The Routledge Handbook of the Polar Regions

Mark Nuttall, Torben R Christensen, Martin Siegert, Mark Nuttall, Torben R Christensen, Martin Siegert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317549567
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecosystems & Habitats
• Index: Biological Sciences

The Routledge Handbook of the Polar Regions is an authoritative guide to the Arctic and the Antarctic through an exploration of key areas of research in the physical and natural sciences and the social sciences and humanities. It presents 38 new and original contributions from leading figures and voices in polar research, policy and practice, as well as work from emerging scholars.

This handbook aims to approach and understand the Polar Regions as places that are at the forefront of global conversations about some of the most pressing contemporary issues and research questions of our age. The volume provides a discussion of the similarities and differences between the two regions to help deepen understanding and knowledge. Major themes and issues are integrated in the comprehensive introduction chapter by the editors, who are top researchers in their respective fields. The contributions show how polar researchers engage with contemporary debates and use interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches to address new developments as well as map out exciting trajectories for future work in the Arctic and the Antarctic.

The handbook provides an easy access to key items of scholarly literature and material otherwise inaccessible or scattered throughout a variety of specialist journals and books. A unique one-stop research resource for researchers and policymakers with an interest in the Arctic and Antarctic, it is also a comprehensive reference work for graduate and advanced undergraduate students.

Part I

Circumpolar worlds

1

Exploring and mapping the Arctic

Histories of discovery and knowledge

John McCannon

To most minds, the phrase “Arctic exploration” is likely to evoke sepia-toned impressions of grizzled adventurers – storied figures such as Nansen and Peary, or roisterous prospectors straight from the pages of Jack London and Robert Service – racing on ships, on skis, with dogs, and soon enough on airships and airplanes, toward the North Pole, or in search of gold and other riches on a legendary scale. As large as it looms in the public imagination, though, this “heroic” age, generally considered to have coincided with the late 1800s and early 1900s, constitutes only a narrow sliver of the long history of Arctic exploration. Whether we take “discovery” – a loaded term in the field for more than a generation now – to mean all forms, indigenous or external, of understanding a geographical space, or a more systematic mapping and study of a place unfamiliar to oneself (but not to its original inhabitants), processes of discovery have unfolded in the circumpolar North for centuries at a minimum, and arguably for millennia, although older and non-Western examples are harder to know with certainty. The breadth of this timespan is matched by that of the range of motivations which drove Arctic exploration: migration and colonial settlement; the quest for wealth, whether it was to be gained from minerals, animals, or creatures of the sea; the imperatives of war, national security, and state-building; the proselytizing crusades of Christian churches; sheer scientific and navigational curiosity; and more. Rather than attempting a comprehensive survey of the topic, a difficult challenge for even a book-length study, this chapter will provide a chronological overview, highlighting key themes and trends for each period, illustrating these with selected examples, both well-known and less familiar. Due to considerations of space, and intending no slight to newer and more expansive readings of the terms “discovery” and “exploration”, it will concentrate principally on navigational, cartographic, and scientific endeavours that conform more closely to traditional understandings of those concepts.

Toward hyperborea: early “discoveries” in the Arctic

Human beings are thought to have first reached the Arctic Circle as early as 28,000 years ago, and while the origin of those peoples who presently inhabit the far north forms a complex subject of its own, broad consensus has it that most of these groups, or at least their ancestors, had moved into their homelands, or were migrating toward them, by around the years between 3000 BCE and 1000 CE.

Without a doubt, these peoples – be they the Eskimo and Inuit of North America and Greenland; the Sámi and Komi of Fennoscandia and northwest Russia; or the dozens of native peoples in northern Siberia, including the Koryaks and the Chukchi – explored, and did so extremely well. Their survival depended on a precise and thorough understanding of the physical layout and natural workings of the ecosystems they inhabited. There is little point in quibbling ungenerously over the semantics of whether such knowledge should be seen as “lore” or, instead, “science” of the sort Westerners typically associate with exploration. The main problem here is that the near-total absence of written documents, combined with the difficulty of reconstructing from oral tradition the worldview of societies from the distant past, leaves us poorly equipped to trace in detail how and when indigenous northerners in the pre-contact era accumulated their geographical knowledge, and in what forms – other than oral transmission and the sharing of lived experience – they may have preserved and transmitted it. When it comes to visualizing and recording geographical data, the best-known instance among Arctic indigenous people is the creation by Eskimo and Inuit peoples of so-called driftwood maps, in which the contours of a given coastline are carved into the edge of the wood. Surviving examples, however, are of comparatively recent origin, and how far back in time this practice might extend is a matter of speculation. The fact that indigenous peoples explored the north is beyond dispute, but recovery of the details may belong more properly to the sphere of anthropology than to that of history. A final note to make here concerns the incalculable debt that Euro-American explorers would later owe to the Arctic’s indigenous inhabitants: native understanding of the northern wilderness proved indispensable to outsiders who came to travel there. It can be said with certainty that without native expertise, little of the Arctic “discovery” carried out by the West would have been possible.

Non-native awareness of a distinctly northern region, or “hyperborea”, is considered to have begun during the Greco-Roman era, as Herodotus wrote in his Histories of a perpetually wintry realm beyond “civilized” bounds, and as the Greek voyager Pytheas of Massalia, around 330 BCE, claimed to have rounded the mass of mainland Europe and entered the frozen seascape he dubbed “Thule”. By Europe’s medieval period, exploratory ventures to the Arctic were more numerous, but in many ways still shrouded in uncertainty. Chronicles from the middle ages have marked limitations as sources, and many of those who travelled to the Arctic had every incentive not to report their “discoveries” in a way that can be captured by the historical record: why, for example, would a whaler reveal the location of a favourite hunting ground, or a merchant a new trade route?

Prior to Columbus, European exploration of the Arctic was by necessity confined to the North Atlantic islands, the Fennoscandian far north, and the high latitudes of northwest Russia. Viking excursions to the west brought the Faeroes (settled by the Norse around 800) and Iceland (discovered in 870) permanently into the Scandinavian sphere. Erik the Red pushed out even farther in the 980s, reaching Greenland, where Norse colonists farmed and fished on its southern and southwestern shores – trading and warring with the local Inuit (or “skraelings”, as the newcomers called them) – then withered during the late 1300s and early 1400s, dying out for reasons still not completely understood. Vikings also sailed north and east to crest the Arctic rim of Scandinavia, continuing on from there into the region they called “Bjarmaland”, which consisted of the Kola Peninsula and Russia’s White Sea coast. Among these early freebooters was the Norse hunter Ottar, who, around 890, reached what was probably the mouth of the North Dvina, traded with the local Sámi and Komi, and brought back a bounty of walrus tusks, seal pelts, and furs that gave him bragging rights when he visited the court of Alfred the Great. Others came in Ottar’s wake, whether to hunt, to fish rich grounds like the Lofoten Islands (off Norway’s coast near 70°N), or to Christianize the natives.

Venturing farther to the east were the Russians, especially from the city-state of Novgorod, a successful expansionist power until its absorption by Muscovy in the 1400s. In search of amber, ivory, and furs, Novgorodians and other Russians followed northwestern rivers like the Dvina through taiga and tundra, arriving at the White Sea coast in the 900s and 1000s. There they built ports and salt works, and then continued eastward along the coast. They charted the southern tip of Novaya Zemlya during the eleventh century and attained over the coming decades a decent geographical understanding of the Arctic shore between the Kola Peninsula and the mouth of the Ob River. Churchmen arrived alongside the trappers, sea-hunters, and settlers, both to preach to the natives – Stephen of Perm began his mission to the Komi in the 1380s – and to seclude themselves as much as possible from worldly distractions, a goal easily achieved in such remote spiritual outposts as the famed Solovetsky Monastery, established on the islands of the White Sea in 1429 (and destined in centuries to come to serve as one of the USSR’s most feared prison camps).

After Columbus: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

Although Christopher Columbus never voyaged near the high northern latitudes, his 1492 encounter with the Americas marks a watershed in the history of Arctic exploration, in that it opened up a new set of frontiers for Europeans to “discover” and provided new incentives to spur those discoveries on. Arctic exploration during the 1500s and 1600s was impelled by the same economic and religious motivations that had driven it in earlier centuries, and now increasingly by state-building and colonization. It now proceeded, however, on a larger scale, with greater scientific precision, and in multiple directions. The newest variable was the desire of nations like France, England, and others to undercut the monopoly held by Portugal and Spain on the New World’s most desirable territories and on sea routes to Asia. Were the higher latitudes of North America, neglected by the Spanish, worth exploiting? And could European ships reach China and the East Indies by sailing through Arctic waters, opening a Northeast Passage along the coast of Russia or a Northwest Passage through the islands and waterways of the country we now know as Canada?

In the west, John Cabot led the way with his 1497 survey of Newfoundland, and more such expeditions, such as Jacques Cartier’s mapping of the St. Lawrence River in the 1530s and 1540s, boosted European familiarity with the terrain and waterways that led upward to the North American Arctic. In the 1570s and 1580s, the Dano-Norwegian kingdom re-established its old colonial claim to Greenland (including its Inuit inhabitants) and more thoroughly explored its southern coastlines. Knocking even harder on the door of the Northwest Passage were Martin Frobisher and John Davis, each of whom, in a series of pivotal voyages during the 1570s and 1580s, entered the chilly waters between western Greenland and the Canadian archipelago, with Davis sailing as far as 72°N. Both men stimulated further exploration of the region by reporting on the vast quantities of bowhead whales and cod they had spotted, and regarding the viability of a Northwest Passage, Davis opined that it was “most probable, the execution easie”.¹

Also in the 1500s, fishing, whaling, and seal- and walrus-hunting, along with the prospect of opening a Northeast Passage to Asia, brought larger numbers of European ships to the Norwegian, White, and Barents seas in the 1500s. A costly but consequential voyage set out from England in 1553, under the command of Hugh Willoughby; although two of Willoughby’s ships were lost, Richard Chancellor landed on the White Sea coast, made his way to the court of Ivan the Terrible, and negotiated terms of trade that led to the formation of the Muscovy Company. (This in turn gave birth, in 1589, to one of the circumpolar world’s most important ports: Arkhangelsk.) In 1556, Stephen Burrough became the first West European to sail past Novaya Zemlya and into the Kara Sea, and the western sectors of Russia’s Arctic coast were charted more thoroughly over the next several decades. On land, parallel efforts extended Russia’s political reach – and geographical knowledge – into western Siberia. Following river valleys northward from the sub-Arctic, as well as inching along the shoreline, Russian hunters and travellers mapped most of the northern littoral from the Kola Peninsula to the Yamal Peninsula and the gulf formed by the Ob, and even to the mouth of the Yenisei by the mid-1500s. All this was helped by the fact that Ivan the Terrible, with his conquests of the Tatar khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan in the 1550s, had opened the Siberian subcontinent to a wave of conquest that eventually took the Russians all the way to the Pacific. Full-scale invasion began with Yermak’s assault across the Urals in the 1580s; although the Cossack warlord fell in battle in 1585, his campaign led to the establishment of Russia’s first Siberian cities, Tiumen and Tobolsk, and the Russian network of townships and settlements soon included numerous outposts along the northern reaches of the Ob and Yenisei rivers, including the Arctic port of Obdorsk, founded in 1595.

Closing out the century along the Northeast Passage was the Dutch mariner Willem Barents. Between 1594 and 1597, Barents led three expeditions to the sea that now bears his name and recorded an astonishing “farthest north” of 79°49′N. He failed in his goal, which was to locate an ice-free path through the Kara Sea, and he and many of his men lost their lives to these voyages: the majority perished while stranded on Novaya Zemlya during the winter of 1596–1597. Still, the survivors returned with a wealth of information about both seas, and it was Barents who formally charted Spitsbergen, the chief island of the Svalbard archipelago. The state of knowledge here had greatly improved since the 1530s, when Sweden’s Olaus Magnus depicted a somewhat distorted version of the North Atlantic and “Bjarmia” on his famed Carta marina.

The search for both passages intensified in the 1600s, as did European appetites for fishing and hunting in the high north. Essaying the northeast and northwest routes alike was Henry Hudson of England, who sailed variously for his own country and for the Dutch. Convinced like Gerhard Mercator and Abraham Ortelius, the premier mapmakers of the day, that beyond the icy seas of the Arctic lay a body of warm water surrounding a pillar-like North Pole, Hudson attempted to pierce this boreal barrier, first for the Muscovy Company in 1607, travelling as far as Spitsbergen, then in 1608 and 1609. These last two voyages took him only as far as Novaya Zemlya, and during the 1609 venture, which he undertook for the Dutch East India Company in the Half Moon, frustration led him to turn to the west, all the way to Newfoundland, and then to Cape Cod and the river that bears his name – a “discovery” that prompted the Dutch to claim the surrounding territory and establish New Amsterdam, now New York. In 1610, Hudson returned to the Americas, this time for England in the Discovery, and charted Hudson Bay: a watershed moment in the search for the Northwest Passage and the colonization of the Canadian Arctic. Unfortunately, the expedition ended in mutiny and the death of Hudson and those loyal to him. Meanwhile, Samuel de Champlain of France founded the cities of Port Royal (1605) and Quebec (1608), solidifying the foundation from which French explorers would move upward into the Canadian north.

In the northeast, the Muscovite state discouraged foreign voyages east of Arkhangelsk, as shown by its 1619 closure of the Arctic port of Mangazeya, on the Ob Gulf. None of this kept English, French, Dutch, and Scandinavian ships, drawn northward by seals, walrus, and whales, out of the waters surrounding Novaya Zemlya, Spitsbergen, and other nearby islands. East of the Ob, however, exploration and exploitation f...