Hardships and Realities of Early Arctic Expeditions

Key Insight

Traveling in the Arctic was characterized by prolonged waiting, with tenuous local transportation systems, especially in winter and along fog-bound summer coasts, leaving travelers stranded for days by the uncertain promise of a plane's arrival or the simple tyranny of plans. In these circumstances, reading historical journals of exploration, particularly those pertaining to the specific regions of travel, helped to understand the human presence in a landscape profoundly devoid of human life. This intellectual process infused geographical features, such as a cairn on Cornwallis Island or ship remnants at Fury Beach, with deeper meaning, evoking feelings of exhilaration, empathy, compassion, and a historical sensibility vital for interpreting these regions.

Across these historical accounts, common themes of quest, defeat, aspiration, and accomplishment emerge, yet viewed from a distance, they often reveal a fundamental disassociation from the actual landscape. The land was frequently cast into a specific role, often that of an adversary or a 'bête noire' for dreams, with its very indifference ironically perceived as a virtue. Extreme forms of this disassociation reduced the landscape to merely a stage for the exposition of a personality, scientific theories, economic ambitions, or national and personal competitions, largely shaped by Victorian sentiment that valorized exertion against formidable odds, ennobling ideals, collecting, and erecting monuments, rather than fostering a tender, reciprocal engagement with the environment.

The expeditions that followed Parry's into the North American Arctic, predominantly British until the mid-nineteenth century, were fraught with unimaginable hardships. Crews on overwintering ships endured extreme cold causing frostbite, amputations, numbing headaches, and stupor, as no clothing or shelter could entirely repel it. Simple tasks were complicated, even making drinking water became a struggle, and the stifling boredom of winter quarters in dank, freezing vessels compounded anxieties about scurvy and starvation. Men succumbed to demoralizing unconsciousness with contraband whiskey, and some officers suffered clinical insanity. The frozen sea posed an constant existential threat, capable of crushing a ship 'like a nut between two stones,' leading men to sleep in their clothes for weeks, ready to abandon ship as ice lifted vessels by feet or rolled them 15° to port, always fearing an explosive hull rupture and the rush of green water.