EARLY POLAR EXPLORATION

It is nearly four hundred years (1526) since the first recorded expedition went forth to seek the North Pole under the initiative of England.

Trade, the great prize of the commerce of the opulent East, land lust, and the spirit of adventure in turn played their part as incentives for the earlier expeditions. It seems to be generally accepted that nothing had a more powerful influence on the work than England’s determination to have a trade route of her own to the riches of the East, independent of the southern routes controlled by Spain and Portugal. It was this determination that made the terms Northeast Passage and Northwest Passage historic, and brought about years of search that, though latterly scientific, have been largely the acme of adventure and sentiment.

TRAVELING IN THE FAR NORTH

Dog sledges used by Peary on his expedition to the North Pole.

From the misty date of Pytheas (325 B.C.) down through the succeeding centuries, the record of polar explo­ra­tion contains much of interest, of mystery, of superstition, followed by some of the grandest epics, most heroic efforts and sacrifices, and somberest catastrophes and tragedies in all the wide field of explo­ra­tion. Briton and Scandinavian, Teuton and Latin, Slav and Magyar, and American, have entered the lists and struggled for the prize.

THE ROOSEVELT

Peary’s ship, in which he sailed to discover the North Pole.

In the earlier years of this long record occurred the strange voyages of the Zeni, and Eric the Red, Icelandic outlaw, with his discovery and colonization of Greenland,—strange stories of hot springs in that far country, with which the monks warmed their monastery and cooked their food; a tribute of walrus tusks toward the expenses of the Crusades; tales of the rich green pastures, and herds of grazing cattle, of these colonists, and later their mysterious and complete disappearance, leaving only a scattered ruin here and there to show that they ever existed.