(a) Arctic: The North-East and North-West Passages.
Although polar exploration is not very directly associated with geographical theory at large, it has been associated with certain individual geographical theories which occupy important positions in our history as having held the minds of men for long periods, and as owing their proof or disproof to some of the most noteworthy exploits in the story of exploration. There is sometimes a tendency to suppose that polar, or at any rate arctic, exploration has always been concerned mainly with the attempt to penetrate as far north as possible along one meridian or another, and that any discoveries made en route have been merely incidental. But the mere desire to set a more northerly or southerly limit to human travel, and ultimately to reach the Poles, really belongs to a relatively late period in the history of arctic and antarctic work. Taking arctic exploration first, we find that its object was in its early stages mainly commercial; from that object there naturally developed a desire to extend geographical knowledge, and, lastly, the extension of many branches of scientific knowledge was served by that particular branch of exploratory work.
Some reference has already been made to the early75 knowledge of arctic lands acquired by Scandinavian seamen, who in the second half of the ninth century had carried not only their commercial explorations but also their actual rule round the North Cape and as far as the White Sea. At this period they also reached Iceland; but they had been preceded there by holy men from Ireland, as is stated by Dicuil about 825. In the tenth century Greenland became known to the Norwegians, and during its ninth decade Eric the Red visited the western coast of that land, and colonization and more or less regular intercommunication were carried on thereafter until the early part of the fifteenth century. In the year 1000 Leif Ericsson reached that part of the North American coast which he named Vinland. A second expedition under Thorfinn Karlsefne reached the same coast by way of Labrador and Newfoundland, but these discoveries were not followed up. In the northerly direction Spitsbergen was found by the close of the twelfth century, and, in the easterly, Novaya Zemlya a little later.
We have already seen something of the effect which these discoveries had upon European geographical studies and cartography; and it has been pointed out that their effect is still more to be observed when, in that brilliant final decade of the fifteenth century which witnessed the triumphs of Columbus and Gama, John Cabot was despatched by a company of Bristol merchants across the Atlantic, and reached Cape Breton and Nova Scotia as some believe, or at least Newfoundland, for at Bristol many Scandinavian merchants were settled, and doubtless helped to inspire this and succeeding journeys. A second journey was made by Cabot in 1498, and in 1500 to 1501 a Portuguese, Gaspar Cortereal, visited eastern Greenland and76 Newfoundland, and these voyages had the incidental result of opening up the important Newfoundland fisheries. But the ultimate object of exploration in this direction, which now and for a long succeeding period possessed the minds of men, was to discover a north-west passage which was held to exist and to be feasible for commerce between Europe and the Indies; and we shall presently see that a similar north-east passage along the north coast of Europe itself and Asia to the same goal was no less eagerly sought after. Cortereal may have seen the opening of Hudson’s Strait, and, though he was lost on a second voyage (as was his brother who sought him), the possibility of finding a practicable north-west passage attracted the Portuguese as well as others, but only for a little while—their instincts like their interests led them southward, not northward.
We cannot here detail all the work of explorers who, in the sixteenth century and after, extended discovery in one or another of these directions; nor, indeed, in the case of some of the earlier journeys, do the records admit of doing so. It is thus probable that in the second half of the sixteenth century Portuguese sailors had anticipated Henry Hudson in acquiring considerable knowledge of Hudson Bay, but it is not possible to say how far they had penetrated it. In 1558 Nicolo Zeno of Venice put forth a forged narrative of a fictitious journey which he attributed to an ancestor of his own. He attached a map to it, and showed thereon an imaginary land named Frisland to the south of Greenland, and other equally false details which set many later travellers and geographers astray. Sir Martin Frobisher, holding that the discovery of the North-West passage was the crowning piece of77 exploratory work remaining to reward the adventurer, secured Queen Elizabeth’s and other powerful interests, and led an expedition to the north-west in 1576. Zeno’s map put him wrong when he discovered Eastern Greenland and thought it to be Frisland, and he subsequently reached the southern part of Baffin Land; but this was supposed to be Greenland. He made a second voyage in 1578. Frobisher’s successor, John Davis, another explorer of high scientific standing, misinterpreted some of Frobisher’s results, as other geographers did, thus placing Frobisher Strait not in Baffin Land but in Greenland, where it long appeared in maps. Davis made voyages in 1585, 1586, and 1587. He passed along Davis Strait, and explored both its eastern and its western shores, extending the knowledge of the west coast of Greenland on his third voyage as far north as 72° 41′. Henry Hudson, in his two earlier voyages in 1607 and 1608, was concerned with the seas of the north-east, and we shall consider them later. But in 1610 he sailed west and entered Hudson Bay, where, after many sufferings, he was set adrift by a mutinous crew and was lost. Following him Sir Thomas Button, in 1612, became acquainted with the west coast of the bay, and maintained the belief, which was upheld for more than a generation following, that the North-West passage to the Indies would be found to open from this coast. In 1615 and 1616 William Baffin made a voyage which brought within men’s knowledge the channels which ramify northward and westward from the head of Baffin Bay; but this knowledge was not appraised at its true value; indeed, even the authenticity of his work came to be doubted, notable though the voyage was for many important discoveries, including, among others, remarkable78 magnetic observations, for in Smith’s Sound Baffin discovered the greatest known variation of the compass. His explorations carried him more than three hundred miles beyond Davis’s northern limit. In spite of these discoveries, which gave no impulse towards theoretical discussion of the North-West passage along right lines, and in spite of the opportunity for investigation to the west of Hudson Bay by the early servants of the Hudson’s Bay Company, which was established in 1670, the theory that the passage lay westward from that bay was still alive in 1722, when the voyage of John Scroggs, in search of two ships previously lost, was held to prove the existence of a strait leading into the Pacific; but in 1742 Christopher Middleton made further acquaintance with the inlets on the west shore of the bay, and later in the century some of the servants of the Company began to arrive at a conception of the north-westward extension of the continent. Thus about 1770 Samuel Hearne reached its arctic shore by way of the Coppermine River, and in 1789 Alexander Mackenzie came to the mouth of the great river which bears his name. The North-West passage had now ceased to be sought as a highway of commerce, though as a matter of scientific interest James Cook, on the third of his great voyages (1776), which will be dealt with in a later chapter, was instructed to find it from the Pacific, but was stopped by the ice in 70° 41′, beyond Bering Strait, having been the first English navigator to observe the western extremity of Alaska, which had, however, been known for a century or more to the Russians.
The exploration for the North-East passage, though of considerably greater importance to commerce, was hardly of equal importance with that of the North-West79 passage from our present standpoint, for it could scarcely have been preceded by that complete ignorance which the voyages to the North-West just mentioned did so much to dispel. Some general idea of the coasts of northern Europe, based upon early Scandinavian and possibly Russian work, may be supposed to have existed even when, in 1484, the Portuguese are said to have endeavoured to find a route in this direction to the Indies, and when in the first half of the following century the feasibility of such a route came to be seriously discussed in England. From that country an expedition, in the arrangement of which Sebastian, son of John Cabot, took a leading part, started in 1553 under Sir Hugh Willoughby, with Richard Chancellor commanding one of the ships. Willoughby was lost on the Kola peninsula; Chancellor succeeded in entering the White Sea, travelled to Moscow, and made arrangements for the opening of a commercial route between England and northern Russia. The Muscovy Company of merchants was founded; and, after Chancellor had been lost on a second expedition in 1555, the Company sent out one of his companions, Stephen Borough, in 1556, with the river Ob as his goal. From this voyage information was first disseminated about the Kola region and Novaya Zemlya, though these had been known long previously to Russian fishermen and hunters. The Company also sent out Arthur Pet and Charles Jackman in 1580. They entered the Kara Sea, but only Pet returned. At this period the Dutch entered the field; they were trading in the White Sea towards the end of the century, and in 1582 Olivier Brunel, and in 1594 and 1596 William Barents and others, penetrated far eastward. In 1596 an expedition with Barents as pilot discovered Spitsbergen, and one80 of the ships proceeded eastward to Novaya Zemlya, where Barents died; but the rest of the party withstood the winter and won their way back to the Lapland coast in boats. It was found that Russian trading vessels were making regular journeys to the Ob and the Yenisei, and in the two following centuries the Russians were chiefly instrumental in extending knowledge of the northern coast of Asia. In 1648 Simon Dezhnev may have passed through the strait which afterwards bore the name of Vitus Bering. In 1735 the northernmost promontory of Siberia was rounded in sledges by Lieutenant T. Chelyuskin, and his name was given to it; and in 1728 and 1740 Bering explored both the strait and the sea which bear his name.
Meanwhile Henry Hudson had done for the Muscovy Company and for England what Barents had done for the Dutch, for in 1607 he reached a point on the east coast of Greenland in 73° N., studied the conditions of the ice between that country and Spitsbergen, and discovered the island afterwards called Jan Mayen. In 1608 he made similar investigations of the ice from Spitsbergen to Novaya Zemlya, and he was again in the same seas before proceeding to the west to discover the Hudson river and the strait and bay which, as we have seen, were also given his name. Upon the work of Hudson and Barents followed the celebrated whale fisheries of Spitsbergen and elsewhere, with which we have little direct concern in this history; but when, in the second half of the seventeenth century, these fisheries, as far as British enterprise was concerned, reached the height of their prosperity, geographical research was encouraged along the lines which this industry gave opportunity to follow, for a reward of ￡5,000 was offered in 1776 to any ship which should81 first sail northward of 89° N. Though the prize was not then won, the foundations of scientific research in the arctic were firmly laid by able and intelligent captains of the whaling ships, among whom William Scoresby is pre-eminent through his voyage as far as 81° 12′ 42′′ N., in 1806, his exploration of the east coast of Greenland from 75° to 69° N. in 1822, and his admirable Account of the Arctic Regions.
(b) Antarctic: the Great South Land.
The leading interest of arctic exploration thus far, in connection with our present study, has been seen to be concerned with the opening of sea routes, by north-west and north-east, from Europe to Asia. The story of antarctic discovery, on the other hand, brings into prominence a problem of far different character which we have already had occasion to notice incidentally. It might be labelled as the problem of the Fifth Continent, though its origin dates from a period long before the discovery of the fourth. We have seen how the conception of a spherical earth was supported on grounds of speculative philosophy by the Pythagoreans, and proven by the observations of Aristotle. We have met with the Stoic conception of the four land-masses, one in each of the “four quarters” of the globe, of which but one, the ?cumene, was known. Here, then, was the material already for an antarctic problem. There can be no doubt that its solution was regarded in ancient times as beyond the limit of human endeavour, because the passage of the torrid zone was held impossible in spite of those rumours of far southerly voyages, to which we have referred, and which might otherwise have pointed the way to further discovery.
We pass over the period when the antipodean theory82 was maintained only by the freest of Christian thinkers, and resume the antarctic story at the point where Bartolomeu Diaz demonstrated by experience that the torrid climatic belt is not impassable, and entered a temperate belt to the south of it. After this, the discovery of Brazil, the frequent enforced voyages south of the Horn by mariners driven thither by storms, and the exploration of the Pacific, are all intimately associated with the antarctic problem. Spanish and Portuguese voyagers at the beginning of the sixteenth century revealed Brazil as continental land; a Portuguese expedition in 1514 reported the southern extremity of South America to be in 40° S., and asserted that the coast of a southern continent was observed beyond this. Ferdinand Magellan, again, passing in 1521 through the straits which bear his name, between the South American mainland and Tierra del Fuego, proved nothing as to the continental or insular character of the latter; but the general tendency of geographical theory favoured the idea of a continent. It took various shapes. We find its coastline roughly coincident with the Antarctic Circle according to Leonardo da Vinci’s globe constructed in 1515; this was at least a better estimate of its extent than that of Orontius of 1531, wherein the west of Terra Australis (“lately discovered but not yet fully known,” as it is ingenuously labelled) approaches close to the southern American promontory about 55° S., runs thence eastward between 50° and 60° S. to the south of Africa, extends northward to the latitude of southern Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, where the “region of Brazil” is found, and to the south-east of Malaysia reveals a vast peninsula (Regio Patalis), which has suggested some obscure conception of the existence83 of Australia. A little later, in the middle of the century, New Guinea took its place as a northward promontory of the southern continent, after the discovery of part of its coast by Inigo Ortis de Retes, a Spanish navigator.
Pursuing the course of Pacific exploration so far as it affects the Antarctic problem, we find that after Menda?a’s researches in that ocean had resulted in the discovery of some of its many islands, his Portuguese pilot on his second voyage, Pedro Fernandez de Quiros, was inspired to petition for the command of a great expedition to the South Land, obtained his desire by promising the Pope and the King of Spain an untold expansion of their realms, respectively spiritual and temporal, and sailed in 1605 from Call?o to discover an island of the group afterwards known as the New Hebrides, from which he returned satisfied in the belief of having performed his self-allotted task, and having taken possession of his “Australia del Espiritu Santo” in the name of his masters. Torres, his companion in command, proceeded through Torres Strait, and thus cut off New Guinea from the supposed continent, as afterwards Tasman did Australia itself, crowning the work of the Dutch navigators who had gradually unveiled the western shores of that vast island, working from the direction of the Malay Archipelago (Chapter VII). Tasman proceeded to discover the west coast of New Zealand, which thereupon succeeded to the position formerly occupied in the minds of the theorists by Java, New Guinea, and Australia as the northward extension of the Antarctic continent in these seas. Such ideas died hard: at the end of the previous century the conception of even Java as continental land survived, after a number of voyagers had sailed the seas to the south of it.
84 During this period a number of vessels, mainly those of English buccaneers, on passing through the Straits of Magellan had suffered the common fate of being caught by northerly storms and driven to the south. Little enough, however, emerges from their exiguous and indefinite records excepting vague pictures of peril from tempest and ice. Thus Sir Francis Drake was carried to about 57° S. in 1578, and afterwards made northward to discover some of the islands of the Fuegian archipelago; but even these took their place on the maps as part of the southern mainland; and it may be added that the same fate befell the remote and tiny Easter Island when it was observed by Edward Davis more than a century later—if Easter Island was indeed his landfall; his observations were not sufficiently definite to enable us now to determine. The Dutchmen Jacob Lemaire and Willem Cornelis Schouten, however, successfully aimed at discovering a passage into the Pacific south of the Straits of Magellan, saw and named Cape Horn, and passed across the ocean through the Paumotu and Tongan archipelagoes by New Pomerania to the East Indies in 1615–17. To an intervening date (1598) is assigned the disputed episode of the voyage of a ship commanded by Dirk Gerrits, one of a Dutch squadron which was said to have been driven south to 64° and there to have fallen in with a mountainous snow-clad coast, identified later with the South Shetland Islands. The story is typical of the uncertainty and misunderstanding associated with all the early southern voyages; it seems probable that Kaspar Barl?us, who in 1622 translated into Latin a history of the “Doings of the Spaniards in America,” was misled by the confusion of a later voyage of one of Gerrits’s shipmates (in the account of which,85 however, no mention occurs of a far southern land) with that of Gerrits himself. However this may be, another mythical point was duly established on the mythical coast-line of the Antarctic continent running westward athwart the southern Pacific. And the old theory held its place in spite of the strong proofs adduced by William Dampier, during his voyage round the world in 1699–1701, of the inaccuracy of the continental coast as laid down according to the cartographers’ theories. Dampier, after sharing to the full in the adventures of the buccaneers in the Pacific, was under the orders of the admiralty on this voyage, in the course of which he approached Australia directly from the Cape of Good Hope, and made careful explorations in the Shark’s Bay area of the west coast. In 1721 Jacob Roggeveen, leading an expedition on behalf of the Dutch East India Company, was satisfied of the neighbourhood of land about 64° S., south of Tierra del Fuego; and subsequently, after voyaging north-westward into the Pacific and (as is generally supposed) discovering Samoa, believed that he had located promontories of the long-sought continent.
Even the British naval explorers, John Byron in 1765 and Samuel Wallis and Philip Carteret in 1767, had it in command to continue the search. The French were now taking a share in Pacific exploration, and Louis Antoine de Bougainville in 1768 passed across the Pacific by way of the Paumotu, Society, Samoan, and New Hebrides groups to the south coast of New Guinea. But these and other voyages only served to add to the map the archipelagoes of the Western Pacific, when they did not actually cause confusion by imperfect position-finding and by the practice of successive voyagers of renaming islands previously discovered.
86 The French voyager Lozier Bouvet, supplied with vessels by the French East India Company, sailed in 1738 to discover the continent, and battled long and bravely with the Antarctic ice about 55° S. for no positive reward save the discovery of Bouvet Island (whose insularity, however, he himself did not recognize) and the negative one of abolishing the imaginary coastline from the chart of the South Atlantic. Hope of future great discoveries was revived by the observation of the Marion and Crozet islands during the expedition under Marion-Dufresne in 1772; but the chapter closes with the bitter disappointment of Yves de Kerguelen-Trémarec, who, after a first voyage in 1772, during which a too vivid imagination led him to regard his discovery of the island now called Kerguelen as revealing the “central mass of the Antarctic continent,” and a land of promise, was hopelessly disabused on his second visit (1773) to that inhospitable shred of land, whose name he changed from Southern France to the Land of Desolation.