HENRY HUDSON
The Arctic according to Mercator, the first to map the region in 1569. Largely mythical, before exploration this was the first map specifically of the North Pole. In the centre can be found ‘Rupes nigra et altissima’, the mythical black magnetic mountain believed to exist at the top of world, helping to explain the attraction of the compass needle.
While Europe’s missionaries were driven by Asia’s potential for proselytization, its merchants remained obsessed with its potential profit. The European fixation on reaching the resources of Asia, which in part had driven Drake on his southwesterly journey around South America to play merry hell with the Spanish, was being explored with a northerly focus too. The existence of such a navigable avenue was wholly theoretical, yet never did faith in its existence waver – the political and financial advantages it offered meant it simply had to be there. This conviction was steeled with contemporary misconceptions: that water of great depth and energy could not be frozen; that the Midnight Sun at the top of the world shone with such unbroken intensity that an uncongealed sea must await beyond a peripheral belt of ice. While cartographers seized on rumours and myths to manifest this transcontinental passage on maps in various unfounded forms like the ‘Strait of Anian’ and the ‘Great Sea of the West’, some of the greatest names in the history of European exploration made their reputations in the Arctic Ocean pursuing every inlet, bay and local rumour to exhaustion, navigating every channel with no promise of success, on the chance it betrayed an eventual thoroughfare to the glittering waters of the Pacific.
The first major expedition to find the Northwest Passage was made by Martin Frobisher in June 1576, backed by the merchant consortium the Muscovy Company and with the endorsement of Queen Elizabeth I. After sailing into Frobisher Bay in Canada’s Nunavut region (opposite Greenland’s west coast) on his first voyage, the story takes a bizarre turn with Frobisher’s discovery of a clod of black earth ‘as great as a half-penny loaf’. On his return to England three of four assayers dismissed it as worthless, while a fourth declared it to be gold-rich. This ensured the green light for a second, larger expedition in which all intention of finding a passage was dropped in favour of mining more of the golden ore. Frobisher returned triumphantly to London with 200 tons of the stuff in his hold; a third voyage would yield an equally large haul. However the material was later proven to be iron pyrite – with zero gold content, it was worthless.
By 1596 the Dutch explorer Willem Barentsz had led two unsuccessful voyages in search of a ‘Northeast’ passage around the northern coast of Siberia. The first had taken him as far as the curved shoehorn of Novaya Zemlya, a giant island group just above northern Russia; but a polar bear attack on board their ship (the sailors had wrestled it on deck to take it home as a prize) and an onslaught of icebergs had forced a return to the Netherlands. During the second voyage the ship again reached Novaya Zemlya and, despite suffering another polar bear attack that claimed two crew, successfully passed the southern tip of the archipelago to enter the Kara Sea north of Siberia. This was discovered to be frozen solid, and so the journey was halted once more.
Then came Barentsz’ third attempt, a voyage considered one of the greatest in the history of Polar exploration. Again the plan was to round Novaya Zemlya, but this time Barentsz was to lead his men north, up its west coast and over its northern headland, high into the Arctic. The rounding they achieved, discovering Bjørnøya (Bear Island) and beyond it Spitsbergen. But then the ice sheets closed swiftly around the ships, crushing them to splinters and stranding the Dutchmen in the bleakest of environments. The sixteen men were forced to overwinter in the bitter Arctic, the first attempt of this kind, and from the ships’ timber built a cabin which they named Het Behouden Huys (The Saved House). With average temperatures of -22°F (30°C) (and virtual darkness between mid-October to the end of February), comfort was with impromptu measures like using heated cannonballs to thaw their frozen beds, but by June supplies had run out and the desperate decision was made to take two small boats and head for Russia’s Kola Peninsula. Barentsz died in the attempt, but thirteen of his men, beset by scurvy, somehow survived the 1500-mile (2400km) southwesterly journey, and were rescued by Russian merchants.
Possessed of similar grit to Barentsz was Henry Hudson, an English explorer who appears on record for the first time in 1607, the year he headed a new northerly Muscovy Company mission to Asia. The plan was to sail directly across the North Pole, which was assumed to be unfrozen. The expedition made it as far as Spitsbergen off northern Norway, by their estimation reaching a latitude of 80°N, a new record. Beyond this point the ice was impenetrable and forced the navigators to turn back, but a year later the Muscovy Company again sent Hudson on the passage’s trail, this time via northern Russia. He reached Novaya Zemlya, but was forced back by the ice.
A third voyage in 1609 saw Hudson now sailing for England’s chief rival at the time, the Dutch East India Company, with orders to find an eastern passage. Ice in the Barents Sea north of Norway obstructed his path and he was forced to turn back a third time. Clearly frustrated, instead of returning to dock Hudson improvised and headed west to find a way through North America. After reaching Newfoundland, damage to his ship forced him south, and after a month the Englishman had entered New York harbour and sailed up what is now known as the Hudson river as far as Albany in search of the Pacific, claiming the area for the Netherlands. (This journey would be used by the Dutch to establish a trading post at this point, and whose presence just ten years later would expand to the founding of ‘New Amsterdam’, better known today as New York City, on Manhattan Island.)
Though Hudson had irked English authorities with his work for the Netherlands (his logbook had to be smuggled out to the Dutch ambassador), the value of his experience ensured he had the opportunity for redemption with a fourth voyage under an English banner in 1610. Aboard the optimistically named Discovery, the voyagers rounded the southern tip of Greenland, entered the Hudson Strait (originally discovered by Martin Frobisher who named it ‘Mistaken Strait’, as he felt it held no promise to a Northwest Passage), and with tremendous excitement entered the wide and seemingly endless Hudson Bay of northeastern Canada. They spent the autumn mapping its eastern shores, but by November had become trapped in the ice at James Bay and were forced ashore. When the ice released their ship in the spring of 1611, Hudson ordered that the mission resume to find the passage. However, for all his enthusiasm, his skills at reading his men were severely lacking. Riddled with scurvy and frostbite, and facing the prospect of months more of frozen hell, the crew mutinied and cast adrift Hudson, his son John and seven loyal crew in a small boat. The mutineers eventually made it home to England where they were arrested, but perhaps, because of the value of their knowledge, suffered no punishment. Hudson and his castaways were never seen again.
