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.