This is a universal experience in the history of intellectual life. In the domain to which this work is devoted, it makes itself felt with perhaps more than its usual force.
The inquiry embraces long periods. In all times and countries we have seen the known world lose itself in the fogs of cloudland—never uniformly, it is true, but in constantly changing proportions. Here and there we have a glimpse, now and again a vision over wider regions; and then the driving mists once more shut out our view. Therefore all that human courage and desire of knowledge have wrested in the course of long ages from this cloudland remains vague, uncertain, full of riddles. But for this very reason it is all the more alluring.
We saw that to the eyes of the oldest civilisation in history and down through the whole of antiquity, the North lay for the most part concealed in the twilight of legend and myth; here and there genuine information finds its way into literature, but is again effaced. At the beginning of the Middle Ages the dark curtain thickens.
Again there is a glimmer of light, first from the intermingling of nations at the time of the migrations, then from new trading voyages and intercourse, until the great change is brought about by the Norsemen, who with their remarkable power of expansion overran western and southern Europe and penetrated the vast unknown solitudes in the North, found their way to the White Sea, discovered the wide Polar Sea and its shores, colonised the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland, and were the first discoverers of the Atlantic Ocean and of North America.
As early as in the writings of King Alfred and Adam of Bremen the Norsemen’s initiatory knowledge of this new northern world made its way into European literature.
No doubt the mists closed again, much of the knowledge gained was forgotten even by the Norsemen themselves, and in the latter part of the Middle Ages it is mostly mythical echoes of this knowledge that are to be traced in the literature of Europe and that have left their mark on its maps. None the less were the discoveries of the Norsemen the great dividing line. For the first time explorers had set out with conscious purpose from the known world, over the surrounding seas, and had found lands on the other side. By their voyages they taught the sailors of Europe the possibility of traversing the ocean. When this first step had been taken the further development came about of itself.
It was in the Norsemen’s school that the sailors of England had their earliest training, especially through the traffic with Iceland; and even the distant Portuguese, the great discoverers of the age of transition, received impulses from them.
Through all that is uncertain, and often apparently fortuitous and chequered, we can discern a line, leading towards the new age, that of the great discoveries, when we emerge from the dusk of the Middle Ages into fuller daylight. Of the new voyages we have, as a rule, accounts at first hand, less and less shrouded in mediævalism and mist. From this time the real history of polar exploration begins.
Cabot had then rediscovered the mainland of North America, Corte-Real had reached Newfoundland, the Portuguese and the English were pushing northward to Greenland and the ice. And this brings in the great transformation of ideas about the Northern World.
It is true that as yet we have not passed the northern limits of our forefathers’ voyages; and that views of the arctic regions are still obscure and vague. While some imagine a continent at the pole, others are for a wreath of islands around it with dangerous currents between them, and others again reckon upon an open polar sea. There is obscurity enough. But new problems are beginning to shape themselves.