European Exploration and Annexation in the North American Arctic to the Turn of the 20th Century

Europe’s first claims to the Arctic originate in a voyage taking place around 986 C.E., when Viking explorer Erik the Red and four hundred to five hundred people became the first Europeans to establish a settlement on Greenland.  These colonies, on the southern and milder portion of Greenland, endured for approximately five hundred years. Eventually, though, increasingly cold winters negatively impacted farming conditions and made voyages back to Iceland more difficult for the settlers.  In addition, the local Inuit are thought to have destroyed the Western Norse settlement, which had the mildest weather, as they moved south. By the end of the sixteenth century, no more Norse settlers remained in Greenland.  Indeed, a 1408 marriage at the Hvalsey Church in the East Settlement is the last written record of the Norse in Greenland.   Around 1440, just before the settlements were abandoned, Leif Eriksson drew the “Vinland Map”, which has lasting historical significance for its status as the first known map of the Americas.  Nonetheless, a European interest in the Arctic had been established.

More modern European exploration of the Arctic region has its roots in Henry VII's 1496 decree to the Italian explorer Giovanni Caboto, better known as John Cabot, to make voyages of discovery to the northern, eastern and western seas. Unfortunately, most of Cabot's manuscripts and charts have disappeared. However, the Canadian as well as British governments hold that his expedition landed on the coast of Newfoundland.

Nearly a century later, in 1576, English seaman Martin Frobisher made the first of three journeys in search of the Northwest Passage and a sea route to Corinth. On his first journey, Frobisher made contact with the local Inuit of Baffin Island, north of present-day Quebec. These inhabitants captured five of his men when a party was sent ashore to return an Inuit who had agreed to help guide Frobisher's expedition through the region. Inuit legend holds that the captive Englishmen died attempting to escape Baffin Island in a self-made boat a few years later. The following year, Frobisher's expedition staked claim to the British Arctic Territories, which in 1880 were gifted to the Canadian government and now compose the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, part of the North-West Territories.  A third and final Frobisher expedition failed to establish a colony near Frobisher Bay off the coast of Baffin Island and later returned to England in October of 1578. Frobisher’s hardships were just the beginning of what was a long and difficult history of European exploration in the region.

During the period following Frobisher's voyages of discovery, a variety of expeditions set out in search of the Northwest Passage and a quicker sea route connecting Europe and Asia. These included three voyages from 1585-1587 by John Davis, an Englishman, a ship commanded by George Waymouth of the East India Company and the 1610 voyage of Henry Hudson, who discovered Hudson Strait and Hudson Bay but was set afloat in a lifeboat by a mutinous crew and never seen again.   By 1632, five more voyages had failed to establish a northerly sea route. In 1668, however, the British vessel Nonsuch succeeded in opening a sea fur trading route with the local Inuit population.  This expedition became the basis for Britain's 1670 establishment of the Hudson Bay Company and marked the first real economic connection with the Arctic world. Also in 1670, Britain appointed Prince Rupert governor of what came to be known as Rupert's Land, which today would comprise more than forty percent of Canadian territories.

In 1719, an ill-fated expedition led by James Knight and financed by the Hudson Bay Company set out in search of a northerly passage in the North American Arctic once again.  Knight’s two ships disappeared without a trace. A separate English voyage discovered Repulse Bay, so named because it marked the ice-choked end of any possible northern passage through that part of the Arctic. An Irish voyage during 1746-47 likewise had little luck establishing a northerly route and was further dogged by poor morale among the crew. 

Finally, a Hudson Bay expedition commanded by Samuel Hearne during 1770-1772 reached the Arctic Ocean. However, Hearne was traveling by land and the only lasting significance of his voyage was to indicate that a navigable northerly sea passage above modern day Canada did not appear to exist. Indeed, the Arctic Ocean was covered in ice.  European interest in an economically advantageous northerly sea route persisted, though, with at least sixteen more expeditions setting out over both land and sea to locate a more northerly sea route or search for missing expeditions between 1775 and 1840. One of these expeditions, led by English navy captain James Cook, approached the Northwest Passage from the Pacific Ocean and for the first time mapped the coast of Alaska as far north as the Bering Strait.  However, despite repeated attempts Cook's HMS Resolution and HMS Discovery were unable to penetrate the ice-covered Bering Strait.

By the mid-nineteenth century, the Arctic captivated the western world’s imagination, particularly in Britain. The region is present in the works of well-known Western period artists such as Thoreau and Friedrich as well as in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The drama of the human saga as it played out in the icy land of the midnight sun fascinated the general public. Above all, the response to an ill-fated 1845 British expedition headed by Sir John Franklin highlighted how central the North American Arctic had become to the European identity. The disappearance of Franklin, his 129 men and the British ships Eremus and Terror developed into the greatest drama of the mid-nineteenth century as expedition after expedition headed to the Arctic to find and rescue the captain and his crew. A variety of early traveling picture shows about the Arctic and Franklin's disaster were also created and presented.

In the United States, the saga of the lost Franklin expedition succeeded in turning the nation's attention to the North American Arctic for the first time. President Zachary Taylor and a wealthy New York shipping merchant, Henry Grinnell, became personally involved in the mission to find the crew.  In 1850-1851, this confluence of public and private interests combined to send the first American mission to the Arctic in search of Franklin's lost expedition and, ostensibly, economic opportunities such as potential mining sites. Dr. Elisha Kent Kane, the senior medical officer on this first American Arctic mission, became a national hero upon returning from a second voyage undertaken in 1853. Though Kane returned from this second voyage with his mission unfulfilled, most of his men were still alive after two winters spent trapped in the Arctic ice in their vessel Advance. When Kane died of illness in Cuba shortly after his return, his legacy as a hero was cemented: the funeral train he received was the longest in the country save Abraham Lincoln's.  This episode indicated how quickly Arctic exploration had grabbed the imagination of the American public. As author Jules Verne wrote in 1855, “In the history of travel no episode is more curious, no image more arresting, no drama more eventful, than wintering in the ice fields.”  Though the Arctic would not prove to be the source of rich and exploitable natural resource finds some businessmen hoped, nationalism propelled the Arctic into the forefront of the American conscience.

Kane's voyages marked the beginning of the heyday of American Arctic exploration. Between 1850 and 1910, more than two dozen American expeditions set out for the ice-ridden waters of the Arctic.  Some went to map the coast of Greenland, some to search for the Northwest Passage, some set out in search of whales and yet others sailed in search of seabed minerals or some combination of these ostensible goals.

By the late nineteenth century, it was widely acknowledged that even if an open polar sea existed around the North Pole that sea was in large part surrounded by thick ice and would make for an impractical shipping route.  However, nationalism and public interest in the story of the Arctic explorers continued to propel voyages northward, in particular from Britain and the United States. Arctic politics, too, began to acquire their own intrigue. In a significant moment, Canada's three-year-old confederation in 1870 accepted the transfer of the territories of the Hudson Bay Company from Great Britain, including Rupert's Land – all territories through which waters drain into Hudson Bay and Hudson Strait – and the North-Western Territory, which consisted of the remaining British continental territories north of the 49th parallel and east of the 141st meridian excepting British Columbia. In September of 1880, Britain proceeded to surrender its rights to its other territories and waters in the Arctic.  In the course of this exploration, two of the major modern Arctic nations – Canada and the United States – developed their initial economic and political interests in the region. Britain, on the other hand, surrendered its early identity as an Arctic nation with the transfer of land to Canada and the end of its reign over the Hudson Bay Company.

Early Human Habitation in the Arctic

Geologic evidence indicates that the first human inhabitants of the Arctic were originally from present-day Russia. Two separate finds place humans in the valley of the Yana River in northern Russia as well as in northwestern North America by 28,000 B.C.E. Stone tools dated to 15,000 B.C.E. have also been recovered from a settlement near the Bluefish River in the northern Yukon.  In addition, excavation of ivory tools along the Berelekh River in Russia points to unrelated inhabitation around 12,000 B.C.E.  Widespread evidence indicates that by 6,000 B.C.E. homo sapiens had moved into the fringes of the Arctic region for good. What little we know about these early Arctic peoples, however, is based solely on archaeological evidence and oral tradition. 

During the second half of the nineteenth century, some European historians believed the modern Inuit people to be direct descendants of Ice Age European reindeer hunters.  However, more recent archaeological surveys show that the Thule, ancestors of the Canadian and Greenlandic Inuit, moved into the coast of Alaska and eastern Siberia from northern Russia between 2000 and 3000 years ago, indicating that Russia has the longest-running historical claim to the region. This evidence dispels the theory that the Inuit are in any way related to Ice Age Europeans. Furthermore, it indicates that the Inuit are relatively recent migrants to the Arctic.

The northern Canadian coastal Inuit economy, based on the hunting of seals and whales, developed as the most northerly of the North Pacific Rim maritime economies that stretched from Japan to British Columbia. It is distinct from the economy that developed during two major tribal occupations, dated between 2500 and 2000 B.C.E. and nearly 2000 years later (around 500 B.C.E.), in northern Greenland. Unlike the northern Canadian Inuit, the Greenland settlers appear to have relied primarily on the muskox that entered the Arctic region around between 3000 and 2000 B.C.E. However, the abrupt disappearance of these two early Greenlandic cultures, referred to as Independence I and Independence II, likely indicates that the animal resources in the region were too meager to support long-term human populations.

How did the migration from the shores of present-day Siberia to Alaska, the Canadian north and Greenland occur? Hundreds of small tribes broke off to form their own communities, often ranging long distances in their search for food. At first, these early Arctic inhabitants only summered in Alaska before returning to Siberia. Tales of good hunting, though, drew more people to the region in following years. Eventually, some of these people followed the caribou eastwards during the caribou herd's wintertime migration. Archaeological finds indicate that when a group of hunters was lucky enough to make a sufficiently large kill, they took the opportunity to establish winter camp in the area with small houses partially dug into the ground.

These early settlers eventually reached the Mackenzie Delta in northern Canada. Here, the mountainous landscape they knew gave way to the wide plains of the Western Arctic. Hunting might well have been easier: the landscape converged at the riverhead, requiring herds to pass through the Mackenzie Delta, which was much narrower than the surrounding plains. Eventually, the settlers developed techniques to hunt the new animals they found—muskox, bison and possibly even mammoths. As these early inhabitants moved further east, following the Mackenzie River towards Great Slave Lake, the hunters identified major river crossings and laid in wait for caribou herds to arrive.

Eventually, small groups followed their prey still farther east, reaching the islands between Greenland and Canada. Here, in areas such as Labrador, they found lush vegetation as well as ample populations of muskoxen—by now a staple of their diet—and caribou. At some point, events such as sickness, social problems or heavy ice on the islands surrounding Lancaster Sound pushed some groups to head still further eastward over the sea ice. The journey from Siberia, which had brought these peoples' ancestors around nearly half the world and through 150 degrees of latitude, thus reached its Eastern stopping point in Greenland. On Greenland’s northern coast, the ill-fated Independence cultures formed and later died off.  Further south, the maritime Saqqaq culture thrived, living off of sea mammals—primarily seals, walruses and the occasional narwhal—and caribou herds. These people had completed the last major exploration of lands previously unknown to the human species. In isolation, they developed their own customs, traditions and way of life. Indeed, it would be millenia before Europe established contact with these early Arctic tribes. However, these peoples' ancestral claims are today a major part of both Canadian and Russian sovereignty claims in the Arctic region.

Geology and Climate

Permanent ice in the Arctic Ocean likely did not appear until about two and a half million years ago. At this time, the Arctic as we know it today began to develop. This new Arctic, while less harsh than the Antarctic, still boasts mean winter temperatures that can reach thirty degrees below zero centigrade. Over thousands of years, snow and ice have shaped the region. Much of the Arctic ice has been formed by repeated snowfalls, one on top of the other. Over time, the snow compacts into ice. The ice formed during this settling process has small air bubbles, which provide some of the buoyancy that can cause icebergs to protrude partially above the surface. In Antarctica, icebergs floating just at or below the surface are both a hazard and impediment to mariners. In the Arctic, however, icebergs are less prevalent – although they are increasing in frequency as large-scale coastal ice sheets have recently been shedding mass at record rates.

In 2010, the very ice and snow that have long defined the Arctic region is melting in a self-reinforcing feedback loop. Whereas ice and snow reflect the sun's rays, as more ice and snow melts a greater amount of dark sea surface and dark-soiled permafrost are exposed to the sun's rays. These dark surfaces absorb more heat than the ice, causing the warming and melting process to continue in an accelerating fashion. Indeed, open ocean water absorbs about 80% more radiation than sea ice does; this phenomenon is called ice-albedo or ice-reflective feedback. Ice-albedo is partially responsible for the remarkable decline in sea ice that led to the opening of the Northwest Passage to cargo vessels in 2007 and the opening of both the Northwest Passage and Northern Sea Route in 2008 for the first time in history.

For shippers, an ice-free Arctic passage is more hospitable than the Southern Ocean latitudes of the Roaring Forties and Screaming Fifties just north of Antarctica. First off, storms in the Arctic region are typically more benign than in the Antarctic. In addition, waves in the Arctic run into obstacles such as icebergs and islands which reduce both their size and intensity as they travel around the globe. Meanwhile, waves in the Antarctic travel without impediment around the globe, a phenomenon that can leads to some of the largest wave conditions on the globe. The prevailing east-west Arctic wind is likewise diminished by the presence of surface obstacles on its way around the globe in a fashion that the Antarctic wind is not. Researchers do predict increased Arctic storm intensity but while Arctic wave and wind conditions can be brutal, they do not compare to the intensity of conditions proximate to the South Pole in the Southern Ocean.

Currents are important for Arctic maritime operations that rely on accurate forecasts of ice movement and formation within the region. Regional surface currents, driven by prevailing winds, have an east-west flow. However, the most important of the Arctic currents is the warm water North Atlantic Drift, which flows north into the region from the western mid-Atlantic. The Arctic Ocean deep water current, which flows south beneath the North Atlantic Drift, helps to offset the incoming flow of the North Atlantic Drift by returning the warm surface water of the North Atlantic Drift as cold deep water. The Arctic Ocean current is formed when the North Atlantic Drift heads north, cools and because of its high salt content settles beneath the surface waters of the Arctic. As the North Atlantic Drift makes its way further north, its waters become still colder and settle deeper, eventually reversing direction and forming the southerly Arctic Ocean deep water current.

This Atlantic conveyor system is vital to the climates of northern Europe. The current is known to have stopped before and a weakening of its current is considered to be the cause of Europe's 'Little Ice Age' during the late 17th and early 18th centuries. As the melting Greenland ice sheets dilute the salty surface waters of the Arctic, the current could be stopped or slowed once more. This would significantly impact the climate of northern Europe until the ice sheet finished melting and the salinity in the water was somewhat restored.

On the North Pacific side of the Arctic and north of Russia air masses have a greater effect than sea currents on temperature since there is no such salinity mismatch between converging surface waters and as such no significantly strong currents. The only other major current affecting the Arctic is the Labrador Current, which carries cold water and air to Canada and Greenland via the Davis Strait to the west of Greenland.

Visibility in the Arctic is poor despite the often panoramic landscape and seascape. There is year-round cloud cover approximately 80% of the time in the Atlantic Arctic; in the Eurasian, central and Canadian Arctic this figure diminishes to 60% during winter. Because water vapor freezes into suspended ice crystals at temperatures below thirty degrees centigrade, the Arctic experiences dense fog during the winter months that can cause extended whiteout conditions. In heavily settled areas where higher emissions levels increase the incidence of fog related to water vapor, such fog is a well-documented phenomenon. In addition, glare from the sun off of highly reflective snow and ice surfaces can cause painful temporary blindness if one’s eyes are not properly protected. Such impediments to visibility necessitate sophisticated equipment for safe navigation and detection of obstacles aboard ships operating in the Arctic. Such equipment should be mandated by any Arctic shipping regulations in order to reduce the risk of collision with another vessel or a navigational hazard. This equipment would also help to reduce poor user navigational judgments based primarily on a visual assessment of a vessel's surroundings rather than Geographical Positioning System, radar, sonar and other instrument-based information systems.

Why the Arctic is Different

Unlike the Antarctic, which is a continent surrounded by water, the Arctic is a mediterranean surrounded by land. The Antarctic and Arctic are also dissimilar in two other important ways. First, people have inhabited the Arctic for thousands of years. Second, sovereign states hold rights to all northern lands. While the Antarctic has its own continental shelf, the Arctic Ocean is split by continental shelves protruding from northern nations around the globe: sovereign nations have legal claims to the region extending to the outer limit of their continental shelf and within the two hundred mile Exclusive Economic Zone immediately beyond the limits of the continental shelf. As Gail Osherenko and Oran Young, authorities on polar matters and the Arctic region, write, “Given the circumstances prevailing in Arctic today, we should not expect the emergence of anything resembling the comprehensive regime for Antarctica set forth in the Antarctic Treaty of 1959." To fully appreciate the rationale behind this statement, it is necessary to understand the history of the region. Indeed, events indicate that it is highly unlikely the Arctic will, as the Antarctic in 1959, be turned into a zone “forever to be used exclusively for peaceful purposes.” However, the Arctic can still be managed cooperatively and developed sustainably.

Early Human Habitation in the Arctic

Geologic evidence indicates that the first human inhabitants of the Arctic were originally from northern Russia. Two separate finds place humans in the valley of the Yana River in northern Russia as well as in northwestern North America by 28,000 B.C.E. Stone tools dated to 15,000 B.C.E. have also been recovered from a settlement near the Bluefish River in the northern Yukon.  In addition, excavation of ivory tools along the Berelekh River in Russia points to unrelated inhabitation around 10,000 B.C.E. There is widespread evidence that by 6,000 B.C.E. homo sapiens had moved into the fringes of the Arctic region for good. What little we know about these early Arctic peoples, however, is based solely on archaeological evidence and oral tradition.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, some European historians claimed that the Inuit people are direct descendants of Ice Age European reindeer hunters. However, more recent archaeological surveys show that the Thule, ancestors of the Canadian and Greenlandic Inuit, moved into the coast of Alaska and eastern Siberia from northern Russia between 2000 and 3000 years ago. This evidence dispels the theory that the Inuit are in any way related to Ice Age Europeans. Furthermore, it indicates that the Inuit are relatively recent migrants to the Arctic.

The Inuit economy, based on the hunting of seals and whales, developed as the most northerly of North Pacific Rim maritime economies that stretched from Japan to British Columbia. It is distinct from the economy that developed during two major tribal occupations, dated between 2500 and 2000 B.C.E. and nearly 2000 years later (around 500 B.C.E.) in northern Greenland. Unlike the northern Canadian Inuit, these people appear to have relied primarily on the muskox that entered the Arctic region around between 3000 and 2000 B.C.E. However, the abrupt disappearance of these two cultures, referred to as Independence I and Independence II, likely indicates that the animal resources in the region were too meager to support long-term human populations.

How did the migration from the shores of present-day Siberia to Alaska, the Canadian north and Greenland occur? Hundreds of small tribes broke off to form their own communities, often ranging long distances in their search for food.  At first, these early Arctic inhabitants spent only summer in Alaska before returning to Siberia. Tales of good hunting, though, would draw more people to the region the following year. Eventually, some of these people would have begun to follow the caribou eastwards during the caribou herd's wintertime migration. In search of a better life, they braved cold winters and long journeys.  When a community was lucky enough to make a sufficiently large kill, archaeological finds indicate that they would establish winter camp in the area with small houses partially dug into the ground.

These settlers eventually reached the Mackenzie Delta in northern Canada. Here, mountains gave way to the wide plains of the Western Arctic.  Hunting might well have been easier as the landscape converged at the riverhead. New animals – muskox, bison and possibly even mammoths – were discovered and eventually the settlers developed techniques to hunt them.  As these early inhabitants moved further east, following the Mackenzie River towards Great Slave Lake, the hunters identified major river crossings and laid in wait for caribou herds to arrive. 

At some point, small groups followed the animal life still farther east, reaching the islands that connect Greenland to Canada. Here, in areas such as Labrador, they found lush vegetation and ample populations of muskoxen, by now a staple of their diet, and caribou. At some point, an event such as sickness, social problems or heavy ice on the islands surrounding Lancaster Sound pushed some groups to head still further eastward. The journey from Siberia, which had brought these peoples' ancestors around nearly half the world and through 150 degrees of latitude, reached its Eastern stopping point in Greenland. On this vast island's northern coast, the ill-fated Independence cultures formed and later died off.  Further south, the Saqqaq culture thrived, living off of sea mammals and caribou herds. These people had completed the last major exploration of lands previously unknown to the human species.  In isolation, they developed their own customs, traditions and way of life.  Indeed, it would be millenia before Europe established contact with these early Arctic tribes.

An Introduction to the Arctic

The Arctic region can be defined in a number of ways.  To geographers, it is the area north of 66° 33′ 39″ North.  For others, it is a region defined by average temperatures or the presence of continuous or discontinuous permafrost.  For the purposes of this blog, we will consider the Arctic to be the region defined by Professor Donat Pharand: all land north of 60° North latitude as well as areas to the south of 60° North that encompass tundra biomes inhabited primarily by Native people, as in northern Quebec.  Fairbanks and Anchorage do not, however, fall under this definition despite being more northerly than 60° North.

Just how big is the Arctic?  According to the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental panel on Arctic issues, the Arctic covers thirty million square kilometers, encompassing one-sixth of the world's landmass and twenty-four time zones.  For comparison, the entire North American continent covers approximately twenty-four million square kilometers.  Continental Russia, China and India could all three fit into the region with room to spare.  At the height of the winter ice season, an ice pack of sixteen million square kilometers - nearly the size of Russia - covers the region.

Change in the Arctic is occurring at a breakneck pace.  On August 21, 2007, the fabled Northwest Passage - a sea route through the waters north of Canada that cuts thousands of miles off the journey from Western Europe to Asia - opened for the first time to vessels without an icebreaker.  The following year, the ice pack again receded to a significant enough extent that the passage opened on August 25, 2008.  The Northern Sea Route, which follows the Russian Arctic border to Europe, is likewise increasingly ice-free.  A growing fleet of Russian icebreakers further enables shipping in the Northern Sea Route.

In short, the Arctic is caught in a self-reinforcing feedback loop.  As more ice melts, the dark surface of the ocean and the permafrost are exposed to a greater extent during the summer months.  These dark surfaces trap and retain heat just as the ice pack once reflected it.  Indeed, scientific data shows that the Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the globe.  A new study in the journal Ecological Monographs indicates that the Arctic has historically absorbed between ten and fifteen percent - and as high as twenty-five percent - of the human-generated carbon dioxide absorbed by land masses and oceans.  Low temperatures allow the permafrost to absorb more carbon dioxide than it emits.  As the region warms and the permafrost is exposed, large deposits of greenhouse gases such as methane and carbon dioxide will be released into the atmosphere.  This is unaccounted for by current climate models.

In the coming decades, the Far North will find its way into our headlines more often.  Already, Russia has declared that it expects the Arctic to be its main resource base by 2020.  The eight Arctic nations - Russia, Canada, the United States, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland - as well as commercial interests (shippers, deep-sea miners, hydrocarbon coporations, the fishing industry), local populations, environmental, preservation and conservation groups will all bring a different opinion to the table.  It will take a coordinated effort, though, to implement regulatory systems and the appropriate enforcing mechanisms to protect Arctic ecosystems and social systems without overly burdening economic development in the region.  And there will be economic development: the 2007 U.S. Geological Survey estimates that 22% of the world's undiscovered, technically recoverable resources are located in the Arctic, with 84% of these resources located offshore.  Even conservative estimates place the amount of methane hydrates in the region at one or more magnitudes larger than the conventional reserves cited by the U.S. Geological Survey.  With increasing global demand for natural resources, the competition for Arctic reserves is heating up.