IV.

The North Pole

A.

The Northern Sea Passages

European interest in reaching and exploring the North Pole emerged gradually out of a stronger desire: to find new sea routes for the conduct of trade. From the late 15th century, Spain and Portugal controlled the southern sea routes between Europe and Asia. English and Dutch ships were barred from using these routes to reach ports of trade in Asia. Northern Europeans thus sought alternate sea routes from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans by way of the Arctic Ocean, thereby reaching Asia. The sea routes they sought came to be called the Northeast Passage (now known as the Northern Sea Route), north of Russia, and the Northwest Passage, above North America. These terms refer to any route through the areas concerned, rather than any particular route.

The search for a northern sea route began in the late 1490s with the voyages of Italian explorer John Cabot, sailing on behalf of England. Cabot navigated a northern route across the Atlantic and in 1497 became the first European since the Vikings to reach North America, which he initially believed to be Asia. Thereafter, finding a northern sea route captured the imagination of many famous explorers, including Sir Martin Frobisher, John Davis, William Baffin, Henry Hudson, and Sir John Franklin.

For centuries the Northwest Passage remained elusive in the ice-choked maze of islands, straits, and bays of the Arctic Archipelago. Each expedition built on the knowledge gained before, and the area was charted in the process. However, all attempts failed, and some ended in disaster, until Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen made the first complete transit of the Northwest Passage from 1903 to 1906. Finding a passage north of Russia was similarly challenging, and it was not until the 1870s that a complete Northeast Passage was finally navigated by Swedish explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskjöld.

B.

Heading for the North Pole

In the late 1700s—still long before the route of either of the two northern sea passages had been found or navigated—an expedition was mounted specifically to reach the North Pole (located at latitude 90°). It was launched in 1773 by the British Navy, which would be one of the most prominent players in the exploration of both poles over the next 140 years, and led by Captain Constantine Phipps. Sailing due north from Britain in the Racehorse, Phipps reached the edge of the Arctic pack ice at a latitude of 80°48’, to the northeast of Svalbard, a group of islands located about midway between Norway and the North Pole. Phipps set a “farthest north” record that held for 33 years. (Meanwhile, his colleague Captain James Cook, on his second great voyage, was penetrating deep into the Antarctic Circle.) Phipps made valuable scientific and natural history observations but found that his way to the north was blocked by an impenetrable shield of ice. This expedition also happened to be the first important voyage of Horatio Nelson, then a teenage midshipman, who later became a famous naval commander.

For a time the quest for the pole was abandoned, until the Hydrographic Department of the British Royal Navy, established in 1811, started to carry out scientific surveys to make navigation safe for commercial shipping and, with an eye on national supremacy, to consider means of keeping Russian influence to a manageable level. The motivating force behind the British navy’s enthusiasm for Arctic exploration was the idea of naval secretary John Barrow, Jr., that beyond the visible barrier of ice there existed an “Open Polar Sea,” devoid of ice. Although the idea was not backed up by any evidence and defied reason, it influenced British and American exploration of the area for most of the 19th century.

An enormous exploratory effort that linked the search for the Northwest Passage and an attempt to reach the North Pole was initiated in 1817 by a report from William Scoresby, a whaling captain and noted expert on Arctic conditions. The report asserted that the northern seas were unusually free of ice, although the experienced Scoresby never himself believed in the Open Polar Sea theory. (The lack of ice he noted was only temporary, possibly related to the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815.)

In 1818 John Franklin commanded one ship of an expedition attempting to sail toward the pole from Svalbard—essentially a repeat of Phipps’s expedition, and with the same result. (In 1845 Franklin launched an expedition to find the Northwest Passage that ended with the deaths of both Franklin and his entire crew of 129 officers and men.) In 1827 William Parry, who had already led expeditions in search of a Northwest Passage, commanded another attempt on the pole from Svalbard, this time landing on the ice pack and hauling sledges northward. Although the sledging party set a new record, reaching latitude 82°45’ north, it had to turn back nearly 800 km (500 mi) short of the pole. The expedition learned many lessons about the rigors of polar exploration: Reindeer were useless as draught animals; heavy wooden boats converted into sledges were cumbersome and exhausting to haul; the crew’s food rations were inadequate for the enormous physical demands; and the continual drift of the Arctic ice carried the explorers back nearly as fast as they advanced. However, few subsequent Royal Navy expeditions heeded these lessons.

In 1829 James Clark Ross, second in command on Parry’s expedition and nephew of Sir John Ross (who led expeditions in 1818 and 1829 in search of the Northwest Passage), established a landmark in polar exploration when, at a spot on the Boothia Peninsula, he discovered the magnetic North Pole. Discovery of the magnetic pole, the location of which varies with time, was essential in helping navigators to accurately calibrate readings from their compasses.

Attention then turned to the idea of reaching the North Pole from North America, this time with American explorers in the vanguard. In 1853 Elisha Kent Kane led an expedition to penetrate Smith Sound and try to find a way through the narrow channel separating Ellesmere Island from Greenland to the hoped-for open sea beyond. He got as far as a widening of the channel, later named Kane Basin, before failing supplies and rancor among his crew forced him to retreat two years later. In 1860 Isaac Israel Hayes led an expedition to the same area and traversed farther, on foot, into the Kennedy Channel. In 1871 Charles Francis Hall led an expedition that sailed beyond any point previously reached by a ship, to latitude 82°11’ north, pushing beyond Kennedy Channel to the widening that came to be known as Hall Basin, where he died that year.

The final breakthrough to the shores of the Arctic Ocean west of Greenland came in the last British naval expedition to the Arctic in the 19th century, led by George Nares in 1875-1876. In the Alert he reached latitude 82°45’ north, on the northern shore of Ellesmere Island via a strait separating that island from Greenland, later named Nares Strait in his honor. Sledging parties from the expedition traveled as far north as 83°20’ before turning back, again exhausted by a generally poor diet (which induced scurvy), unsuitable clothing, inadequate snowshoes, and overly heavy sledges. Nares’s attempt on the North Pole failed, but valuable scientific work was done, with geological and natural history specimens being collected. In 1881 the otherwise disastrous expedition led by Adolphus Washington Greely, in the same area, managed to add some distance to the record, reaching latitude 83°24’ north.

In 1879 American explorer George Washington De Long attempted to reach the North Pole from another direction, sailing the Jeannette into the Arctic Ocean through the Bering Strait and heading north. His ship became stuck in the ice off Siberia, drifted for 21 months, and was finally crushed by the heavy pack ice. Several years later, remains of the Jeannette were found in an ice floe off the coast of Greenland. Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen realized that the remains could have drifted with the ice floes to a point near the North Pole. He reasoned that if an ice floe could drift across the polar region, a ship could too. To test his theory, he custom built a ship, the Fram, and allowed it to become frozen into the Arctic ice pack. During the 1893-1896 expedition, Nansen realized the drifting ice would not carry the ship all the way to the North Pole and set out with sledges on foot. He reached a record latitude 86°14’ north, but that was still 416 km (258 mi) short of the pole.

C.

On Top of the World

The final steps in the quest to reach the North Pole were taken by the Americans Frederick Cook and Robert Peary. Both were professional explorers who learned survival lessons from the Inuit, a people indigenous to the Arctic region. These two explorers traveled light, hunted where they could, used dogs to haul sledges, and wore Inuit-style fur and hide parkas.

Peary, a veteran of six Arctic expeditions between 1891 and 1909, was driven by the desire to become the first man to the reach the North Pole, which he saw as both a patriotic duty and a divine right. In February 1909, then aged 52, he set out on a last and desperate attempt to fulfill his ambition. His expedition included 24 men with 19 sledges and 133 dogs. As members of the expedition cleared the trail, erected tents, laid provisions, and then turned back (the so-called “Peary System”), Peary was enabled to speed on, traveling with only Matthew Henson and four Inuit. Peary later claimed that they reached the pole on April 6, 1909. In the end, it was a victory of planning and organization as much as courage and endurance.

However, as Peary was traveling back to announce his victory, he heard news from Inuit on the Greenland coast that a white man and two Inuit in advanced stages of exhaustion had passed by earlier. The white man, Frederick Cook, had reported that he had come from the North Pole, which he claimed he had reached on April 21, 1908, almost a year before Peary. Cook’s claim was subsequently discredited by scientists, although he received popular acclaim, and Peary’s records were accepted as genuine. However, the two rival claims have never been entirely satisfactorily resolved, and neither can now be proved. Peary’s is more generally accepted, as it had more corroborating testimony and was more intrinsically likely, given his extensive experience, meticulous planning, and extremely well-resourced expedition. However, inconsistencies in his account and the seemingly impossible speeds necessary for Peary’s account to be true mean that in all probability even he fell somewhat short of the pole.

The first fully attested, scientifically accredited achievement of the pole over the ice was that of Wally Herbert’s British Trans-Arctic Expedition of 1968-1969. Herbert and his team trekked 6,115 km (3,800 mi), across the Arctic Ocean from Alaska to Spitsbergen (now Svalbard), and reached the North Pole on the 60th anniversary of Peary’s disputed expedition.

D.

The North Pole by Air

After Peary, it seemed that the only new thing left to do at the North Pole was to try different ways of getting there. The first attempt to fly in the Arctic was made by a Swede, Salomon Andrée, who in 1897 took off from Svalbard in a balloon called the Eagle. A message brought back to base by carrier pigeon reported that everything was going well and latitude 82° north had been reached. Thereafter nothing was heard of Andrée and his companions, and 33 years later their bodies were found at a camp on White Island, in the eastern part of the Svalbard archipelago. The balloon had apparently lost height owing to the accumulation of ice on it.

In 1925 the Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen, who by that time had already become the first to navigate the Northwest Passage and to reach the South Pole, attempted to become the first to fly over the North Pole. He was accompanied by the wealthy American Lincoln Ellsworth and four other companions, taking off in May from Svalbard in two amphibious airplanes. They were forced to land at about latitude 88° north, just shy of the 90° mark at the pole. A year later, Amundsen and Ellsworth tried again, accompanied by the Italian explorer and engineer Umberto Nobile. This time they successfully flew over the pole in the Norge, an Italian airship designed and piloted by Nobile, on a flight from Kongsfjord, Svalbard, to Teller, Alaska. The flight took them across the Arctic Ocean and covered 5,460 km (3,390 mi) in three days (May 11-14). An airplane flight some days previously by Richard Byrd and Floyd Bennett is now known not to have reached the pole, contrary to their claim at the time.

The next milestone was a flight by Sir Hubert Wilkins and Carl B. Eielson across the Arctic Ocean from Point Barrow in Alaska to Svalbard, via the north coast of Ellesmere Island, in April 1928. The following month Nobile tried to take another airship, the Italia, to the pole and moor it there. The plan had to be abandoned because of ice buildup, and on the return journey the airship lost height and struck the ice. Some occupants were lost while others, including Nobile, were stranded on the ice. Nobile was located and saved, but Amundsen, flying in a French aircraft on a rescue mission from northern Norway, disappeared. His crashed aircraft was discovered some months later, bringing a tragic end to a brilliant career in polar exploration.

The North Pole was first reached by hot-air balloon in June 2000. A British explorer, David Hempleman-Adams, set off from Longyearbyen, in northern Norway, in a wicker basket suspended beneath a Roziere helium and hot-air balloon. He flew within 21 km (13 mi) of the North Pole and also became the first balloonist to fly solo across the Arctic Ocean.