Arctic Dreams, page 36
Voyages of a very different sort were undertaken eight years later by John Davis, perhaps the most highly skilled of all the Elizabethan navigators, a man of a more serene disposition than the volatile Frobisher, much less the disciplinarian among his men, less acquisitive and less self-promoting of his achievements—part of the reason that he, of all the West Country mariners, was the one never knighted.
With the backing of Adrian Gilbert, a prominent Devonshire physician, and William Sanderson, a London merchant-adventurer, and under the patronage of the Duke of Walsingham, Davis outfitted two small ships, the Sunneshine and the Mooneshine, the former with a four-piece orchestra, and sailed from Dartmouth on the Devon coast on June 7, 1585.
Their first landfall was near present-day Cape Walløe on the southeast coast of Greenland, but fog and the ice stream in the East Greenland Current held them off. “[T]he irksome noyse of the yse was such, that it bred strange conceites among us, so that we supposed the place to be vast and voyd of any sensible or vegitable creatures, whereupon I called the same Desolation.” The two ships stood out from Cape Farewell (Davis would so name it on his second voyage) and came to shore, finally, near the old Norse settlement at Godthåb on July 29. And here took place one of the most memorable of meetings between cultures in all of arctic literature.
Davis and several others were reconnoitering from the top of an island in what Davis had named Gilbert Sound when they were spotted by a group of Eskimos on the shore, some of whom launched kayaks. They made “a lamentable noyse,” wrote John Jane, “… with great outcryes and skreechings: wee hearing them, thought it had bene the howling of wolves.” Davis called on the orchestra to play and directed his officers and men to dance. The Eskimos cautiously approached in kayaks, two of them pulling very close to the beach. “Their pronunciation,” wrote Jane, “was very hollow through the throate, and their speach such as we could not understand: onely we allured them by friendly imbracings and signes of curtesie. At length one of them poynting up to the sunne with his hande, would presently strike his brest so hard, that we might hear the blowe.” John Ellis, master of the Mooneshine, began to imitate, pointing to the sun and striking his breast. One of the Eskimos came ashore. They handed him pieces of their clothing, having nothing else to offer, and kept up their dancing, the orchestra playing all the while.
The following morning the ships’ companies were awakened by the very same people, standing on the same hill the officers had stood on the day before. The Eskimos were playing on a drum, dancing and beckoning to them.
(Davis’s courteous regard for the Eskimos is unique in early arctic narratives. He found them “a very tractable people, voyde of craft or double dealing….” He returned to the same spot on his second voyage; the moment of mutual recognition, and his reception, were tumultuous.)
Two days after meeting the Eskimos, Davis crossed the strait later named for him and sailed far up Cumberland Sound, which he judged, from the lack of ice, the breadth of the channel, the set of the tides, the sight of whales passing to the east, and the “colour, nature, and qualities” of the water, to be the entrance to the Northwest Passage. Satisfied, he sailed for home. (There was no thought of overwintering on these early voyages. The ships were too small to carry a year’s provisions.) On October 3 he wrote Walsingham that the passage was “nothing doubtfull, but at any tyme [of year] almost to be passed, the sea navigable, voyd of yse, the ayre tollerable, and the waters very depe.”
Gilbert, Sanderson, and Walsingham were pleased with Davis’s progress, and, with additional backing from merchants in the city of Exeter, he sailed again on May 7, 1586, with a fleet of four ships—the large ship Mermayde, the barks Sunneshine and Mooneshine, and a small pinnace, the North Starre. Davis sent the Sunneshine and the North Starre up the east coast of Greenland with instructions to explore as far as they could in search of a route over the Pole. With the other two ships he sailed for Godthåb, where he assembled a second, prefabricated pinnace on the beach, launched with the help of forty Eskimos.
The meeting with the people at Godthåb was marked initially by a spirit of fellowship, but the mood began to deteriorate once the Eskimos became “marvellous theevish, especially for iron.” Davis tried to ameliorate the situation. He continued to trade generously with the Eskimos, and he cajoled his men to forbear. One afternoon a rock-throwing incident escalated into a fight and one of his men was wounded. That was enough for Davis. With a fair wind he sailed north.
On the 17th of July the two ships and the pinnace fell in with an enormous tabular iceberg “which bred great admiration to us all,” a sight so incredible to them that Davis declines to write about it, saying only, “I thinke that the like before was never seene.” They coasted its perimeter for thirteen days. Davis Strait, as it was later named, was full of ice where they had seen none the year before; the sight so worked on the minds of the men that they begged Davis to turn for home. He landed on the Greenland coast, disassembled the pinnace, transferred stores, and sent those who wished to go home on the Mermayde. With the rest he sailed in the Mooneshine for Baffin Island. He passed the entrance to Cumberland Sound without recognizing it, crossed Hudson Strait in a snowstorm, and then sailed south along the Labrador coast, where they made several prodigious hauls of codfish on improvised hooks.
At Trunmore Bay (perhaps), where they anchored to dry fish, they were attacked by “the brutish people of this countrey.” Two of Davis’s men were killed and three wounded. Immediately afterward the ships were all but driven onshore by a storm when an anchor cable parted. On September 11 Davis turned for home, arriving to find that the Sunneshine and North Starre had been turned back by the ice before advancing very far, and that the North Starre had gone down with her crew in a storm.
Though not as enthusiastic as they had been, Davis’s supporters underwrote a third voyage in 1587, with the understanding that while Davis himself sailed into the places he now thought might offer passage (Davis Strait, Cumberland Sound, Hudson Strait, and Hamilton Inlet on the Labrador coast), the accompanying ships would fish for cod to defray the expense of the expedition. Davis’s own ship, a small, clincher-built pinnace, the Ellen, broke her tiller the first day out and, overall, sailed “like to a cart drawen with oxen.”
At Godthåb, Davis explored the interior of the fiord while the crew of one of the other ships assembled a fourth craft, another pinnace on the beach. (Davis intended to explore in this pinnace while the other three ships went south to fish for cod.) Again hostilities broke out, with the Eskimos stealing nails from the shipwrights. Davis could not settle the issue. After a gunner fired a blank shot from a cannon, Davis ordered the half-assembled pinnace knocked down and stowed aboard the Elizabeth. With the Sunneshine leaking badly and that crew and the Elizabeth’s nearly mutinous with a desire to be off, Davis bade them adieu. He set a course north in the Ellen along the Greenland coast, sailing as far as 72°46´N, which he named Sanderson’s Hope for the Passage. The ocean was open far to the north and west, and of “an unsearcheable depth.” But there was no wind to take him in either direction. He made southwest. After being beset for two days when he tried to penetrate the pack ice, he doubled the Cape of God’s Mercy (named on the first voyage for the cape that pointed him into what he thought was the Passage), and headed up Cumberland Sound. When the wind fell off, he sailed back to the entrance and south past Frobisher Bay, which he named Lumley’s Inlet. (With no reliable method to determine longitude, and under the pervasive influence of the problematical Zeno map, which showed Frobisher Strait at the southern tip of Greenland, Davis thought he was the first to visit here.)
He noted again, as he had the year before, the “furious overfall” of tides in Hudson Strait, “lothsomly crying like the rage of the waters under London Bridge.” They cruised along the Labrador coast looking for the Sunneshine and Elizabeth, which, owing to the poor sailing characteristics of the Ellen, were to escort him home. They had not waited. On August 15, Davis set sail for Dartmouth. It took him a month to make the crossing.
Davis’s accomplishments on these trips are stunning. He laid down most of the Labrador coast on sailing charts, some 700 miles of the west coast of Greenland, and most of southwest Baffin Island. His notes on ice conditions, plants, animals, currents, and the interior of Greenland, as well as his ethnographic descriptions of the Eskimos, were the first of their kind. He brought these lands not only onto the maps but into the realms of science. The “Traverse-Booke” he developed on the voyages became the model for a standard ship’s log. The backstaff he developed anticipated the reflecting quadrant and the modern sextant. And The Seaman’s Secrets (1594), much of it based on these three voyages, became a seventeenth-century bible for English mariners.
In subsequent years Davis discovered the Falkland Islands and sailed into the Pacific, hopeful of finding a western entrance to the Passage. He was killed by Japanese pirates in the Strait of Malacca, off Singapore, in 1605, at the age of fifty-five. He was a loyal and courageous man, tolerant of other people’s differences. His knowledge of navigation was a fine blend of scientific acumen and practical experience. In The Worlde’s Hydrographical Description (1595), reflecting on the light that fell on the northern regions in the summer, he wrote that because of this suffusion of light the land beneath the Pole Star is “the place of greatest dignitie” on earth.
Davis’s expeditions went out uninsured, like all others at the time—the risk of shipwreck due to crude instruments, errors in the charts, or inexperienced command was simply too high. A master mariner like Davis could determine his latitude with a quadrant, astrolabe, or backstaff. He had declination tables to compensate for compass errors. And he might be fortunate enough to have the journal or rutter of another pilot who had been to the area he was sailing, to warn him about reefs or give helpful advice about tides. But not until John Harrison built his first chronometer in 1735 would there be a reliable way to determine longitude.
The charts and maps available to expeditions, especially for westering mariners, were of little help. Too much of the information was whimsical or groundless, and updating maps often meant contending with theoretical concepts of geography with which practical mariners had little patience. Furthermore, with no way to determine longitude and scant information on compass variation in different parts of the hemisphere, they found it hard to place new lands accurately and so improve old maps. The Zeno map (1558), a fictitious compilation showing many large islands in the western North Atlantic, was of such intimidating authority, on the other hand, that even John Davis believed he had to “harmonize his work with universally received errors.”
A competent mariner, observing of the weather and attentive to the subtle behavior of the sea and the movement of his ship, especially a known ship, frequently had an intuitive feeling for what he was doing, even along an unknown coast. If he was sailing “by ghesse and by God,” he was mostly guessing right. He preferred a small, maneuverable vessel to a large cargo ship—a frequent point of disagreement with an expedition’s backers—and tried, if possible, to sail in company with another ship. (It was not until 1821, when Parry set off on his second trip to the Arctic with Hecla and Fury, that anyone saw the wisdom of embarking in duplicate ships with interchangeable parts.)
Sailors, the best of them, had an astounding ability to keep their ships running, and were as resourceful as Eskimos with a handful of scraps in improvising a repair. They often pulled a small ship completely out of the water on a foreign beach and heaved it over to patch its hull. Their lot in arctic waters, where they ran the constant risk of being stove by ice, was dreadful. Their fare was utterly simple: salt beef and codfish, bread and dried peas, cheese and butter, and beer. All eaten cold. There were no hot liquids like coffee or tea. Sailors slept wherever there was room among the stores and provisions, and felt fortunate to have a change or two of clothing if they got wet or cold. The possibility of scurvy and shipwreck were always “hard by.”7
Shipboard conditions slowly improved, the maps became more accurate, and better navigational instruments were developed. Books such as Davis’s The Seaman’s Secrets spread a technical knowledge of navigation. By the seventeenth century, cartographers were not so disposed to conjecture by filling in with an island or two. They left large areas like the Arctic blank now, something that would have astounded their predecessors. The maze of portolano lines on coastal charts became, in time, a circular arrangement of thirty-two winds, drawn like the petals of a flower—the wind, or compass, rose. Exploration, however, continued to be an arrangement between bankers and dreamers, carried out by tough, sagacious pilots and resourceful crews. And because the bills had to be paid, remuneration in trade from the newly discovered lands was never far from the minds of those who wished to pursue these journeys.
Several important voyages followed soon after Davis’s last. Henry Hudson sailed for the Pole in 1607 with ten men and a boy in a small pinnace. They got as far as 73°N on the east coast of Greenland, where Hudson named a promontory Hold with Hope. On the return voyage he discovered Jan Mayen Island and the whale fishery at Spitsbergen. After a voyage to Novaya Zemlya, and a second voyage that started in that direction but turned for the east coast of North America and became an exploration of the Hudson River, he sailed in 1610 for arctic waters. That year he overwintered in James Bay, south of the strait and bay which today bear his name. In the spring some of the crew, fearing starvation, mutinied. They put Hudson and his son, three loyal men, and four of the sick in a boat and set them adrift, never to be seen again. The alleged ringleaders of the mutiny were later killed by Eskimos; those left alive sailed the Discovery home in a pitiful condition, reduced to eating candles, grass, and shreds of bird skin.
The entrepreneurs who employed Hudson, more interested in refitting for another voyage than in any trial for mutiny, sent the same ship back out under Thomas Button in 1612. He reached the far shore of Hudson Bay, realized Hudson’s Sea was an embayment, and named a point there Hopes Checked. (Hudson, who thought he was sailing into the Pacific, named the southern cape at the entrance to Hudson Strait Hopes Advance.) Button, who overwintered at the mouth of the Nelson River, where he lost many men, discovered Coats, Southampton, and Mansel islands, and in the spring sailed to 65°N in Roes Welcome Sound.
In 1615 William Baffin, pilot, and Robert Bylot, captain, made the first of two important journeys together, this one into Foxe Channel and Frozen Strait, north of Hudson Bay, where they determined that there was no Northwest Passage to be found via Hudson Strait. Baffin, a gifted navigator and an astute and accurate observer, saw the tide flooded from the southeast and ebbed from the northwest. He guessed, correctly, that the Passage lay through Davis Strait, and in 1616 he and Bylot went there. (Hudson’s voyage, Button’s voyage, and both of Baffin’s were made in the Discovery, a bark the size of Davis’s Sunneshine.)
The second voyage took Bylot and Baffin to 78°N, above Davis Strait and farther north than anyone else would sail for 200 years.8 They named many of the sounds, bays, and capes for their investors, the same men who had sent Hudson and Button out before them—Smith, Jones, Lancaster, Digges, and Wolstenholme. Returning to the south, Baffin surveyed the east coast of the island that would be named for him, laying down charts until his work intersected that of John Davis.
When Baffin’s journal and charts were prepared for publication, they were heavily censored; in time, his discoveries came to be disbelieved and were removed from contemporary maps. (It was not until 1818 that Sir John Ross would confirm everything Baffin had set down.) Baffin’s work, and Button’s journals and maps, were suppressed, probably, by investors who didn’t want rivals nosing about for a passage in Baffin Bay. The early history of Hudson Bay after Button’s voyage there in 1612 is a woeful chronicle of fatal disasters and bravado in search of a Northwest Passage and a fortune in furs and gold. When Charles II granted a permanent charter to Prince Rupert and other “Gentlemen Adventurers trading into Hudson’s Bay” in 1670, he offered that company, in effect, a sovereign right to all lands drained by the rivers emptying into Hudson Bay. This sweeping privilege was made contingent, however, upon the Bay’s efforts to find a Northwest Passage. Once the Gentlemen Adventurers saw the bales of lustrous furs brought out of the subarctic hinterlands by Pierre Radisson and Médard Chouart des Groseillers, they were disinclined to pursue any such geography. They were staring at a fortune. In order to protect it and create a trade monopoly, the Bay deliberately obstructed (initially) the search for a Passage in the region, since any business along such a route would bypass them on the way to China. The size of the bribe they reportedly paid to one Christopher Middleton to falsify his records of exploration induced the British Admiralty to set aside in 1734 a huge sum as a reward for the discovery of a Northwest Passage—£20,000.
The story of the Hudson’s Bay Company is the story of an enormously powerful, nearly autonomous special-interest group that for hundreds of years strongly influenced the political, social, economic, and environmental fate of a country larger than most sovereign nations. Its stable base of remuneration in the New World—fur trapping—changed the whole focus of arctic exploration. Given the desolate aspects of the land, no one had suspected what a staggering number of high-quality furs would be brought out year after year, and for how many years this would go on.9
The other, earlier foundation of wealth found by merchant-adventurers in the Arctic was the whale fishery, first in the vicinity of Spitsbergen where it was shore-based and extremely competitive, especially between the Dutch and the British, and then in the open waters of the “whale-fisher’s bight,” a tongue of water that extends unfrozen in winter into the northern Greenland Sea west of Spitsbergen, the last trace of the Gulf Stream.10 Sealing took place here, too, in the spring on the “west ice,” to the west of the whale-fisher’s bight. (The whale and seal fisheries would thrive in the Greenland and Norwegian seas for more than a hundred years before whalers shifted to Davis Strait and North American sealers began to exploit a sealing ground just as large on the sea ice north and east of Newfoundland.)
