Among Unknown Eskimo

A voyage to the Arctics has always been a dangerous and exciting adventure, whether entered upon by whalers and hunters, intrepid men lured by the hardy business of the frozen North, or by the no less intrepid pioneers of exploration and of science. For the moment, we are not concerned with the latter, but rather with some aspects of life in the barren lands and icy seas north of “the Circle,” and with the adventures and experiences of the few ships’ crews who have been making yearly voyages in those regions for trading purposes ever since the efforts of the sixteenth century navigators to discover the famous North West Passage began to chart out these hitherto unnavigated seas.

The search, indeed, for this passage, a sea route of communication between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans (or, in other words, a short way to the East Indies without doubling the Cape of Good Hope)—was incidentally the means of opening up the whole of the north polar regions to exploration and discovery. As early as the year 1527, the idea of such a passage was suggested to Henry VIII by a merchant of Bristol; but it was not until the beginning of the following century that a first expedition was fitted out at the expense of some London merchants and despatched to the arctic seas.

Centuries before this, however, the Arctic Ocean was entered by a Norwegian adventurer about the time of King Alfred; and the west coast of Greenland was colonised from Iceland early in the eleventh century. But no further progress was made in arctic discovery until the sixteenth century, when various seas and points of land were mapped out, mainly in the eastern hemisphere. The navigator Henry Hudson discovered the Straits and Bay named after him in the great North American archipelago, in 1610. Frobisher, Drake, and Hall, made voyages to the west coasts of Greenland and to the opposite coasts; but the entrance to the arctic regions west of that continent was discovered by John Davis in 1585. In 1616, Baffin and Bylot passed through this passage and sailed up Smith Sound, but nothing further was learned of these parts for another two hundred years.