Arctic Obsession

by Alexis S. Troubetzkoy

  June 26 proved arduous for the men:

  In the name of Jesus, and after prayer and supplication to God for good fortune and counsel, we now set to work to bring the Lamprenen alongside Enhiörningen and worked as diligently as we could in getting sails ready for us. But therein we encountered a great difficulty and much anxiety, because the Lamprenen stood high on the shore, having been carried up by the winter flood. We were consequently obliged first to unload all that was in her, and then look out for a high spring tide in order to haul her out. In this we succeeded, and brought her alongside the Enhiörningen. When we got on board the Enhiömingen, we were obliged first to throw overboard the dead bodies, which were then quite decomposed, as we could not move about or do anything there for had smell and stench, and yet were under the necessity of taking the Enhiörningen and placing on board Lamprenen victuals and other necessities for our use in crossing the sea, as far as we three persons could manage.

  For three weeks the small group toiled in the preparations for sailing. On the afternoon of Sunday, July 16, after prayers in the morning, sails were set and the Lamprenen moved out slowly from its winter imprisonment into the bay’s relatively open waters. Initial progress was slow because of the incessant ice floes. In addition, gales were encountered and then fogs, and the rudder was once broken by jagged ice and had to be repaired. A month later they found themselves hugging the north coast of Hudson Strait, making their way east under favourable winds at a rate of twenty-five to thirty miles a day. On September 11, “towards night a gale sprang up and our foresail was torn from the bolt-line, so that we three men had plenty to do to get it in, and then the ship was half full of water.” Three days later they passed the Orkneys and on the 20th Norway was sighted. Five days later the sloop sailed into Bergen; it “had returned into a Christian country. We poor men could not hold our tears for great joy, and thanked God that He had graciously granted us this happiness.”

  Munk closed his journal by thanking God for his safe delivery home: “… Thou hast saved me from icebergs in dreadful storms.… Thou has led me out of anxiety, disease and sickness.… Thou wast my highest pilot, counselor, guide and compass …” And then he quotes Isaiah 43: 2–3:

  Fear not, for I have redeemed thee ... When thou passest through

  the waters, I will be with thee, that the rivers shall not drown thee.

  A hundred years later James Knight, an official of the Hudson’s Bay Company, arrived to the area of Munk’s wintering to establish a trading post. He selected for the site the same “high ground” at the mouth of the Churchill River used by the earlier explorer to bury many of his dead. Traces of the tragic Danish expedition remained, but nothing was left of the Enhiörningen. Prior to sailing for home, Munk had effectively scuttled the vessel by walking out to it at low tide and drilling three major holes into the hull. He had hoped that high-tide water pouring through the cavities would anchor the vessel firmly to the ground sufficiently to prevent winter ice from moving it. The result of his efforts was quite the opposite — the water in the hold froze solidly and the ship splintered apart, with pieces being carried out to sea. Knight reported that:

  [I]t is a poor and miserable spot … for here is neither fish, fowl, nor game. Given time it will, I believe, prove advantageous for the Company, but it will never be good for those of its servants who must live here. We are compelled to build in a place where we cannot keep ourselves warm, for there is only lee on a sixth of the compass. Yet can I find no better place. The many graves and bones from the folk who lie buried here are a revelation of that which awaits us if we do not lay in supplies before the winter sets in. For although they were Danes and very hardy people, almost 130 [sic] of them lie buried here, and a great part of their graves lie under our building. I pray that the Lord may protect and preserve us.

  King Christian, disappointed as he no doubt was with the inconclusive results of Munk’s expedition, determined to give it another try, and the spirited explorer was ordered in 1621 to prepare for a fresh expedition. Work began on the outfitting of new vessels, but the effort was soon aborted for an inability to gather a willing crew. Tales of the initial expedition had been sensationally circulated, and sailors were simply scared off — no way would anyone hazard a repeat of such misadventure.

  A grim misadventure it certainly had been and the unparalleled tale of death is unlike any other in the history of Arctic exploration. Munk may rightly be accused of having given insufficient care to the provisioning and supply of his expedition. It must be noted, however, that the intelligence available to him on the western Arctic was scant and often fanciful. As for scurvy, virtually nothing at the time was known of the dread disease. Munk cannot be faulted for ineptitude or incompetence of the sort displayed by Willoughby or Hudson. Although his journey of exploration to Hudson Bay was void of tangible results, it is a notable story of endurance, fortitude, and skill.

  That Munk failed to enlist sailors for a fresh expedition for reasons of fear is one thing, but there was more to it than that. Europe at the time had just plunged itself into the Thirty Years’ War, one of the most destructive conflicts in its history. The war raged from France to Hungary, from Sweden to Transylvania. Denmark became enmeshed and Munk found himself putting out to sea on an altogether different mission. Protestant King Christian ordered him into battle against the Catholic navies of the Holy Roman Empire. Among his more notable achievements in that struggle was a successful blockade of the Weser River in the North Sea and attacks on German troops in the Baltic. In 1625 he was promoted to admiral and three years later he died, in all probability from a battle wound. (One alternative account has it that his death was caused by a blow allegedly suffered at the hands of the king, who in the course of a dispute furiously lashed out at him with a stick.)

  * * *

  At about the time that Munk was suffering through his winter at Churchill, William Baffin was leading an expedition into more northerly reaches of the Canadian Arctic. The celebrated navigator had once been in the employ of the Muscovy Company, serving on expeditions to Greenland and Spitzbergen. He possessed an uncanny skill in calculating latitude, and it was he who first recorded longitude by using lunar observations. The North West Company had made three unsuccessful attempts at uncovering the fabled passage west, but despite its failures it was prepared to launch yet another try. Henry Hudson’s Discovery was refitted and Baffin was engaged to lead the fresh expedition jointly with Hudson’s former shipmate, Robert Bylot, as the ship’s captain. A small crew of sixteen men and two boys was gathered and the little vessel set off from London on April 16, 1615. A month later the Discovery found itself off Resolution Island at the entrance to Hudson Strait. Along the way Baffin recorded, “We sayled through many great islands of ice,”[4] which he described as being over two hundred feet high with one at 240 feet. He then calculated that the visible part of the iceberg was only one-eighth of the whole with the bulk spreading beneath the waters.

  At this juncture, disagreement was had regarding which direction to proceed. Bylot wished to advance up the strait to explore the regions north of Hudson Bay, while Baffin urged a sail directly north, up Davis Strait past Frobisher Bay, and onward. Bylot prevailed and the Discovery began its journey west, retracing Hudson’s earlier path. It was slow going, what with the ice packs, storms, and vicious currents; it took three weeks to cover a distance of sixty miles.

  Anchoring off one of the Savage Islands, they heard the barking of dogs. Baffin went ashore with some men and found a small cluster of primitive tent-like shelters outside of which were tethered over thirty dogs “about the bigness of our mongrel mastiffs looking most like wolves.” The camp had obviously been abandoned in haste. Baffin continued:

  When finding no people, we went to the top of the hill where we saw one great cannoo, or boat, having about fourteen persons in it … being from us somewhat above a musket shott away. I called them (using some words of Greenlandish speech) making signes of friendship. They did the like
to us, but seeing them to be fearfull of us, and we did not willing to trust them, I made another signe to them, showing a knife and other small things which I left at the top of the hill, and returned down to their tents agayne.

  The five tents were made of sealskins and in searching through them they found, among other things, fourteen whale fins which they took, leaving in return some knives and beads. They also discovered in “a small leather bag a company of little images of men and one the image of a woman with a child on her back all of which I brought along” — the first recorded reference to Inuit art. The encounter — rather the non-encounter — with natives clearly showed that the Inuit had learned to exercise caution in any potential exchange with Europeans.

  On the following day, the Discovery weighed anchor and continued on its sail west. By July 8, it had come to Foxe Basin, the large, shallow body of water north of Hudson Bay, which is rarely free of ice. The hollowing winds and severe currents of the area discouraged further exploration in those parts, and having decided that they were not on the track of the passage, they turned about and headed for home, reaching Plymouth on September 8.

  * * *

  Baffin completed his account of this, his first voyage into the Canadian Arctic by stating, “And now it may be that some expect I should give my opynion concerning the passage. To these my answer must be, that doubtless there is a passage. But within this strayte, called Hundson’s Straytes, I am doubtfull … but whether there be or no, I will not affirm.”

  It was an inconclusive expedition, and no doubt as disappointing to those who financed it as it was to Baffin and Bylot. Whatever the regret, the principles of the North West Company remained resolute and the following year they sent off the same two men once more, but this time their path was pre-determined. According to specific written instructions, they were to follow Greenland’s west coast and try to reach 80°N, at which point they were to turn west and move “so far southerly that you may touch the north part of Japan.” On March 26, 1616, the Discovery put out from London on its mission.

  They arrived off Greenland in late May and began to follow the coastline. At 75°45' N they came upon a small Inuit enclave inhabiting a group of islands at a distance from shore. As soon as the natives spotted the ship, they fled, but with the Englishmen making every sort of friendly sign they soon returned. Very quickly, gifts were being exchanged — objects of iron “which they highly esteeme” for sealskins, seal meat, and blubber. Baffin took pains in describing the people, their tents, clothing, and hunting equipment. Some vignettes: the women “are marked in their face with diverse black strokes or lines, the skin being raised with some sharpe instrument when they were young, and black color put therein.” Regarding Inuit religion, “I can little say, only they have a kind of worship or adoration of the sunne, which continually they will point onto and strike their hand on their breast, crying ‘Ilyout’.” On their funerary custom: “Their dead they burie on the side of hills where they live making a pile of stones over them, yet not so close but that wee might see the dead body, the aire being so piercing that it keepeth them from stinking savour.”

  The Discovery moved on after a few days at the islands. Battling the inevitable ice floes, currents, and storms, it arrived on July 5 at the head of Baffin Bay to a narrow body of water, the mouth of Smith Sound. Here they not only encountered massive blocks of ice, but they were whipped by a storm “so vehement that it blew away our fourcourse [foresail], and … wee lay adrift till about eight a clock.” Refuge was attempted in a cove, but the force of the wind broke the cable and the anchor was lost. A dead end had been reached and nothing remained but to return back, this time following the coastline of adjacent Ellesmere Island. Disappointed as Baffin may have been in not reaching the targeted 80°N, he had come marginally close to it: 77°45' N, further north by 300 miles than Davis had thirty years earlier — a new record that was to remain unbroken for over two hundred years.

  * * *

  As the Discovery progressed south, it prodded — as well as conditions permitted — every sound along the way, the most promising of which was the ice-clogged Lancaster Sound. It was at that point that Baffin first expressed a doubt on the existence of the fabled Northwest Passage. “Here our hope of passage began to be less,” he wrote. (Poor Baffin: nearly three centuries later Roald Amundsen the Norwegian explorer, completed the first successful navigation of the long-sought waterway, which he entered through Lancaster Sound). Baffin’s expedition returned home empty-handed once more. He was, however, able to inform his principals of the existence of vast herds of whales in the upper reaches of Baffin Bay, but, he warned, accessibility to those parts was possible only in the month of July.

  In those early forays into the eastern Arctic, it was the London merchants who were the principals and their motive, pure and simple, was profit. The captains and crews who carried them out were opportunists cum visionaries eager to make a name for themselves, to find favour with their monarchs and, of course, to receive suitable rewards. By 1630, English interest in providing further venture capital into continued exploration had all but died, particularly after Baffin’s opinion that the passage did not exist — “when we coasted the land so far to the southward, hope of passage was none.” At the time, the continent was well enmeshed in the Thirty Years’ War and monarchs had no time for overseas exploration. Nevertheless, two Englishmen independent of each another did meet success persuading investors for a final try. The Bristol Society of Merchant Adventurers agreed to outfit a ship for Thomas James, while a second consortium of merchants sponsored Luke Foxe. Neither was aware of the other, and in Spring 1631, they set out from different ports within five days of one another in similarly sized ships each carrying crews of twenty men and two boys.

  Both captains entered Hudson Bay and explored various west coast coves and straits, but, as with the earlier expeditions, no trace was found of a route to Cathay. Imagine, however, their utter astonishment when in mid-July, near the top of James Bay, the two ships spotted each other at a distance, sails billowing, and fast approaching one another. Amid much excitement, enthusiastic greetings were exchanged by the crews and James invited Foxe to dine on board his vessel. “I was well entertained and feasted by Captaine James with varieties of such cheer his sea provisions could afford,”[5] writes Foxe in his memoir. But he quickly moved to find fault with his host’s seamanship, stating, “That Gentleman could discourse of Arte, as observations, calculations and the like, and showed me many instruments, but when I found that he was no Seaman, I did blame those very much who counseled him to make choice of that ship for a voyage of such importance.” During the meeting, James informed his guest that “he was going to the Emperor of Japan with letters from his Majestie.” Since no such munificence had fallen to Foxe, possibly it was a touch of jealousy that prompted the unflattering comments regarding the other’s seamanship.

  After wintering in the Arctic the men returned home, each met by disenchanted investors. James had essentially sailed charted ground, while Foxe managed only to penetrate Foxe Basin; nothing substantial had been achieved. Both men left behind rich accounts of their travels and each confirmed Baffin’s contention that the Northwest Passage through the eastern Arctic simply did not exist.

  Notes

  1. C.A.A. Gosch, ed., Danish Arctic Expedition, 1605–1620 (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1847), 8.

  2. During the Napoleonic Wars, the Royal Navy made compulsory a daily dose of lime juice for all its personnel at sea — hence “Limey,” the pejorative for Englishman.

  3. Samuel de Champlain, Voyages du Sieur de Champlain (1613; reprint, Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1971), 147.

  4. Clement Markham, The Voyages of William Baffin, 1612–1622 (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1881), 114.

  5. Miller Christy, The Voyages of Captain Luke Foxe in Search of the Northwest Passage (London: 1894), 222.

  6

  Russians in the Arctic

  IN THE LATE SEVENTEENTH century, Peter th
e Great burst onto the Russian stage, all six-foot-eight of him, a man of boundless energy, burning intellectual curiosity, and unfettered ambition. His first order of business was to open a “window to the west” in order to drag his parochial and unwilling people into the world outside their country. But he was equally set on expanding and consolidating his empire; a push into Siberia and the Pacific was of no less importance than looking to Western Europe. Like the double-headed eagle of the Russian coat of arms, Peter gazed east and west simultaneously. The prospect of a Northeast Passage particularly intrigued him, a sea lane that would connect his Russia with China. What a splendid avenue it would be for the expansion and consolidation of the empire and for further developing the lucrative fur trade.

  Early in his forty-three-year reign, the young tsar travelled to Western Europe, and when in England, in 1698, he met and took a liking to William Penn, an eccentric Quaker who some years earlier had received the proprietary rights to the colony of Pennsylvania. The two men, communicating in the Dutch language, met on several occasions and got along famously. As discussions one evening turned to geography, Penn challenged Peter to determine once and for all whether Eurasia was connected to North America, a tantalizing, unresolved question that continued to challenge the scientific world.

  A quarter century later, after years of warfare and frenetic empire-building and transformation, Peter set out to meet that challenge. If the landmasses were unconnected, a way might be found to the Northern Sea Route from the Pacific end. On the recommendation of the relatively new Ministry of Marine, he found the person who might lead such an exploration, the forty-four-year old Vitus Bering, a trusted Danish officer serving as a captain in the Russian Navy. Bering had at one time sailed for the Dutch East India Company and was reputed to be an excellent seaman. A stern, plodding individual, he did not shirk responsibility; he did what he was ordered, but rarely ventured beyond those bounds. The Dane, as Professor Neatby puts it in Discovery in Russian and Siberian Waters, “was a brave and experienced mariner who executed his orders with all the thoroughness and exactness which conditions permitted but without any imaginative overtones.”[1] Inquisitiveness seems not to have been his forte, and he is judged as having lacked the sort of zealousness that impelled committed explorers to push limits.