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Finding uncharted territory was cold comfort
By Carl Heintze
Lately, in keeping with the approach of winter, I suppose, I've been reading of the many attempts to find the Northwest Passage.
The Northwest Passage does exist--barely and then only in the Arctic Summer--but for a good part of the 18th and 19th centuries it was an unattained and unattainable goal of explorers.
It meanders along the northern coast of North America, sprinkled with straits and islands, hardly a passage, but one that it is possible to navigate in years when the ice is at a minimum.
But to the explorers of the 18th and 19th centuries it gleamed like a superhighway, just waiting to be discovered.
These folks were sure there was an easier way to get to the Pacific Ocean than by going around Cape Horn. The chief searchers were English, spurred on by various bureaucrats in the Admiralty, who saw trade with the Orient made easier by such a water passage around North America.
It didn't hurt that the Napoleonic wars had just ended and England was awash with naval officers on half pay looking for some way to advance their careers.
Going to the Arctic (and later the Antarctic) became a fairly sure and quick path to fame and riches, provided, of course, you managed to come back. Quite a few didn't.
The amazing thing about these various expeditions is the conditions under which they were made. For part of the time scurvy decimated the crews.
Eventually the explorers figured out one had to have fresh meat and vegetables and their vitamins to avoid this nasty and often fatal disease.
The ships used were powered until late in the 19th century by sails, and kept getting stuck in the ice. Even when the steam engine was invented creaky paddle-wheelers which could chug along at 3 or 4 knots were all that were available.
Men kept warm by hauling coal for fuel--there's no wood in the Arctic--and the conditions on shore were simply appalling.
The most disastrous expedition was led by Sir William Franklin, aged 60 and in poor shape, who had botched an earlier land trip and almost died in the process.
This didn't deter Franklin, however, who was considered an old Arctic hand. He sailed off across the North Atlantic into history and mystery.
He and his crew vanished. To this date there's a debate about what happened to them. But apparently the lead in the cans of food they brought with them contributed to their deaths. Some of their remains eventually showed up, but no one is still quite sure what happened.
It seems typically British that no matter what disasters took place--and there were many--the Brits kept going back to the Arctic, just as they did in Antarctica with similar tales of failure. The British seem to revel in such stories. Most of the trips were heroic, but they also often were badly bungled.
And, in the end, even though the Northwest Passage eventually was found, it is mostly useless. It is frozen over in the winter--and sometimes in the summer, as well. It has never been used with any regularity as a useful route to or from the Pacific.
So it is difficult for those of us in the 21st Century to appreciate the gnawing desire of men to find it, or the 19th Century drive to explore the blank spaces on the map.
But, before satellite mapping and other ways of looking into the last dark corners of the globe, men just loved to go out on half-baked journeys to places about which almost nothing was known, and often died.
If they didn't die, they came back heroes and some of them enjoyed the fame and fortune today awarded to athletes such as Michael Jordan and Mohammed Ali.
For instance, small parties of mad English sought for several years to find the source of the Niger River in Africa.
The Niger is a big river and empties into the sea below the bight of the continent. It pretty much doesn't go anywhere else, but that didn't stop the English explorers. They thought it was connected to the Nile River (it wasn't), and somehow they got the idea that Timbuktu was a great city on its banks.
Timbuktu today is pretty much what it was then--nowhere, a collection of mud buildings a long way from anywhere, but a pair of English explorers went through all kinds of hell to find this out .
The resident Arabs looked upon them as infidels--as, indeed, they were--and told them the river really didn't go anywhere, that Timbuktu was basically not worth finding, but they had to anyway.
Unlike Franklin who was knighted for his first expedition when he probably should have been court-martialed, the Timbuktu visitors didn't reap titles or money. But they were, of course, indomitable.
And, looking back, one supposes that being indomitable was as important as finding the Northwest Passage or anything else. Today we are not so indomitable. But we are sure a whole lot warmer.
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Willow Glen, California Since 1992
