Arctic exploration

• 1. Introduction

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  Arctic exploration began, as far as records tell us, in 325 BC, when a Greek sailor named Pytheas pushed north past the known world and reached a sea he described as "curdled" with ice. He had set out from the Mediterranean colony of Massilia, which we now call Marseille, looking for the source of tin. What he found instead was the edge of something far stranger: a frozen ocean, lights rippling across the sky, and a sun that refused to set. His contemporaries thought he was lying. The geographer Strabo dismissed his accounts as fantasy. Yet Pytheas had glimpsed a region that would draw explorers, merchants, and dreamers for the next two thousand years. What drove them north across ice-choked seas? What did they find when they got there? And who, in the end, actually reached the farthest point on the globe?

• 2. Myth and Origins

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  Long before anyone sailed north of the Arctic Circle, ancient writers imagined a paradise there. Herodotus placed the mythical Hyperboreans beyond the Massagetae and the Issedones, two Central Asian peoples, which would put their homeland somewhere in the vicinity of Siberia. The twelve labors of Heracles sent him hunting a golden-antlered hind in Hyperborea. Scholars have noted that the reindeer is the only deer species whose females grow antlers, which may point the legend toward arctic or subarctic territory.

  In 1883, Austro-Hungarian ethnologist Karl Penka explored these connections in his Origins of the Aryans. Two decades later, Indian independence activist Bal Gangadhar Tilak published The Arctic Home in the Vedas in 1903, dedicated to philologist and indologist Max Müller, with whom Tilak had discussed ideas before the book was finished. The theory attracted Russian nationalist attention through the work of Soviet historian Natalya Romanovna Guseva and Soviet ethnographer S.V. Zharnikova, who argued for a northern Urals Arctic homeland of Indo-Aryan and Slavic peoples.

  William F. Warren, the first President of Boston University, had laid the original groundwork in his book Paradise Found or the Cradle of the Human Race at the North Pole. The scientist and author John G. Bennett addressed the idea in a 1963 research paper titled "The Hyperborean Origin of the Indo-European Culture." Most scholars today consider this entire hypothesis controversial at best, and often characterize it as pseudohistory. Hindu nationalist Madhavrao Sadashivrao Golwalkar, in his 1939 publication We or Our Nationhood Defined, claimed that Hindus had lived in undisputed possession of their land for over eight or even ten thousand years before any foreign invasion.

• 3. Medieval Pathfinders

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  Naddodd stumbled onto Iceland by accident in the 860s, driven off course by harsh weather while sailing from Norway to the Faroe Islands. A generation later, a Norse sailor named Gunnbjörn Ulfsson was blown off course in a storm and caught sight of the Greenland coast. His report reached Erik the Red, an outlawed chieftain who used it to establish a settlement on Greenland in 985. Those early colonies thrived at first and then faded, disappearing around 1450. The original explanation pointed to the Little Ice Age, but recent studies suggest the abandonment had more complex causes.

  Greenland's settlers pressed farther west, searching for better pasturage and hunting grounds, and discovered the lands they called Vinland, Markland, and Helluland. Where exactly those places were remains a live debate among modern scholars.

  The Scandinavians also pushed north along their own peninsula. The Viking Ohthere of Hålogaland rounded the Scandinavian Peninsula and reached the Kola Peninsula and the White Sea as early as 880. Russian monks founded the Pechenga Monastery on the north of the Kola Peninsula in 1533. From their base at Kola, a seafaring people called the Pomors explored the Barents Region, Spitsbergen, and Novaya Zemlya. Pomors founded the settlement of Mangazeya east of the Yamal Peninsula in the early 16th century and established a continuous sea route from Arkhangelsk to the mouth of the Yenisey by the 17th century. In 1648, the Cossack Semyon Dezhnyov opened the strait between America and Asia that would later carry the name Bering Strait.

• 4. The Passage Hunters

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  A translation event in 1409 changed the course of Arctic exploration. When Ptolemy's Geographia was rendered into Latin, Western European navigators gained the concepts of latitude and longitude for the first time. Better charts meant bolder routes, and within a century, the race was on to find sea lanes connecting Europe to Asia around the top of the world.

  Martin Frobisher took three voyages between 1576 and 1578 to what is now the Canadian Arctic, determined to forge a trade route from England westward to India. Frobisher Bay bears his name today. In July 1583, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who had written a treatise on the Northwest Passage and backed Frobisher's expeditions, claimed Newfoundland for the English crown. Two years later, under the employ of Elizabeth I, John Davis entered Cumberland Sound on Baffin Island. Davis divided his four ships to search separately for a westward passage, failed to break through the ice, but reported to his sponsors that the passage was "a matter nothing doubtfull," and secured funding for two more expeditions. In 1609, Henry Hudson sailed for the Dutch East India Company up the river now bearing his name, reaching present-day Albany, New York, before turning back.

  For the Northeast Passage, the search began with an idea floated by Russian diplomat Dmitry Gerasimov in 1525. In the mid-16th century, an expedition led by Sir Hugh Willoughby and Richard Chancellor ended in catastrophe: Willoughby's crew was shipwrecked off the Kola Peninsula and died of scurvy. Chancellor survived, made it to Arkhangelsk, met a delegation from Tsar Ivan the Terrible, and launched the Muscovy Company to promote trade between England and Russia. In 1596, Dutch navigator Willem Barentsz led an expedition that discovered Spitsbergen and Bear Island. The full Northeast Passage was not completed until 1878, when Finnish-Swedish explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld sailed it from west to east on the Vega expedition, with Lieutenant Louis Palander of the Swedish Royal Navy as the ship's captain.

• 5. Conquering the Northwest

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  Sir Robert McClure was credited with discovering the Northwest Passage by sea in 1851, when he looked from Banks Island across M'Clure Strait and saw Melville Island. But the strait was blocked by young ice and not passable for ships. The only workable route, linking Lancaster Sound with Dolphin and Union Strait, was first used that same year by John Rae, who traveled by foot and dog sled with parties of fewer than ten people.

  The full sea passage fell to Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen in 1906. Amundsen had sailed just in time to escape creditors who were trying to stop the expedition. His vessel was the converted 47-ton herring boat Gjøa, and the journey took three years. At the end of it, he walked into the city of Eagle, Alaska, and sent a telegram announcing his success. The route was not commercially viable; some of the waterways were extremely shallow.

  Knud Rasmussen, who lived from 1879 to 1933, approached the Northwest Passage from a different direction entirely. He grew up in Greenland speaking Greenlandic and Danish, and became the first Greenlander of Inuit and European descent to cross the passage by dog sled. Known as the father of Eskimology, Rasmussen and his friend Peter Freuchen took part in seven Thule Expeditions, named after the mythical ultima Thule that had captivated Greek writers centuries earlier.

• 6. Race to the Pole

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  On the 6th of April 1909, Robert Peary claimed to have become the first person in recorded history to reach the North Pole. He had traveled with dogsleds and three support crews who turned back at successive stages before the final push. The claim has never been settled: many modern explorers, including Olympic skiers with modern equipment, argue that Peary could not have covered the distance in the time he reported. Frederick Cook had claimed to reach the Pole in 1908, but that assertion gained even less acceptance.

  The question of who truly arrived first became tangled with aviation. On the 9th of May 1926, Americans Richard E. Byrd and Floyd Bennett claimed to have flown over the Pole in a Fokker F.VIIa/3m Tri-motor monoplane. Three days later, on the 12th of May 1926, the airship Norge crossed the Pole with a crew that included Roald Amundsen and American sponsor Lincoln Ellsworth. Norge was designed and piloted by Italian Umberto Nobile. This overpass is considered the first undisputed sighting of the Pole. Nobile made a second overflight on the 24th of May 1928, but his airship ran into a storm, crashed on the ice, and Amundsen disappeared while flying to help with the rescue.

  The first people confirmed to have stood at the Pole were a Soviet party in 1948 under Aleksandr Kuznetsov, who landed aircraft nearby and walked the final stretch. On the 3rd of August 1958, an American submarine reached the Pole submerged and then traveled under the entire Polar ice cap. On the 17th of March 1959, a submarine surfaced at the Pole and dispersed the ashes of explorer Sir Hubert Wilkins. On the 19th of April 1968, Ralph Plaisted became the first surface traveler confirmed to have reached the Pole, arriving by snowmobile; the US Air Force independently verified his position. In 1969, Wally Herbert reached the Pole on foot and by dog sled, on the 60th anniversary of Peary's disputed expedition. The final distinction went to Richard Weber of Canada and Misha Malakhov of Russia, who in 1995 became the first people to reach the North Pole on foot or skis and return with no outside help, no dogs, no aircraft, and no resupplies. No one has completed that journey since.