Most people, when asked who discovered the North Pole, are somewhat surprised to find that they do not know. Most Brits, at least, will recall that some Scandinavian (Amundsen) beat our national hero Scott to the South Pole and some may even throw in some facts about Shackleton, but their knowledge of the North Pole will be vanishingly small.
If we roll back to the early nineteenth century, good old England was playing a major role in opening up most unexplored areas of the world. In particular under John Barrow, second secretary to the Admiralty, England ruled supreme for 50 years or so as man after man was sent to discover the source of the Niger in Africa or, more interestingly for us, the North West Passage. This holy grail of that era was a supposed seaway that ran through the Canadian Arctic and provided a short cut between the Atlantic and the Pacific.
It all started when a great mass of ice which stretched from the coast of Greenland to Spitzbergen, and which previously had prevented sailors from penetrating further north than 80 degrees, began to break up. Some 18,000 square miles of ice had broken free from the polar cap and was gradually drifting southwards. Iceland was ice bound for a number of years and even in England winters became harsher. As whalers of the time were now able to get further north, so the question of the North West Passage grabbed Barrow’s attention.
Expedition after expedition was despatched, with boats specially reinforced for the ice. Whilst all failed to find the passage, the ensuing activity did lead to much discovery and mapping of the Arctic region. A common theme through these years were boats sailing in Spring time along a narrow
waterway between islands, such as
Lancaster Sound or Jones Sound, only to be trapped by ice as winter set on. This led to enforced over wintering in the Arctic. One can only imagine the terrors of poorly equipped sailors surviving through the dark winter months, on half rations, in a ship frozen at a rigid angle in the ice. The supplies of ptarmigan or caribou shot in the summer were quickly exhausted and the diet reverted to Donkin preserved meat or salt beef. Occasionally, a polar bear would be shot, but this often caused death to the sailors as it was a number of years before people worked out that a polar bear’s liver is poisonous! Without fresh food, many men died from scurvy. The real and terrible shock for those intrepid explorers was that their particular waterway often did not become free of ice the following summer.
On one such expedition led by John Ross in 1829, the ship and crew were trapped for four winters in Prince Regent’s Inlet. Survival was helped in part by the Eskimos who both shared food and taught the English the rudiments of sledging. John Ross’s young nephew James Ross became an excellent sledger and on June 1st 1831 he was the first to reach the Magnetic North Pole. In 1832 they abandoned their boat and via a series of sledges pulled a number of the life boats over 300 miles to Fury Beach. This task was compared to each man dragging a dead sheep from Carlyle to London in Arctic conditions. At Fury Beach they hoped to find food supplies left by an earlier expedition of Parry and, even more hopefully, open seas via Baffin Bay. Having achieved the monumental task of making the crossing, the expedition was further iced in at Fury Beach until they finally escaped in 1836 some 7 years after first setting sale.
Not all such expeditions were so lucky. The most famous of those which failed was Franklin’s 1845 attempt on the North WestPassage, in which every man was lost. Despite 10 years of searching by numerous rescue parties and all the subsequent scientific application some of the details still
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