To find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea Tracing one warm line through a land so wide and Savage And make Northwest Rasgh the sea IT N REED
Arrival of the First Arctic Peoples 6000 BCE People probably first came to the North American Arctic about 8000 years ago across a land bridge that then linked Asia and what is now Alaska About 5000 years ago these people who had learned to hunt and survive on the frozen seas and lands of the Far North expanded eastward as far as southern Green land and the coast of Newfound land They called themselves Sivullirmiut or Tuniit which means first people Later migrations brought fresh waves of people The inhabitants of northern Canada are now called Inuit Viking Exploration 900s Early Exploration 1497-1811 Age of Exploration 1817-1880 Probably the first Europeans to visit the Arctic Islands were the Vikings who may have reached Greenland as early as the late 900s They traded with Inuit and named one of the islands Skraeling the Viking word for indigenous people There is a Viking settlement in northern Newfoundland called L’Anse aux Meadows that probably dates from the early 1000s Much of the exploration of the Americas was due to the search for a passage between Europe and the riches of Asia that would be shorter than going around Africa or South America In North America there were attempts on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts to break through the frozen seas of the Arctic Much of the mapping early knowledge and European settlement of the North American continent took place because of the fur trade And a great deal of the exploration of northern and western Canada was done by people working for the North West Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company Early explorers included John Cabot 1497 Jacques Cartier 1534 1542 Martin Frobisher 1576 Samuel de Champlain many voyages between 1603-1633 and Henry Hudson 1609 from the Atlantic Francis Drake 1579 Juan de Fuca 1592 Captain Cook 1776 1778 and George Vancouver 1792 in the Pacific Northwest and Henry Kelsey 1690-1692 Sieur de la Vérendrye 1731-1743 Alex ander Mackenzie 1789-1790 1793 Samuel Hearne 1769 1770 1771-1772 and David Thompson 1797-1811 through the interior and rivers of northern Canada After the British defeated the French emperor Napoleon in 1815 and became the dominant naval power in the world John Barrow of the British Admiralty declared that Arctic exploration including finding a Northwest Passage and discovering the North Pole was to be a British project Un derestimating how hard it would be to conquer the Arctic the British government and its wealthy private citizens undertook many voyages of exploration These voyages led to the mapping of the Arctic The British were plagued by the cold scurvy and lead poisoning in the tinned food they brought with them Most of these explorers failed to learn from Inuit about how to survive in the Arctic The most important of these voyages were those led by John Ross 1817 1829-1833 William Edward Parry 1819-1820 1821-1823 1824-1825 James Clark Ross 1829-1833 and John Franklin 1819-1822 1826-1827 1845 Up to forty expeditions in search of Franklin followed 1846-1880
Roald Amundsen 1903-1906 Amundsen a Norwegian was the first person to actually navigate the Northwest Passage in a fishing boat called the Gjøa It took him three and a half years 1903 1906 Unlike most of his predecessors he lived among and took advice from Inuit in the region wearing furs and eating local food that he hunted thus avoiding freezing to death and scurvy He also learned how to use sleds and sled dogs The knowledge he gained on this expedition led to his being the first person to ever reach the South Pole in 1911 Discovery of the North Pole 1908-1926 Crossing the Passage 1940-present Lowest Recorded Ice Levels in the Passage 2012 American explorers Frederick Cook 1908 Robert Peary 1909 and Richard E Byrd 1926 each claimed to have reached the North Pole There is substantial doubt about all of these claims Roald Amundsen flew in an airship to the North Pole in 1926 His arrival was documented and he may well have actually been the first to reach the pole Henry Larsen was the first to sail the passage from west to east 1940-1942 and the first to sail from east to west in one year 1944 His boat was a wooden RCMP vessel called the St Roch Icebreakers began to use the passage in 1955 and since then shipping has increased steadily Levels of ice in the passage have been decreasing steadily Multi-year pack ice the really solid ice that remains frozen for long periods of time has diminished dramatically even faster than climate-change scientists predicted Today the countries whose lands circle the North Pole Canada the US Russia Denmark and Norway are claiming that they have the right to control shipping through the passage as well as the minerals that lie beneath its waters Species that depended on the ice especially polar bears and Inuit who used this space for hunting have been substantially affected And some species of plankton and whales from the Pacific appear to have migrated to the Atlantic through the passage
