if able, the course pointed out by his instructions, of penetrating by the first opening he could find near Cape Walker to the open channel along the continental shore. Be this, however, as it may, Dr Kane, having chosen his line of search, pursued it unflinchingly under difficulties, arising from the severity of the climate and scantiness of means, that would have appalled and driven back any one not possessed of that fixedness of purpose and fertility of resource which formed parts of his character. His voyage commenced in 1853, and he reached home, after passing two winters in Smith's Sound, and finally abandoning his ship, in 1855. According to Dr Kane's view of the structure of the coast, Greenland terminates at Cape Agassiz by the stupendous Humboldt Glacier, issuing from a mer de glace a little above the 79th parallel; this glacier, 60 geographical miles wide, being the boundary between it and Washington Land. The highest point of Washington Land is Cape Constitution, in Lat. 80. 56. N. This is not far S. of the land seen by Hudson in 1607, to the W. of Spitzbergen, which may therefore be considered as part of the eastern coast of Washington Land. On the western side of Smith's Sound, the extreme point seen by Dr Kane's party is Mount Parry, which was laid down approximately by reckoning in Lat. 82. 30. N., and Long. 66. W., or 82. 14. reduced lat. Ross's Inlet, the extreme rock of the Seven Islands, and the most northerly land previously correctly known, is 100 miles more to the S.; and even the somewhat conjectural position of Hudson's northernmost point falls short of Kane's Mount Parry. Smith's Sound, or Kane's Channel, as it is otherwise named, is 33 geographical miles across at its narrowest places. During Dr Kane's residence in Smith's Sound, an unbroken bridge of ice remained across the sound up to the 81st parallel of latitude. Northwards of this there was open sea between Washington and Grinnell lands, whose waters had a temperature of +36° F., while the thermometer marked -60° F. of atmospheric cold.
Physical Geography of the Arctic Polar Basin.
The residents on the shores of Hudson's Bay are aware that pools of water, recognisable from a distance by the mist rising from them, exist in the depth of winter amid the ice of that sea. Sir Edward Parry and other voyagers observed similar pools in higher latitudes, with Dovekies lingering in them all the winter; and Baron Wrangell and Lieutenant Anjou, in attempting to travel northwards over the ice from
the estuaries of the Lena and Kolyma, were stopped by open water. Middendorf also, in 1843, found an open sea at Cape Taimura. It is not surmised that the small pieces of water seen by Parry were otherwise than accidental,—that is, not having a fixed locality, but recurring in different situations in different winters; and indeed the winter drift of large ice-fields experienced by Lieutenant De Haven's vessels, by the Resolute after Captain Kellett had reluctantly obeyed the command to abandon her, and last year by Captain McClintock, indicates that open spaces must be left by the removal of such extensive fields. That this drift is normal, and not the casual effect of winds in one or two exceptional seasons, is proved by the annual descent in winter of ice-fields and large bergs down Davis Strait, and the similar route of several whalers that have passed a winter in the ice. But the Russian geographers and others have conjectured that, in addition to the comparatively small pools observed in the accessible parts of the Ledovitoe More, or Frozen Ocean, there exists at all seasons, nearer the Pole, a Polynia, or open sea of warmer water, whose verge was reached by Wrangel, and more recently by Kane.
Lieutenant Maury, reasoning from various facts which he adduces, infers that there must be an under-current in Davis Strait from the S., which rises to the surface somewhere in the N., and there produces an area of warm water of considerable extent, tempering the climate of high parallels, and being one of the beautiful compensating actions of nature. Baër also takes it for granted that there must be an under-current towards the S. in Bering's Straits, resulting from the superficial one in the opposite direction.
Sir Edward Parry, when he reached the parallel of 82. 45. N. in his memorable boat voyage from Spitzbergen, had to contend with a current setting to the S. at the rate of more than 4 miles a day, which was increased when a northerly wind blew. The natives of the E. coast of Greenland are familiar with the drift of what they call the "great ice," which, coming down from the N., often fills the strait between Greenland and Iceland, and is probably an extension of the drift experienced by Parry. At Cape Farewell the great ice occasionally forms a belt from 120 to 160 miles wide, but in general only a narrower stream, known to the whalers as the Cape Farewell ice; and in some seasons the navigation at that extremity of the land is quite free from port to port. Part of the great ice is deflected to the N. along the W. coast of Greenland, probably by the action of the under-current spoken of by Lieutenant Maury. The main surface current, however, sets out of Davis Strait, and the sounds connected with it, both in summer and winter. On the disruption of the ice off Meville Island, Parry saw it move to the eastward; and it took a similar course many years afterwards, when Captain Kellett wintered at Dealy Island. Sir James Ross's voyage of 1849 was also brought prematurely to an end by drift ice taking in summer a course out of Lancaster Sound nearly identical with the drift of the American ships in winter.
At Bering's Straits, on the contrary, the current, according to general testimony, sets in to the N.; and Commander Maugre, the latest of the Arctic voyagers in that quarter, calls it strong, and of great assistance to him in his passage northwards against contrary winds. He mentions that the whalers, even with favourable winds, were obliged to warp when going against the current. The same current, setting to the northward and eastward, was powerful off Point Barrow.
In the narrow seas bounding the American continent between Point Barrow and Great Fish River the tides are perfectly regular, though of small velocity, and producing but little rise of water, rarely amounting to 4 feet. Some of the late Arctic navigators have thought that they perceived a prevailing current setting to the eastward on this
coast. Between the Mackenzie and Coppermine rivers Sir John Richardson found the flood-tide setting to the eastward; but on an indented coast the real direction of the tide can scarcely be ascertained by a passing voyager; and he remarks that a gale of wind produces a greater rise of water on that coast than an ordinary spring-tide,—three days of a strong north-wester being sufficient to flood for many miles the low-lying meadows east of the Mackenzie, and deposit long lines of drift timber at the foot of the rising grounds. In the Strait of the Fury and Hecla the tides rise 9 feet; but the stream of the current was to the eastward throughout the twenty-four hours, with in-shore eddies running the other way. This easterly current was as much as 4 miles an hour at times; and the observers thought that in the summer season it was so much stronger than in the winter as to mask the small westerly stream of the ebb-tide. From Dr Sutherland's register of tides, kept near Cape Hotham, the western portal of Wellington Sound, we learn that the rise and fall varied from less than a foot to a little more than 6 feet. At Cape Belcher, on the N. side of the upper extremity of Wellington Sound, the flood-tide flowed about nine hours, and the ebb only three, the fall of tide being rapid. The strength of the current, according to some of Captain Penny's officers, was 4 miles an hour. Farther to the N. (on the 77th parallel) Sir Edward Belcher observed the ebb running strong to the E. towards Jones' Sound. As this was an isolated observation, it may be that the ordinary current setting out of the Polar Sea overpowered the feeble westerly ebb-tide, as in the preceding instance. In this quarter also the rise of spring-tides was 7 feet, and that of the neaps 2. In Prince of Wales' Strait the flood came from the S.; and McClure ascertained the rise and fall to be about 3 feet at spring-tides, but scarcely perceptible at the neaps.
Lieutenant Maury affirms that a tidal wave cannot be propagated through a barrier of ice 80 or 100 miles wide, and that the ebb and flow of the iceless sea discovered by Dr Kane under the 82d parallel must have been the movements of a Polynian tide generated about the North Pole. The Eskimos reported to Sir Robert McClure the existence of an unbroken barrier of ice of unknown width, extending westward from Parry's Island to the meridian of Point Barrow, at the distance of 30 or 40 miles from the continent. This leaves too narrow a space for the generation of a tide, if Maury's opinion be well founded; and the origin of the coast tide must in that case be sought for elsewhere.
Middendorf records a tidal rise of 36 feet in Taimur Bay.2 If the gulf-stream doubles the extremity of Norway, as Lieutenant Maury's chart indicates, a body of comparatively warm water may strike against the North-East Cape of Asia, raising the flood to the height mentioned by Middendorf, and be deflected into the Polar basin round that far-projecting promontory. That a current sets in that direction along the western shores of Novaya Zemlya as far as Cape Nassau, has been ascertained by Admiral Lutke. Henry Hudson also, at a much earlier date, experienced the same current, which drifted his ship to the N. in a calm. Martens could not detect an ebb and flow of tide at Spitzbergen; nor could Barentzoon in the sea of Kara, or, as it is called from its calmness, Marmora, but he found the height of water at its entrance or weygartz to be largely influenced by the wind. Our information, therefore, respecting the movements of the Arctic Sea tends to show that warmer currents from the Atlantic and Pacific set round the North-East Cape of Asia, and also into Bering's Straits; while there is an outward flow, carrying with it much ice, between Spitzbergen and Greenland, as well as out of Davis Strait and down Fox's Channel. How far the under-currents spoken of by Baër and Maury
Arctic Regions. operate in preserving the level is not so apparent. Maury considers one of the causes of the gulf-stream to be the increased gravity of the water resulting from tropical evaporation. In like manner, the freezing of the sea within the Arctic Circle, by precipitating the saline ingredients, must augment the gravity of the deeper unfrozen water; while the lighter surface water, freed from salt, is carried southwards in form of ice. Wrangel informs us that the Great Polynia is from 16 to 18 English miles to the N. of Kotelnoi and New Siberia, and keeps at the same distance from the continent of Asia between Cape Chelagskoi and Cape North.1 In its vicinity northerly winds always enveloped his party in damp air. During the summer the current between Svatoi Noss and Kolitschin Island is from E. to W., or towards Bering's Straits, and in the autumn from W. to E. A current to the S.E., which prevails in spring, is attributed by Wrangel to the N.W. winds of that season.
Winds. Mr J. H. Coffin, in a treatise published in the sixth volume of the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge (1854), places a meteorological pole in Lat. 84. N., Long. 105. W., and states that it is encircled by a zone, 23½ degrees in breadth, of westerly or north-westerly winds; encompassed on the south, between the parallels of 60. and 66. of N. Lat., by a belt of easterly and north-east winds, as indicated by observations made at Great Bear Lake, Great Slave Lake, Fort Enterprise, two stations in Greenland, and one at Reikiavik in Iceland. Lieut. Maury's wind-chart also marks the prevailing direction of the winds in the polar basin and northern seas as being westerly, but does not indicate the easterly encompassing belt of Coffin. Baron Wrangel observes that in Arctic Siberia, though the south-east winds prevail in summer, the north-west winds are most frequent, taking the general yearly average, and are especially common in the winter time; they are cold winds in summer, and bring snow-storms in winter. The south-west wind is, however, the most piercing to the sensations in the winter, and on that account receives the name of Shalonik from the native Siberians. Captain McClintock reports that during his eight months' drift in Davis Strait the wind was northerly. At Fort Confidence, on Great Bear Lake, for seven months of winter in 1848-9, the mean direction of the wind was from S.E. ¼ E., the southing becoming more decided as the spring advanced; this observation, made within the verge of the Arctic Circle, being at variance with the general position laid down by Mr Coffin. The pressure of the atmosphere at that place was greatest when the wind was S.E., decreased greatly with a due south or due east wind, and was least when the wind blew from any point to the northward of east. The force of the wind was least in mid-winter; and from December to March, both months inclusive, calms were very frequent, but became rare in April. The sky was comparatively cloudy in October and November; remarkably clear in December and the succeeding four months. In the summer of 1848 little or no rain had fallen.
The theory of opposite aerial currents, which are such important agents in transferring heat, was considered by Professor Leslie to lead theoretically to the same conclusions, with respect to the gradations of temperature in different latitudes, as the empirical formula of Meyer, which represents the mean heat at the sea-level as proportional to the sine of twice the latitude; but Leslie erred in stating the mean temperature at the Pole to be 32° or 25° F.; and on the observations of Arctic voyagers proving this to be greatly above the truth, he was led to assert that there was some latent material inaccuracy in their thermometrical records. That there were in fact great defects in the graduation of the alcoholic thermometers formerly in use, is
now well ascertained, but this is remedied by the employment of absolute alcohol only, and fixing the point of - 40° F. by freezing large masses of mercury. Thermometers are now tested for the Board of Trade at the Kew Observatory; and every Arctic traveller may find the error of his thermometer for himself by plunging the bulb into freezing mercury as soon as the temperature is sufficiently low. In consequence of this easily-applied test having been neglected, there is generally error more or less in the earlier thermometric records of the recent Arctic voyages, but not nearly to the extent which Professor Leslie supposes.
The able philosopher just named also informs us that the limit of perpetual congelation forms a curve which is nearly the same as the companion of the cycloid, bending gradually from the equator, reverting its flexure at the 45th parallel, and grazing the surface of the sea at the Pole; the mean height of eternal frost under the equator, and at latitudes 30. and 60. being respectively 15,207, 11,484, and 3,818 feet. He is probably correct in stating that the snow-line keeps near the sea-level in the north polar regions, though the mean temperature of the atmosphere may be 30° or 40° below what he supposed it to be; and the explanation of the fact ought to be sought in the influence of a sun constantly above the horizon in the summer months compensating in a great degree for the obliquity of its rays, in the aerial currents above alluded to, and perhaps in a greater degree to the oceanic currents. The observations of Humboldt and Dr Hooker, and of others, show how very much the height of the snow-line, in different sides of the same range of mountains, is influenced by radiation from adjoining plains and conditions of aspect. That the reflection of the sun's rays from a snowy surface has a most powerful effect in a clear atmosphere, has been surmised by Professor James Forbes; and it will also be found, we doubt not, that there is a difference between the upper and lower limits of perpetual snow within the Polar Circle as great as on the sides of high mountain ranges. It is certain that phenogamous vegetation is not extinct in the most northern lands that have been attained.
In Dove's isothermal charts, constructed on Baron Humboldt's plan, an elliptical area of greatest cold is placed in Northern Siberia, reaching from Lat. 60. to 81., and including the whole valley of the Lena, with the western part of New Siberia, and the adjoining border of Wrangel's supposed Polynia. Round this (mesocheimal) lines of mid-winter temperatures are protracted in curves, which are far from being regular, but which have all a tendency to form ellipses. Taking these curves as expositions of facts so far as known, they indicate the mildest winters to be in the meridians of Bering's Straits and of the Spitzbergen seas, the most severe being in the parts of Asia and America farthest from these seas. The curves or ellipsoids of mid-summer (mesothermal) heat have their long axes almost at right angles to the winter ones, the summers of Bering's Straits and Spitzbergen being cool compared with those of the continental projections to the north. The district of greatest heat round which the very irregularly flexed mesothermal lines circulate embraces the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, with the intervening Arabian peninsula and the eastern coast of Nubia. The annual isothermals take of course an intermediate direction between the isothermals and isocheimals; and the mean of 32° F., or the freezing-point, passes from a point on the 60th parallel somewhat south of Bering's Straits, cuts off the southern quarter of Kamtschatka, part of the Sea of Ochotsk, curves regularly by Sagaien on the Amour, and, after touching the 49th parallel, ascends gradually by the south of Tobolsk to the White Sea, north of Archangel; and then, having first dipped suddenly to the
1 This was ascertained by Tatarinow and Pichonitsa in 1811, Hedenström in 1810, Lieutenant Anjou in 1823, and by Wrangel and his assistants during his various journeys performed between 1820 and 1823.
Gulf of Bothnia, rises rapidly beyond the North Cape to the 72d parallel; whence, taking a descending curve, it grazes the north end of Iceland, cuts the south point of Greenland, and reaches its second southern apsis near the 49th parallel, in the bottom of James's or Hudson's Bay; then, rising in its course through Rupert's Land and the basin of the Mackenzie to the 63d parallel, descends through Russian America to meet the point in Bering's Sea from whence we commenced tracing it.
Though the subjoined thermometric table partakes of the inaccuracies which result from causes alluded to above, it is an abstract of the most complete series of observations that we have been able to collect. By it we are led to infer that the winter cold increases with the latitude on the same meridian within the Arctic Circle, while there is a great uniformity of summer temperature between the parallels of 70° and 75°, from Lancaster Sound to Bering's Straits. Between the parallels of 76° and 81° the summer heat of Spitzbergen, Smith's Sound, and Wellington Sound is nearly alike, and a degree or two below that of Lancaster and Melville sounds. These observations may be neither sufficiently continuous nor correct to disprove the existence of an open Polar basin, yet as far as they go they tend that way.
| Observer. | Place. | Year. | Geographical Position. | Thermometer. | Mean of Year. | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lat. | Long. | |||||
| Parry | Spitzbergen, on ice | 1827 | N. 51°-511/2° | E. 17°-20° | +25.6 | |
| Forster | Do., Hecla Cove | 1827 | 59 | 14 | +38.1 | |
| Franklin | Do., at 40° | 1818 | 59 | 10 | +34.5 | |
| Kane | Smith's Sound | 1854 | 73 | 70 | +31.0 | -16.8 |
| Belcher | Northumberland Sound | 1852-3 | 77 | 97 | +29.8 | -11.8 |
| Russ | Widderenhoze Sound | 74 | 70 | +27.8 | -6.8 | |
| Belcher | Wellington Channel | 1853-4 | 74 | 72 | +24.6 | -12.7 |
| Palmer | Beechey Island | 1853 | 74 | 92 | +30.3 | -6.3 |
| Sutherland | Barrow Strait | 1859-1 | 74 | 94 | +32.9 | -8.6 |
| Parry | Melville Island | 1853-20 | 74 | 111 | +25.1 | -19.5 |
| McCure | Banks' Land | 1851-2 | 74 | 113 | +37.3 | -8.7 |
| Parry | Port Bowen | 1824-5 | 74 | 89 | +39.2 | -6.7 |
| McCure | Prince of Wales Strait | 1859-1 | 75 | 113 | +37.1 | -9.6 |
| Collinson | Do. | 1851-2 | 74 | 114 | +38.2 | -2.2 |
| Collinson | Candian Bay | 1853-4 | 79 | 145 | +38.1 | -3.8 |
| Parry | Strait of Fory & Hecla | 1827-8 | 69 | 81 | +32.1 | -1.4 |
| Collinson | Cambridge Bay | 1852-3 | 69 | 105 | +27.5 | -7.3 |
| Richardson | Great Bear Lake | 1852-9 | 67 | 103 | +49.7 | -0.8 |
| Parry | Lyon Sound | 1821-2 | 66 | 135 | +35.1 | -1.2 |
| McCure | Yukto | 1846-7 | 65 | 147 | +36.7 | +2.7 |
| Richardson | Great Bear Lake | 1853-6 | 64 | 124 | +36.4 | +2.3 |
| Godhaab | 64 | 92 | +49.6 | +22.2 | ||
| Yakutsk | Many years | 62 | ... | +61.8 | -4.1 | |
| E. | ||||||
| Forrell | Enontekit | 1862-6 | 63 | 20 | +51.6 | +167 |
It is an established fact, that as we descend into the interior of the earth through the shafts of deep mines, the temperature rises,—according to some at the rate of one degree of Fahrenheit's scale for every forty-five feet of descent; but the increment varies in different localities, and cannot be considered as having been as yet perfectly ascertained over any one extensive district. The superficial crust or soil is moreover influenced by the direct impact of the sun's rays in summer, and, in winters of high latitudes, by radiation into space, and long-continued contact of a cold atmosphere. In all cases, however, the thermal effects of seasons descend like tides through the soil, becoming gradually less and less distinct as the distance from the surface increases, and finally blending and vanishing at depths which vary with the latitude and also with local causes. In severe Polar climates the result is a permanently frozen substratum, whose southern limit is placed by Bair in coincidence with the isothermal line of 32° F., its thickness increasing of course with the decrease of mean temperature calculated for a series of years. At Yakutsk in Siberia, where the mean heat of the year is +14° F., the frozen earth is 382 feet in thickness; but at York Factory, a few miles from Hudson's Bay, where the mean temperature is
+251/2° F., the frozen substratum was cut through at the depth of 201/2 feet: at that place the superficial summer thaw penetrated about three feet. At Fort Simpson on the Mackenzie, five degrees to the north of York Factory, but possessing nearly the same mean annual temperature, the soil was thawed at the close of summer to the depth of eleven feet, beneath which lay a stratum of only six feet of permanently frozen soil, the underlying loose sandy soil being unfrozen at the depth of seventeen feet from the surface of the ground. Throughout the northern shores of the American continent, and in the islands beyond it, the summer thaw penetrates from ten inches to a foot, or a little more; but no shafts have been sunk in America within the Arctic Circle to ascertain the thickness of the permanently frozen substratum.
Spitzbergen lies on the verge of the snow-line,—some low-lying tracts of meadow becoming bare in summer, and also the steep faces of hills; so that enough of grass and lichens are produced to nourish herds of rein-deer; but the higher grounds are covered with snow, and the valleys occupied by glaciers. In Smith's Sound (Lat. 78. 79.) some patches of ground became visible in the first weeks of July on which many flowering plants flourished. Hesperis pygmaea and Vesicaria arctica were found in fruit by Dr Kane as far north as 81°, accompanied by other phænomenal plants of various families, whose fruits require a considerable number of summer days for ripening. Even dwarf, shrubby Vaccinia, Empetra, and Salices attain the height of Smith's Sound. The east side of that strait, and a great part of Greenland in general, has its valleys and the gorges of its fiords occupied by glaciers; and it is probable that the interior of the northern parts at least are, like Spitzbergen, covered permanently with snow, the only bare spots in summer being steep acclivities lying well to the mid-day sun, or strips of meadow land on the coast. Farther to the westward, in latitude 77° north of Wellington Sound, Sir Edward Belcher observed the lower grounds to become partially denuded of snow early in June; and in the spring of 1851 Mr Goodis saw patches of bare earth on the 10th of June, the snow at that period being in process of rapid waste. Sir Edward Parry notes a period of seventy days, from June to September, during which vegetation goes on in the low grounds of Melville Island, latitude 741/2°. Snow showers are of occasional occurrence in those quarters in every summer month, but soon after the beginning of September the snow that falls is permanent for the winter.
In no part of America within the Arctic Circle where cereals have been sown has success attended the operation, though the cultivation of barley reaches the 70th parallel on the Scandinavian peninsula. On the Mackenzie, turnips and radishes alone of the culinary vegetables could be raised on the 67th parallel. At Shifedoi Kolymsk, in 671/2°, on the Kolyma, radishes and cabbages without heads were the poor rewards of the kitchen gardener's toil; and a degree farther north, at Nijnei Kolymsk, the climate is so severe that in a low marsh near the village, ice, mixed with vegetable earth, remains frozen the whole year. There the river freezes in September, and the winter is nine months long. Baron Wrangel mentions the occasional occurrence of warm winds, named teploi veter, which blow from the south-east by south in the middle of winter, and raise the temperature in the course of twenty-four hours from 47° below zero to 35° above it. Similar warm winds recur once or twice in the winter in the higher latitudes of America, sometimes in December, more frequently in January or February; so that sometimes one, sometimes another, of these months is the coldest in the year. The great effect of these temporary winds proves how much aerial currents may influence the mean temperature of a locality.
The northern termination of the woods, though in some
Arctic Regions. degree dependent on soil, and still more on elevation and vicinity of the sea, yet furnishes an approximate measure of the climate of various meridians. In Northern Asia the line of woods undulates considerably, yet its general course rises from the verge of the Arctic Circle in Bering's Straits to 71° on the deltas of the Jana and Lena. On the Lulean Alps, Scotch firs (which there ascend above the spruces, and 200 feet above the limit at which barley ceases to ripen) terminate at an altitude of 1300 feet, and the lower edge of the snow-line varies there from 3100 to 4100 feet above the sea, according to aspect. Some Ranunculi and similar plants grow above the snow-line in the crevices of steep rocks, where the sun's rays have power; and a few lichens (Gyrophora) ascend 2000 feet higher. At the island of Mageröe, off the North Cape of Europe, the line of perpetual congelation is about 1100 feet above the sea-level, and trees grow at no great distance from the sea on the northern coasts of Lapland and Finnmark. In Greenland there are no trees; but on the west side of Hudson's Bay the line of woods commences between the 60th and 61st parallels, and, inclining to the north as it runs westward, reaches the 68th parallel on the alluvial banks of the Mackenzie, though it does not come so far north on the higher ground. On Noatak River, which falls into Eschscholtz Bay, the wood-line is coincident with the Arctic Circle; and that curve probably represents its course from Noatak eastward to the Mackenzie, except on the Colville, where the low fertile alluvium may cause it to bend to the north. In the severe Arctic climates, trees are frozen to the centre in winter, but under the influence of the spring sun, travelling above the horizon throughout the twenty-four hours, they are thawed long before there is any material diminution of the snow which covers the frozen soil in which their roots are fixed; yet the deciduous trees show neither leaves nor flowers until the snow has wholly or nearly disappeared.
Animals. Our restricted space will not permit us to extend those very general remarks on the climate and vegetation of the Polar regions. Certain animals, such as the Canadian lynx, the American hare, and the Moose-deer, are limited in their range by the line of woods,—the latter wandering northwards of the woody country only on river banks where thickets of willows grow. The goat antelope (Aploceros montanus) and the small Pika or tailless hare, are confined to the Rocky Mountain ridge, which they follow to within the verge of the Arctic Circle; and the magnificent Argali or Big-horn also ranges to the northern termination of the same ridge, in the parallels of 68° or 69°. The Rein-deer has been found in the most northern lands to which navigators have attained; and the Musk-ox, though more partial in its distribution, also attains a high latitude; while the Polar hare and several kinds of Lemmings are residents on all the Arctic islands which produce any kind of vegetation. These herbivorous quadrupeds are accompanied by the Wolf, Wolverine, and Arctic Fox. The Brown Bear also roams over the Arctic wastes of the continents of Europe, Asia, and America; while the White Bear is the tyrant of the Polar seas, making the seals which abound therein its peculiar prey. Some small herds of rein-deer and musk-oxen having been seen on the islands of Melville Sound in the winter, have led some to deny the migrations of these animals; but only a few can find food in the Polar islands during winter, and it is unquestionable that the rein-deer retire in vast herds southwards on the close of summer to the borders of the woody country, where the males and females congregate in the rutting season. In the spring the females, travelling alone, seek the sea-coast to bring forth their young. At that season the Cenomyces, Cornicularia, and Cetraria which clothe the more barren dis-
tricts like a carpet, become soft and tender amid the melting snow, and furnish fitting food for the dogs and their young. The grasses and carices also, which grow freely in the alluvial meadows on the coast, are only then shedding their seeds, and still retain some sap in their culms, the sudden autumn frosts having arrested their fructiferous functions, which are not completed till the snow is disappearing on the approach of midsummer. The same may be said of the berry-bearing plants, the Empetrum, Vaccinia, and Rubi, whose frozen fruits remain pendant over winter, and when uncovered by the melting snows, supply bears and geese with stores of food.
The Polar regions are the native country of many geese, ducks, and aquatic birds. The Canada goose is the only North American member of that genus which breeds below the Arctic Circle, and many bands even of them travel as far as 68°; while the Barnacle, Brent, Laughing-Goose, and Snow-Goose go to the extreme north to breed. Ptarmigan and Dovekies may be said to be constant residents in the highest latitudes; but the bulk of both these species go southwards for their winter food, though a few dovekies linger behind in the open pools of the Polar Sea. The Raven and Snowy Owl are the only birds of prey that find food within the Arctic Circle in the winter time.
Whales and seals must not be overlooked in any notice, however brief, of the animals of the Polar regions. Taken in conjunction with marine and fresh-water fish and the rein-deer, they are the productions which render the hyperborean lands and seas habitable for the Eskimos. Like the rein-deer, the Right Whales produce their young in the solitudes of the icy seas, but have their equatorial limits between the 30th and 45th parallels.1 This range of the Right Whale may be called a zoological district, and it is not dissimilar in extent to the ranges of the Snow and Barnacle Geese, which leave their Polar native places to pass the winter on the elevated Mexican plateaux.
The Eskimos are a people fitted peculiarly to dwell Eskimos within the Arctic Circle. They occupy the whole of the sea-board of Arctic America, continent and islands, the entire coast of Greenland, and both sides of the peninsula of Labrador. In Greenland, Labrador, and Hudson's Bay only, have Europeans fixed themselves on the Eskimo lands; and though in one or two districts the American red races have, through the more early possession of fire-arms, been able to restrict the southern range of the Eskimos, they have nowhere dwelt among them in America, except on Bering's Sea, where there is a fusion of races. The Eskimo not only subsists in the high latitudes, but has much enjoyment in his routine of duties, which vary with the seasons, and he even prefers his frigid wastes to what we consider more favoured lands. He may be said to be wholly independent of vegetable food, his chief luxury of that kind being the nerooks or half-digested lichens which he finds in the paunch of the rein-deer. Occasionally, also, he eats, when the chase fails, a few bistort roots, a little scurvy-grass, or whortle or crow berries in the autumn; but these make no important part of his diet. The nation is, in fact, more strictly carnivorous than any other that we know of; and as a diet consisting exclusively of animal food requires to be very plentiful, the skill and energy of the Eskimo hunter are fully taxed. In summer, at the epochs of the rein-deer migrations, he lays the passing herds under contribution in various ways. He snares them, traps them in pounds and pit-falls, spears them while crossing lakes or rivers, or stalks them, and shoots them with arrows. The skins, especially those of the young, furnish warm clothing for himself and family, the women being skilful in converting the hide into shamoy, or in dressing the fur; the back sinew, split into fine fibres, makes excellent thread; and the antlers and
1 Maury's Chart, Imp. Geogr. of the Sea.
bones are shaped into knives, spear-heads, and fishing-hooks, or are used in the framing of sledges. Twisted into lines, the sinews, or sometimes thongs of the skin, are employed in making nets. The flesh of the rein-deer, dried in the sun or stored in a natural ice-cellar, is reserved for winter food; geese and other birds yielding abundant provision during the season of the autumn deer-hunt. In September, after the deer have passed southwards, the Eskimo families assemble on certain promontories to hunt the whale, and, if successful, they spend a luxurious winter, the blubber and oil of the whale, as well as its flesh, being pleasing to their palates. The oil also supplies their lamps, so essential in the dark winter months. The lamps are made of pot-stone, and the same material is excavated to make cooking-kettles; but these heavy utensils are less valued since the more portable copper kettles of Europe have become known in Eskimo-land. Of the whale's intestines, sails for the women's boats (oomiaks) are made, the gut being neatly sewed together in stripes; and of the same material waterproof shirts are formed, to be worn by the men when seated in their small kajacks. The ribs and other bones of the whale are used in framing sledges or canoes when drift-wood cannot be had, and also for rafters to the twif roofs of houses. These houses, whether framed of wood or bone, are half sunk in the ground, and are thickly covered with earth, so as to exclude the cold atmosphere; and, with the same view, the passage by which they are entered is long, low, and subterranean. In these iglooachs the height of the winter is passed; but when the return of the sun brings length of day, though as yet the air continues very cold, the winter houses are evacuated, and the families travel seaward on the ice to hunt for seals. By a skilful application of his knowledge of the habits of that wary animal, the expert Eskimo hunter brings a daily supply to his family. The seal-flesh is the most favourite food of the people, and its skins are dressed to make durable waterproof coverings for the kajacks and oomiaks, or cut into thongs for lines, which being slit circularly from the skin, are made of considerable length without knots. The skins of the lesser seals also are stripped off in the form of a bag, and the various apertures being very effectually and neatly plugged, are blown up to form an excellent buoy, used in hunting whales or large seals and morses. The Eskimo women are, moreover, very skilful in manufacturing waterproof boots of the seal-skin, or jackets for summer wear. During the spring seal-hunt the family is encamped on the ice in huts most elegantly built of blocks cut from the compact snow, and which endure until the ice begins to break up. In autumn, when the snow is neither deep enough nor sufficiently compact to serve for a building material, the Eskimo knows how to substitute slabs of ice—the cold acting the part of a cement. The only domestic animal the American Eskimo possesses is the dog, which he employs both for the draught and the chase. Formerly it is probable that the Eskimos crossed Bering's Straits, and occupied the coast as far as the Kolyma, or even farther towards Europe. The Namollos of the Gulf of Anadyr are, according to Sauer, a tribe of Eskimos; and traces of Eskimo dwellings have been discovered along the northern shores of Asia as far as the 160th meridian. The more powerful Rein-deer Tchukche, supposed to be of Tatar origin, are considered as the invaders of the Namollo territory. Throughout the vast linear range of the Eskimos the variations in the language are merely dialectic. The Samœids have much physical resemblance to the Eskimos, which, as far as such evidence goes, points to a common Mongol origin; but neither the Tchukche, the Yeniseians, Yukahivi, Samœids, nor Laps seem to have the nautical skill of the Eskimos, to be able to hunt the whale on the high seas, or to obtain a living on an ice-bound ocean. The domestic habits of the nations just named rather resemble those of the American red races
in high latitudes, especially their modes of cradling their infants, and are to be attributed to the precautions that experience has taught them to use against the severity of the climate. The Eskimo kajack is peculiar to the nation. Olaus Magnus mentions that in the year 1505 he saw two suspended in the cathedral church of St. Halvard at Aslo, which were reported to have been brought from Greenland by King Haco when he visited that country with a hostile fleet.
In Arctic America, part of Baffin's Bay, the east end of Minerska Barrow's Strait, and the continental coast and adjoining islands of Melville Peninsula, the S. end of Boothia, and from thence to the Coppermine, the rocks are mostly granitic, ancient trap, or metamorphic. Farther to the W., and in the islands more to the N., there are considerable tracts of Silurian limestone, and also carboniferous limestones and sandstones; and as far N. as 76½°, at Prince Patrick's Island, liassic fossils have been found. The coal beds of Melville Island belong to the true coal formation, and the beds are supposed to be low in the series; but there is a tertiary coal at Disco in Greenland, on Cape Bathurst on the 127th meridian, and on the Garry Islands at the mouth of the Mackenzie, very similar to the coal higher up the Mackenzie, at the influx of Bear Lake River, and which, from the fossil plants it contains, was judged to be of the miocene age. Moreover, a pleistocene drift seems to be scattered over the horizontal Silurian and Devonian beds, to the height of 500 feet above the present sea-level.
But perhaps the most interesting of all the deposits of Fossils, past times are vast multitudes of animal remains, in forms very similar to, and in some cases not to be distinguished from, those which are still inhabitants of the face of the earth. The bones brought from the extraordinary ice-cliffs of Eschscholtz Bay, on the verge of the Arctic Circle, were those of the Elephas primigenius; the Equus fossilis, in no respect different from the bones of the existing horse of the same medium size; the Cervus tarandus; the Oribos moschatus, both of them equally like the bones of the existing species; Oribos maximus, of larger size than the musk-ox, but of the same genus; Bison priscus (?) vel americanus (?); Bison crassicornis; Cercus alces. The elephant tusks have been for many years an object of traffic with the natives, who find them in abundance on the Kuskokwim River, on the 60th parallel, and several of the inlets communicating with Bering's Sea and Strait; and an entire skeleton of an elephant was found far inland in the elevated country near the sources of the Yukon, but none has as yet been discovered to the E. of the Rocky Mountain chain. The two fore extremities of a Mastodon, found far to the S., not a great way from the W. side of Lake Winipeg, are the only fossil bones that have been met with in Rupert's Land. The Eschscholtz Bay deposits, full of interest as they are, sink into insignificance when compared with the vast masses of fossil bones on the islands N. of the Asiatic Svaitoi Noss, lying between the 73d and 76th degrees of north latitude. Some of these islands, which are of considerable extent, seem to consist mostly of organic remains, which occupy more space than the solidly frozen matrix in which they lie, and from which, as it thaws annually under the direct influence of the summer sun, the bones drop or are quarried by the natives. Ever since that coast was discovered by the Yakutsk hunters the removal of bones has been going on; and in the year 1821, 20,000 lb. of fossil ivory was procured from the island of New Siberia alone, some of the tusks weighing 480 lb. The skull, flesh, and skin of the Rhinoceros tichorinus have been obtained from thence, and the discovery of the entire carcass of a mammoth at the mouth of the Lena in 1779 has been repeatedly commented upon in popular works. The charnel-house smell, and the remains of hair and horn in the Eschscholtz ice-cliffs, tell a similar story of the slow progress of
Antarctic decay since these vast and curious assemblages of animals Regions. were entombed in these two localities, lying 50° of longitude apart. The elephant and rhinoceros do not exist on the American continent at the present day, nor in Siberia. The horse was introduced into the former by the Spaniards; and of the other species enumerated above, the musk-ox at the same geological epoch existed in Europe, Professor Owen having identified a skull found in England with the American species. The conditions of sea and land when such accumulations were possible are subjects of conjecture and speculation on which we cannot enter here.
Our knowledge of the North Polar seas and lands is the result of the search for a strait leading to the Pacific; but the exploration of the Antarctic regions is mainly due to quests after a Terra Australis incognita. The belief in the existence of an Antarctic continent can be traced back to the year 1576, when Juan Fernandez sailed from the coast of Chile on a W.S.W. course, and was reported to have arrived, after a month's voyage, at a tierra firme, a pleasant, fertile land inhabited by highly civilized white people, dressed in woven cloth. If this story be not altogether apocryphal, it may be explained in part by supposing that Fernandez reached the coasts of New Zealand. At this time reports were in circulation respecting the Saloman Islands, discovered by Alvaro Mendana de Neyra in 1567, but which that seaman was unable to find on a second voyage made in 1595. The Saloman Islands were supposed so to abound in silver that in one place an entire mountain was composed of the precious metal. Mendana, however, did not realize the hopes that had prompted his enterprise: he and many of his companions died at Santa Cruz or Egmont Island, and the chief pilot, Pedro Fernandez de Quiros, conducted the shattered remnant of the squadron to Manila. This same Quiros was the first who sailed professedly to seek the Tierra Austral. His voyage, performed in 1605-6, had for result the discovery of Pitcairn's Island, the New Hebrides, and various other islands; and the passage of two vessels of the squadron, led by Luis Vaez de Torres, through the strait between Australia and New Guinea; but neither Quiros nor his second in command, Torres, went far to the south. Seven years previous to Quiros' voyage, or in 1599, Dirk Cherrits, in endeavouring to enter Magelhaen's Strait, in company with some ships belonging to Rotterdam, was separated from them in tempestuous weather, and driven southwards to latitude 64°, when he saw a high snowy land, since known by the name of South Shetland, and ascertained to extend southwards across the Antarctic Circle. Other voyages to the S. followed; but Captain Cook is the first navigator who is known to have actually entered within the circle just named. His voyage in 1773-4 was undertaken, as he states, to ascertain whether the unexplored part of the Southern Hemisphere be only an immense mass of water, or contains another continent, as speculative geography seemed to suggest. Of the discoveries that our great navigator made exterior to the Antarctic Circle this is not the place to speak; and it is merely necessary to say that he saw no land to the S. of Southern Thule or Sandwich Land, on the parallel of 60. S.; and that he entered within the Antarctic Circle only thrice, and for short distances,—namely, near the meridian of 40. E., between 100. and 110. W., and between 135. and 148. W.; the most southerly point attained to by him being 71. 10. S., on the 107th meridian, and on the 30th of January 1774. The Russian Bellinghausen discovered Petra Island in January 1821; Weddell in 1823 proceeded 3 degrees farther S. than Cook; Biscoe in 1831-3 discovered Enderby and Kemp islands, lying between the meridians of 45. and
60. E. Ballyen in 1839 discovered Sabrina Land and the small islands which bear his name; and Dumont D'Urville saw Adelie Land in 1840. These lands are mostly exterior to the Antarctic Circle; the S. end of South Shetland, Ballyen, and Petra islands being the only lands that actually cross it. South Victoria, containing Mount Terror, 10,880 feet high, and the active volcano Mount Erebus, 12,400 feet high, is the discovery of Rear-Admiral Sir James Clark Ross. The farthest point of south latitude reached by this persevering and enterprising officer was 78. 4. S.; and the Parry Mountains, the most southern known land, were seen extending about as far S. This southern land was traced from N. to S. for about 460 miles, and found everywhere barricaded by a high ledge of ice, on which a heavy surf was beating; so that landing was impossible, except on some small islands, which consisted of igneous rocks. The surface was everywhere thickly covered with snow, and there was not the smallest vestige of vegetation; but on the islands there were inconceivable myriads of penguins, whose deposits had formed a deep bed of guano. Cockburn Island, one of the South Shetland group, and not above a mile in diameter, but rising 2760 feet above the sea, lying in Lat. 64. 12. S., Long. 59. 49. W., is the most southern land on which vegetation has been detected. Its flora contains nineteen species, all belonging to the orders of mosses, algae, and lichens. The cliffs were streaked with the yellow Lecanora miniata; the Ulea crispa grew on the beach in decaying organized substances; and the minute mosses in the fissures of the rocks. One of the algae inhabited a pool of fresh water hardly two spans across, and sheltered by a projecting rock; the earth at the bottom, perhaps half an inch below, was hard frozen, and the water itself just thawing in the unusual warmth of the day which had raised the thermometer to 40° Fahrenheit. Collema crispa grew on the borders of the pool, and with it a green microscopic Conferva lecanora. The sea-weeds Iridaea micans and Adenocystis Lessoni, gathered on the shores of the island, were all floating. Vegetation could not be traced above a ledge of rocks which girt the island at the height of 1400 feet. The lichens ascended the highest. This land, therefore, lying 34° from the Antarctic Circle, on the outside, has a climate approaching closer to the absolute and perpetual snow-line than Arctic land approaching 17° nearer to the Pole. No terrestrial quadruped inhabits the lands within the Antarctic Circle, the marine cetaceans and seals being the only mammals that enter its area or approach it within many degrees of latitude. Organized specially to inhabit the chilly Antarctic waste of waters, the almost scaly Penguins resemble the Walrus and Seals in being able to travel long and far beneath the surface of the ocean, in seeking their food in its depths, and in scarcely quitting it except for the purposes of incubation. Indeed one species, the Solitary Penguin, carries its egg with it in a fold of skin when it roams far in search of food. The existence of such a creature, and of the Dodo, Moa, &c., furnishes an argument of certain species having been created solely for limited districts.
A glance at the north and south circumpolar maps will show the great contrast between the Arctic and Antarctic areas,—the one mostly of land, the other of sea. Aerial and marine currents operate in both in modifying the climate, and meet with less interference in the south; yet the summer temperature of the Antarctic Circle is the inferior one. Sir James Ross ascertained the mean temperature within the Antarctic Circle in 1841, for January, February, and March, to be 27°3,—that of February, passed in the highest latitude, being only 24°3 Fahr.; while the temperature of the surface sea-water for the first two months, passed between Lat. 66½. and 78., scarcely varied from 29°2 Fahr. (S. R.—N.)