POLAR EXPLORATION TO THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
_(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 early 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 and 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 of
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, remarkable
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-West 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 one 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
should 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 _œcumene_, 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 theory 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 existence 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 Mendaña’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 Callão 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.
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 Barlæus, 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, 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.
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.