Arctic exploration

The story of the first few centuries of Arctic exploration can, of course, never be written. The early Norsemen, to whom must go the credit for most of the first discoveries, we...

With the voyages of Weymouth, Knight, and Hall, which occupied the first few years of the seventeenth century, we need not concern ourselves at all, for they resulted in no disc...

What with the American War and the Napoleonic Wars, our sailors had their hands so full at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, that they had...

While Buchan and Franklin were in difficulties in the ice off Spitzbergen, Ross and Parry with the _Isabella_ (385 tons) and the _Alexander_ (252 tons) were searching the shores...

It is now necessary to return to Parry’s friend and fellow explorer, John Franklin, who, it will be remembered, was summoned into Lord Melville’s presence with Parry on November...

We must now return to Parry, who, it will be remembered, landed in England on October 1820, after making a number of most valuable discoveries in Lancaster Sound. The results of...

In no way deterred by the terrible dangers which he had encountered in his first journey, Franklin had scarcely returned home when he laid before the Government a scheme for a s...

It is not necessary to concern ourselves much with Captain Lyon’s subsidiary voyage of 1824. His instructions were to proceed to Repulse Bay in the _Hecla_, and to explore the i...

The idea of discovering a north-west passage, though temporarily eclipsed by Parry’s great effort to reach the North Pole, was by no means set aside, and in 1828, soon after the...

The prolonged absence of Ross and his party naturally gave their friends at home cause for the keenest anxiety. Many, believing it to be impossible for any Englishman to survive...

Meanwhile the exploration of the shores of Northern America was proceeding apace. At the time when the _Terror_ sailed for Hudson’s Strait the situation was this. Beechey, start...

The failure of Back’s expedition in the _Terror_ to accomplish anything of importance proved so discouraging to the Government that, for a while, they desisted from any further...

In order to preserve the chronological order of events, it is now necessary to leave the Franklin expedition for a while, and to take up the thread of the exploration of Norther...

It was in the summer of 1847 that serious doubts concerning the safety of the Franklin expedition were first entertained and the Government decided to take steps towards its rel...

It will be remembered that, in organising the Franklin search, the Government determined to send out expeditions from three points of the compass, east, west, and south. The fir...

We now come to one of the strangest chapters in the whole history of the Franklin search. That Sir Edward Belcher’s expedition, the last, and in every way the most complete equi...

Rae had displayed such ability when acting in conjunction with Sir John Richardson that the Government felt that they could not do better than entrust the conduct of the next ex...

The news that Rae brought home naturally created the greatest stir in England, and it was felt that steps ought to be taken at once to discover whether any of the luckless explo...

Up to the middle of the nineteenth century America had not played a very important part in the history of Arctic exploration. In 1853, however, an expedition set out under the c...

We now come to one of the most curious figures in the whole history of Arctic exploration, that of the American, Charles Francis Hall, who, in the year 1864, set sail for Smith...

As has been seen in the last chapter, Hall was first inspired to enter upon the field of Arctic exploration by the loss of the Franklin expedition, and we have, in consequence,...

Many routes to the North Pole had now been tried and found wanting. Expeditions had started out by Behring Strait, through Smith Sound, up the eastern coast of Greenland and fro...

After the return of Sir Edward Belcher’s expedition in 1854 the British Government was content to rest on its laurels, so far as Arctic research was concerned, and to leave the...

Valuable as were the immediate results of Lieutenant Charles Weyprecht’s voyage in the _Tegetthoff_, its indirect results were greater still, for he came back from his adventuro...

Of all the men who have added to the world’s scientific knowledge of the Polar regions there is none who has made his name more famous than Adolph Erik Nordenskiöld. The data th...

There is a double interest attached to the voyage of the _Jeannette_, for not only is the story itself one of the most terrible tragedies in the whole history of Arctic explorat...

Not a little of our knowledge of Spitzbergen and Franz Josef Land is due to the exertions of that able yachtsman and hunter, Leigh Smith, of whom mention has already been made i...

On the whole of the earth’s surface there is probably no more desolate and uninviting country than Greenland. Extending for a distance of over 1400 miles from north to south, an...

It was, no doubt, the success which attended Mr Leigh Smith’s expedition that first directed the attention of another well-known English explorer, Mr F. G. Jackson, to Franz Jos...

A careful study of the history of Arctic travel had convinced Nansen that the routes by which most of his predecessors had attempted to reach the North Pole were either impracti...

Though Nordenskiöld had succeeded in exploring North-East Land pretty thoroughly, and had shown that it is practically nothing but one large ice-field, for many years very littl...

As we have already seen, it was as Nansen’s companion on his journey across Greenland, and as his second in command on the _Fram_, that Otto Sverdrup first acquired the taste fo...

From his earliest days Prince Louis Amadeus of Savoy, Duke of the Abruzzi, displayed a strong taste for adventure, and while he was still very young, he made a name for himself...