An Icelandic map from 1590, known as the Skálholt Map, also features a ‘Winlandiæ Promontorium’ where Newfoundland is situated. Another map, drawn by Danish theologian Hans Poulson Resen in 1605, is similar to the Skálholt Map, but Resen wrote that it was based on a map that was only 100 years old (‘ex antiqua quadam mappa, rudi modo delineata, ante aliquot centenos annos…’). Ingstad believed that both the Skálholt Map and Resen’s map were based on a common map dating from before the time of Columbus.
A third map, the Vinland Map, on which America is represented as an island–‘Vinlandia Insula’–was revealed to the public in 1965, after some of the world’s most eminent map experts from Yale University and the British Museum concluded that the map was drawn at some time around the year 1440, fifty years before Columbus set out across the Atlantic. The map was therefore deemed the oldest known map of America–but others were less convinced. First, nobody knew of a single source from the year 1440 or later that referred to the map, and second, Greenland had been reproduced just a little too accurately. Leif Eriksson’s name, mentioned in one of the map’s texts, had also been Latinised to ‘Erissonius’–a practice that only became common from the 1600s. Following much study, the map is today believed to be a forgery from more recent times.
A map of the Arctic Ocean, based on the notes of Dutch explorer Willem Barentsz and made just before he died in Novaya Zemlya in 1597. The map depicts the sea and stretches of coastline in the north with impressive accuracy. The Barents Sea north of Norway was later named after Barentsz. Het neuwe land is Svalbard, and this is the first time the group of islands featured on a map.
But the idea that someone might have drawn such a map around the year 1440 is not an improbable one, because the voyages made to and from America, Greenland and Iceland continued. In the year 1075, in his Account of the Diocese of Hamburg, the archbishop’s activities and island kingdoms in the north, Adam of Bremen wrote: ‘The King of Denmark has also told me about yet another island, which many have observed in this ocean. It is called Vinland, […] and this is not idle rumours nor fabrication, I have heard it from trustworthy Danish sources.’ The Icelandic Annals from 1121 state that ‘Erik, bishop of Greenland, set out to search for Vinland,’ while those from 1347 state: ‘A ship came from Greenland. […] There were seventeen men onboard and they had sailed to Markland, but were driven here by a storm at sea.’ Markland was the name Leif Eriksson gave to an area north of Vinland. A cosmography possibly originating from Abbot Nikolás of Munkatverå, who died in 1159, states: ‘South of Greenland is Helluland. Then comes Markland, and then it is not far to Vinland the Good, which some believe goes out of Africa, and if so, the sea must flow between Vinland and Markland.’ Hauksbók tells of Ari, who set out to sea and reached White Men’s Land, also known as Great Ireland: ‘It lies in the ocean to westward, near Vinland the Good, said to be a six-day sail west from Ireland.’
But how much of this Norse knowledge of the northern regions found its way to the continent’s cartographers? Very little. On none of the most important medieval maps, such as the Hereford Mappa Mundi and Ebstorf Map, do we find any real attempt to represent that which lies north of Thule and the Arctic Circle. But there is one exception–the prayer book map from the mid-1200s, on which there are two islands to the north of Norway, Ipboria and Aramphe, which are named for two peoples–the Hyperboreans and the Arampheans–who the Greeks believed lived in the far north.
In the year AD 77, in his Naturalis Historia, Pliny the Elder wrote about the Amalehian Sea, ‘a name that in the language of the natives means “frozen”’; in the vicinity of this sea were islands inhabited by people with hooves instead of feet, or ears so large they could cover their entire body with them. Adam of Bremen wrote that ‘beyond Norway, which is the outermost country in the Nordic region, there are no human settlements, only the terrible and endless sea, which surrounds the whole world.’ In 1410, Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly wrote in his Tractatus de imagine mundi: ‘Beyond Thule, the last island of the Ocean, after one day’s sail the sea is frozen and stiff. At the Poles there live great ghosts and ferocious beasts, the enemies of man.’
NORTHERN PASSAGES | The systematic mapping of the polar regions only began when the Europeans attempted to find a sea route to Asia that avoided sailing to the south of Africa or America–a Northwest Passage north of America, or a Northeast Passage north of Eurasia.
Once certain individuals had started to imagine that America might not be part of Asia, as Columbus had believed, they started to look for a way around or through this new continent in order to reach the riches of the East. In 1487, Italian explorer John Cabot kicked off the search for the Northwest Passage when attempting to sail north of the American continent–twenty-three years before Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan sailed around the continent’s southern tip. Cabot was therefore the first person to sail into the Arctic labyrinth that would be only gradually mapped over the next 400 years, until Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen and his crew aboard the Gjøa finally reached the Pacific Ocean in 1906. Cabot was far from achieving his goal when he came up against land and ice, having only made it as far as Newfoundland. On his second expedition in 1498, Cabot and four of his ships disappeared without trace–an ominous omen of what awaited any explorer who dared to venture into these waters.
Cabot’s maps have unfortunately not survived, but from looking at Spanish cartographer Juan de la Cosa’s map of the east coast of America from 1500 it is clear that they were circulated. Here, at 52 degrees north, de la Cosas has drawn five English maritime flags, and written: ‘Mar descubierta ynglesie in’ (‘Sea discovered by the English’). The Portuguese also made attempts to find a route eastward via the west–explorer Gaspar Corte-Real reached Greenland, Labrador and Newfoundland in 1500 and 1501, and on an anonymous map from 1502, these areas are littered with Portuguese maritime flags. A text beside Greenland states that the area ‘was discovered on behalf of Dom Manuel, King of Portugal, they believe this is outermost Asia.’ Corte-Real also disappeared without trace.
But the British didn’t give up hope of finding their way through the northern regions, and in 1541 Roger Barlow, a merchant from Bristol, presented his Brief Summe of Geographie to Henry VIII. Here, he wrote that since the Spanish and Portuguese had established their overseas empires in the east, south and west, there was only one direction left in which to discover anything, and this was ‘the northe’. In 1553, a British expedition set out along the Norwegian coast in an attempt to find the Northeast Passage along Russia’s as yet unmapped northern coast–they were able to do this because Olaus Magnus’s Carta Marina from 1539 had shown that to the north of Scandinavia was open sea. As they rounded the northern tip of Norway, one of the captains named the cliffs at Knyskanes the North Cape–and the name continues to be used today. But just a short time later, the expedition was shipwrecked. Sixty-three men aboard two of the ships died of starvation and disease while overwintering on the Kola Peninsula.
The cartographers of the age disagreed on whether any northern passage to Asia existed, whether to the east or west. Many believed that America and Asia were one and the same continent, meaning that no passage was necessary–you would simply return to the Atlantic if you sailed along the north side of the continent towards the west. On the Portuguese map from 1502, the easternmost coast of Asia continues east off the map, perhaps indicating that it connects to America somewhere beyond the parchment, and the same is true of two Italian world maps produced a few years later.
In 1507, Johannes Ruysch, a Dutchman who may have been a member of Cabot’s first expedition, created a world map on which Greenland is clearly connected to the eastern part of an Asian-American continent. Ruysch also connected Norway with a spit of land named Ventelant, which is in turn connected to Filapelat and Pilapelant, which extends northwards towards an island all the way up at the North Pole named Hyperborei Europe.
On a globe dating from around 1505, North America is broken up into a number
of small islands that pose no obstacle whatsoever to anyone wishing to reach Asia in the east. These same islands are also included on German geographer Johannes Schöner’s globe from 1515, but on his later globes, from 1520, 1523 and 1533, the North American continent becomes larger and larger, until it eventually links up with Asia.
The lack of reliable information meant that the areas of the Atlantic above 55 degrees north not only posed a challenge to cartographers–they also offered them free rein. Not everyone was as conservative as the Italian cartographer Giacomo Gastaldi had been in 1556, when he drew a map on which the northern regions were completely blank–and nor did Gastaldi remain so himself. On a world map from 1562, he added an opening between America and Asia that he named the Streti di Anian–the Strait of Anian. He probably took the name from Marco Polo’s travelogues, where Ania is the name given to one of China’s provinces, but the strait was pure conjecture. It remains striking, however, that Gastaldi placed it exactly where in reality the Bering Strait divides the two continents.
The Strait of Anian enjoyed a long life on European maps–it appears again on a map included in the English chronicler George Best’s book True Discourse from 1578. Best had been a member of Captain Martin Frobisher’s expedition in search of the Northwest Passage two years earlier, equipped with Mercator’s world map from 1569 and Ortelius’s atlas from 1570. Both showed a navigable route to the Pacific via the north side of the American continent. When in late July they sailed into Frobisher Bay, a bay at the south-east corner of Baffin Island, Frobisher thought he had Asia to his right and America to his left, and that the Pacific was just on the other side. In reality, 4,390 kilometres remained before the expedition would reach Asia’s easternmost point. Due to heavy snow and the loss of a lifeboat, Frobisher turned around, just thirty-two kilometres from the end of the bay, convinced that he had discovered the Northwest Passage. He named it Frobisher Strait to indicate its status as the Strait of Magellan’s northern counterpart. On the map included in True Discourse, the area Frobisher’s expedition had reached is represented as a kingdom of islands, where the large and open ‘Frobussher’s Straightes’ runs all the way to the Pacific via the Strait of Anian. Once back home in London, Frobisher sent word of where he had been to both Mercator and Ortelius. Ortelius made the journey across to England to obtain first-hand information about the new discoveries.
Meanwhile, Dutch navigator Willem Barentsz was looking for the Northeast Passage, and in 1596 made a third attempt to sail past Novaya Zemlya and on to the east. On 4 June, his expedition sighted the North Cape–but from here, an obstinate skipper set the expedition’s course a good deal further to the west than Barentsz had instructed. The next day they encountered the sea ice, and crew member Gerrit de Veer wrote in his diary that this also drove them westwards: ‘therefore we wound about south-west and by west until two glasses were run out, and after that three glasses more south south-west, and then south three glasses, to sail to the island that we saw, as also to shun the ice. The ninth of June we found the island, that lay under 74 degrees and 30 minutes, and (as we guessed) it was about 20 miles long.’ They called the island Beyren Eylandt–Bear Island–after having fought a polar bear: ‘we saw a white bear, which we rowed after with our boat, thinking to cast a rope about her neck; but when we were near her, she was so great that we dare not do it, but rowed back again to our ship to fetch more men and our arms, and so made to her again with muskets, rifles, halberds and hatchets,’ de Veer wrote, describing how the crew fought the bear for two hours because their ‘weapons could do her little hurt’, before the bear finally succumbed.
Ten days later, the crew spotted a number of jagged mountaintops at 80 degrees north, and Barentsz named the area Spitsbergen. Despite the fact that they sailed north of these mountains, and travelled on down the west side as they mapped the coast from north to south, turning eastwards again when they reached the southern tip, they believed the area to be a part of Greenland.
Barentsz and four members of his crew would never return home–they died at the northern tip of Novaya Zemlya, where they were forced to spend the winter when their ship became stuck in the pack ice. But during the winter, Barentsz completed a map of the northern regions, which was published posthumously in 1598–the first map to show Bear Island and Svalbard, and the first of many on which islands were no longer drawn around the Pole, and which instead presented the open Arctic Ocean.
NORTHWEST | In 1610, English explorer Henry Hudson discovered what is today known as the Hudson Strait, and was therefore the first European to sail into the huge Hudson Bay in northern Canada. Considering the bay’s size, it is little wonder that Hudson believed he had reached the Pacific and would arrive in California if he simply followed the coast to the south-west. The expedition therefore came to an abrupt end in James Bay, with a highly unpopular overwintering that led to mutiny. Hudson and eight other members of his crew set out in a lifeboat, but were never heard from again.
The mutineers must have taken Hudson’s logbook home with them–or at least it appears that way, since Dutch engraver Hessel Gerritsz seems to have used it as a source when drawing a map of the area for the book Detectio Freti Hudsoni (Discovery of the Hudson Strait) in 1612. The map shows a Mare Magnum–large sea–in the far west, which Hudson would have discovered if only he had stayed further north.
The British therefore returned to Hudson Bay to look for an opening further west. In 1615, navigator and cartographer William Baffin noticed that the strongest tide, which he believed to come from a north-westerly sea, flowed from the northern Davis Strait alongside Greenland, and not the westerly Hudson Strait. Baffin therefore set the expedition’s course for the north, and he and his crew made it as far as Smith Sound at 78 degrees north–only half a degree from the sound where the Fram would harbour for the winter just 282 years later. Along the way, Baffin discovered several sea routes that stretched out towards the west, and on 12 July recorded in the ship’s log that they were situated off ‘another great Sound, lying in the latitude of 74° 20′ N, and we called it Sir James Lancaster’s Sound.’ Little did Baffin know that his ship was lazily bobbing off what in the 1800s would turn out to be the entrance to the Northwest Passage. Unaware of just how close he had come, Baffin wrote that his hope of finding a passage through the north was diminishing day by day due to the overwhelming masses of ice. Members of his crew were also suffering from scurvy and other diseases. Safely home in England, he concluded resignedly: ‘There is no passage.’
But Baffin’s pessimism did not sit particularly well with Samuel Purchas, the editor who published Baffin’s travel writings and who was keen for Britain to take to the seas once again. Purchas therefore only published Baffin’s log, and not his maps, and so these have been lost. This is a shame, as Baffin, perhaps the most eminent navigator of his time–he was a pioneer when it came to finding longitude values through observations of the Moon–probably put more work into the creation of his maps than the log. Instead, Purchas chose to use The North Part of America by mathematician Henry Briggs–on this map, the Pacific coast of America extends out to the north-east, towards a Hudson Bay described as ‘a fair entrance to ye nearest and most temperate passage to Japan & China.’ Purchas’s desire to find a passage was so strong that he prioritised a speculative map drawn by an armchair geographer over a map drawn by someone who had actually been to the region in question.
In 1619, three years after Baffin, a Dano-Norwegian expedition led by Jens Munk sailed into Hudson Bay. King Christian IV, inspired by the Norse Sagas about the discovery of settlements, had dreams of recreating a kind of northern empire, and so dispatched a frigate, the Enhiörningen, and a yacht, the Lamprenen, with a total of sixty-five men on board. But the expedition ended in catastrophe–forced to spend the winter on the west coast of the bay, an entire sixty-two men lost their lives. The three survivors, with Munk among them, incredibly managed to sail the Lamprenen all the way back to Bergen–where they were thrown in jail for having
destroyed one of the king’s ships. They were eventually pardoned, however, and in 1624 Munk wrote his Navigatio, septentrionalis. Det er: Relation Eller Bescriffuelse om Seiglads oc Reyse paa denne Nordvestiske Passagie, som nu kaldis Nova Dania (Navigatio, septentrionalis. Or: A Relation or Description of the Voyage to the Northwest Passage, which is now called Nova Dania), which included three maps. Considering the expedition’s terrible fate, and the fact that no permanent settlements were founded, it is surprising that the name Nova Dania stuck. It was featured on several future maps–and appeared in Dutch cartographer Tobias Conrad Lotter’s pocket atlas as late as 1762.
In 1717, almost 100 years after Munk’s expedition, British explorer James Knight arrived at the location where Munk had spent the winter to discover shallow graves and the remains of bones spread across the area–‘a revelation of that which awaits us if we do not lay in supplies before the winter sets in… I pray that the Lord may protect and preserve us.’ Knight later disappeared without trace on another expedition further north.
NORTHEAST | The Russians explored and laid claim to the areas to the east and north of the Eurasian continent, and in 1648 an expedition led by Cossack explorer Semyon Dezhnev arrived in the northern part of the Pacific that, 128 years later, would be named the Bering Strait–the true Strait of Anian between Asia and America.
Vitus Bering was a high-ranking Danish captain in the Russian Navy. After having set out on an expedition to travel as far east as he could towards the end of the 1720s, all the way to the Kamchatka Peninsula and the northern Pacific, he was tasked with mapping the entire northern coast of Russia by Tsarina Anna Ivanovna. Three years later, four groups of men each began mapping their allocated sections–fighting against challenging ice conditions, freezing cold and inaccessible routes to complete the enormous project. A significant number of officers had to be demoted before the project was finally completed in 1741.
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