Round About the North Pole

by W. J. Gordon

Barents was by no means convinced that the strait was impassable, and held out against the opinion of the others for some days, but with the firm ice stretching round in all directions he had to give in, and on the 15th of September the fleet began the voyage home. Much had been expected, and the result was so conspicuous a failure that the States General abandoned any further attempt at a north-east passage on their own account, but decided to offer a reward to any private expedition that proved successful. Whereupon the authorities and merchants of Amsterdam fitted out two vessels for a third voyage, giving the command of one to Jan Corneliszoon Rijp, and that of the other to Jacob van Heemskerck, with Barents as chief pilot.

The ships left the Dutch coast on the 18th of May. Four days afterwards they were off the Shetlands, going north-east. On the 9th of June they discovered an island, on which they landed. Here they saw a prodigious white bear, which they went after in a boat, intending to slip a noose over her neck, but when they were near her she looked so strong that their courage failed, and they returned to the ships to fetch more men, and what seems to have been quite an armoury of "muskets, harquebusses, halberds and hatchets." Accompanied by another boat they attacked this formidable beast for over two hours, one of them getting an axe into her back, with which she swam away until she was caught and had her head split open by another blow from an axe. From this remarkable bear, whose skin, we are told, was twelve feet long, the island was named Bear Island.

Continuing northwards they sighted, on the 19th of June, Spitsbergen, which they supposed to be Greenland—an error that led to much confusion—and on the 21st of June they landed and had another trying time with a bear, whose skin proved to be thirteen feet long. On one island of the cluster they found the eggs of the barnacle goose, Bernicla leucopsis, whose nesting ground was up to then unknown, and on others they saw reindeer, for in this land "there groweth leaves and grass." Returning to Bear Island after attaining 79° 49´, some hundred and seventy miles higher north than in 1594, Rijp departed for the north again, and, failing to get beyond Bird Cape, went home to Holland by way of Kola; and to Kola he came back the year afterwards.

In 1603, following the Dutch, came Stephen Bennet to call Bear Island Cherie Island, after his patron, and find the walruses in thousands and the birds in millions. A rocky tableland of mountain limestone and carboniferous sandstone, with the usual fossils in unusual numbers and a few coal seams in between; the ravines faced and floored with fragments of every dimension and shape, split off by the frost and weathered by wind and rain: a grey, grassless, monotonous country, except along the coast, where the guano from the vast numbers of seabirds has coated the crannies and ledges of the cliffs, that tower up perhaps four hundred feet from the water, with a thin layer of soil in which the scurvy-grass and a few other plants thrive amazingly, though the island's complete flora contains but forty species—such is Bear Island, the stepping-stone to Spitsbergen, of which Jonas Poole took possession in 1609 for the Muscovy Company.

SPITSBERGEN

Lying east of the influence of the Gulf Stream, the range of temperature is of the widest. Often the island is unapproachable owing to the ice, sometimes it is even now as hot as Welden found it in 1608, when, in June, "the pitch did run down the ship's sides, and that side of the masts that was to the sun-ward was so hot that the tar did fry out of it as though it had boiled." That was a great year for Welden, for he killed a thousand walruses in less than seven hours and took a young one home with him, "where the king and many honourable personages beheld it with admiration, the like whereof had never before been seen alive in England."

Poole did much useful work in these seas, but is now little heard of, most of the surviving interest in such matters being concentrated on Henry Hudson, who was in the same service at the same time. Hudson was, perhaps, a grandson of Alderman Henry Hudson, one of the founders of the Muscovy Company, but nothing is really known of him beyond his being a captain in the Muscovy Company, who, on the 19th of April, 1607, took the sacrament at St. Ethelburga's, in Bishopsgate Street, with his son and crew "and the rest of the parishioners." That he was a parishioner may be true, but that all the ten members of the crew were so is unlikely. Anyhow, they were outward bound for Japan and China by way of the North Pole, and sailed from Gravesend on the 1st of May.

Where he went is not clear in detail, as his latitudes are seldom correct and his longitudes are not recorded. He sighted Greenland north of Iceland, and, shouldered off by the ice barrier, left it somewhere about Franz Josef Fjord, working easterly by the edge of the ice to Spitsbergen. Here he sailed round Prince Charles's Foreland and went north, passing Hakluyt Headland, which he named, reaching on the 13th of July, 80° 23´, "by observation." He saw many whales, but found his way blocked by ice; and after many attempts, assuring himself that there was no passage hereabouts to the north, sailed southwards for Bear Island. On leaving this he seems to have gone west, possibly to the coast of Greenland again, for on his way home he lighted upon Hudson's Touches, now known as Jan Mayen Island, the principal cape of which bears the name of Hudson's Point—which may be either Hudson's or Rudston's (after the Rudston mentioned in Baffin's fourth voyage)—while another is known as Young's Foreland, perhaps after the James Young who was the first in the ship to sight the coast of Greenland on the outward journey. He dropped anchor in the Thames on the 15th of September all well. He had not crossed the Pole, nor did he find Spitsbergen stretching up to 82°, as he said, its most northerly point being miles further south; but he had gone beyond Van Heemskerck's furthest north and found a fishing ground for whales and walruses which proved of great commercial value.