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Home , Henry Hudson, Martin Frobisher

VOL. 37, NO. 4 (DECEMBER 1984) P. 448452

The .Route to China: Northern Europe’s Arctic. Delusions BERNARD d’ANGLURE*

In spite of the mounting Western interest in history, ancient Is it not a symptom of our era of satellite mapping that the travellers’ tales, and historical .cartography- brought home to use of the terrestrial globe has become so obsolete that it is us by the number, quality, and popularity of recent works - now only used by a few specialists or in schools, whereas up to the arctic regions seem to be peculiarly absent from the main- the endof the eighteenth century - whenthe scientific stream of contemporary historicalresearch. These regions also .measuring of longitude at sea.was .made possibleby the port- appear to resist, oddly enough, any attempt’atsynthesis, as if able chronometer - it was considered .absolutely indispens- they can only be understood through a fragmentation of time able for geographical study, whether the aim was pedagogic, and space or through the scissions resulting from the disillu- economic, political, religious, or-purely scientific? The globe sionments of a recent‘past and the stakes placed on future ex- was present in every house, every institution, and on every ploitation, over which many different interests are.already in ocean-going vessel, wherever anyonewas interested in acquir- confrontation. ing geographical knowledge, either through personal inclina- tion or necessity. GLOBAL AND NATIONAL HISTORY Certainly the information displayed on the terrestrial globe is at the root of innumerable errors and geographical delu- I think that this hiatus not a matter of chance, that it does is sions, beginningwith those of Christopher Col~mbus.~A not springfrom the historian’s oversight but morefrom globe is a finite space askingto be filled up, and people did not economic, political, ideological, and scientific developments hesitate to do so, even when they had no precise data at hand. thathave taken place. in the Christianized West since the But. the globe is also an incomparable source for synthesized Renaissance. These developments have gradually pushed back thought and the only three-dimensional way of looking at the theunreal inthe Westernperson’s mind to make way for earth’s surface that avoids the deformations resulting fromthe “logical thought” and “efficiency”, thus .creating in the choice of projection or angle imposed by a map on the plane; it realm of knowledge vast patches of shadow besidethose areas is.also the onlyway of making us see the real.importance of the of.bright illumination. These developments have also led to a Arctic as an intermediary stage between China and northern historical science whose objecfivity has given way to a creed Europe. The ill effects of the employment of the “flat map thattoo often hides the fact that “revolutions” theap- - policy”, whichone has to admit has practical value at the pearance of new independent states the specialization of and analytical level, can be seen in the presentday splitting .up of knowledge - have brought with them a divergence in points “learned societies” into their separate entities of Orientalists, ofview and a.breaking upof geographical representation, Americanists, Africanists, andOceanists - whono longer notably in thearctic-regions.* This should not surprise us if we know.what to do with the arctic regions,and withgood consider that the .protagonists of today’s science are the an- rea~on.~I should, therefore, like to stress the importance of tagonists of yesterday in the Arctic, among them the Anglo- giving back to the globe the role in research and teaching it Saxons, French, Dutch, .Danes, and Russians, who-vied with should never have l0st.5 each other eachfrom their own economic, political, and religious standpoints. MYTHS AND HISTORY Byan easily. understoodand perhaps even unconscious reflex, the states that tday control the .real “arctic empires” An arctic ethnologist isnot in the best position.tothrow light of Siberia, Alaska, the Canadian North, and, to a on the shadowy regions of knowledge, since his field of con- lesser extent, the Scandinavian North - indisputably the last sideration is constantly moving, difficult, andnarrow com- great colonial empires leftin the world - seem to try to avoid pred with the disciplinesof a historian, geographer, cartogra- any global historical perspective that would bring them, in a ,pher, or specialist of the literature of travel. While the others somewhat less glorious fashion, face to face with the illusions can make use of the significant progressin the human sciences and rivalries that tarnished their beginnings in and appropria- with regard to documentarysources and the use of newanalyt- tions of arctic lands: particularly the illusion of the existence ical methods applied to them, the ethnologist has to retrogress of a northernpassage between Europe and China, which .and maintain a .precarious balance between science and ne- would have been an alternative to the known southern ronrtes science, the real and the imaginary, and truth and error, along monopolized by the powerful Iberians. the frontiers of the other disciplines, while according them all

*Department of Anthropology, Lava1 University,.QuebBc, Que&, GlK 7P4 NORTHERN EUROPE’S ARCTIC DELUSIONS 441 an epistemological status. He has to establish a pattern among drye, Middleton and Ellis, Phipps, Lewis andClark, Chateau- events, places, prospects, andpossibilities from an ar- briand, Buchan, Ross, Parry, and Franklin doing in the west, chaeology of dreams, myths, beliefs, and facts, which in com- east, and north from the endof the seventeenth to the middleof bination have brought forth severalcenturies of arctic explora- thenineteenth century, ifthey were not searching for this tion, adventure, representation, and appropriation.6 famous shortcut? The paradox is that thearctic regions did not exist as a locus It would be a delusion to think it was only the adventurers, for scientific discussion in the stories of voyagers or in carto- explorers, and navigators who believed in this myth while the graphical drawings from the time of the Renaissance to the scientific establishment showed more discretion- far from it. dawn of the twentieth century, when the search for a passage There is a long list of cosmographers, cartographers, and to China gaveway to the racefor the . Classicaland geographers who were victims or advocates of the same er- medieval descriptions of the Arctic and memories of the col- rors, includingsome well-known and high-ranking people, onization of Greenland doubtless remained alive and influen- suchas Mercator, Buache,, Plancius,Briggs, tial for a long time, as we shall see with Mercator, but they no Champlain, and Moses Pitt. Almost all ofthem came from longer had the power to stir people into action compared with northern Europe, and their mapsand commentaries had a the fascination exercised by the search for a northern shortcut strong influence on their contemporaries, as evidenced by the to China. The Arctic had become a place of transition - for insertion of thesemistakes inthe Grunde Encyclopkdie of passing through or just stopping off - an obstacle to explore Diderot and d’Alembert.II The French Jesuits, some of the or togo around, likethe more southerly parts of North best geographers of their timet2 until the unfortunate suppres- America and Eurasia.’ Was it a promontory of Asia or Eu- sion of their order, also played an important role in the search rope? Was it a continent or an archipelago? These questions for the western route to China. were debated not only in the sixteenth centurybut still later in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, because of the con- SCIENCE AND NESCIENCE FROM MERCATOR TO BUACHE stant search for a passage.* The history of and northern Eurasia is more To illustrate the ambiguous links between science and fic- easily understood if looked at from a global and structural tion, we can consider the examples of two maps: one of Mer- viewpoint. The drive toward the east and west, toward an ex- cator’s from his atlas of 1595 and theother of Philippe Buache tension of the “frontier”, toward the northwest, north, and and Joseph Nicolas Delisle, published in 1750. The first (Fig. northeast passages - all take on another sense when isolated 1) is remarkable for the precision of its outline, the calculation from the historiographies tainted with nationalism andlooked of the coordinates, and the quality of the projection. Mercator upon as part of a pattern in East-West relationships, with their established a new scientific cartography that was to influence economic, political, scientific, ideological, andontological generations of cartographers. Yet this same map allies great dimensions, as I have tried to showfor the sixteenth centuryin exactitude with the purest fantasy in reproducing not only the a recent work.9 medieval Scandinavian beliefs about the Pole spreadby the Zn- Most present-day historians agree that after the pioneering ventio Fortunutu toward 1360 (in which a polar maelstrom days of - from the end of the fifteenth to the begin- swirled around a central rock in the middle of four islands ningof the sixteenth century - explorers suchas Cartier, partly peopled by pygmies, these islands being separated by Frobisher, Gilbert, Champlain, Smith, Barents, Davis, Way- currents of water running toward thepole13 - the equilibrium mouth, Hudson, Button, Munk, , and James were always between the sea andearth surfaces and the divisionof the four searching for a direct route to China, though several experts continentsbeing maintained), but also Zeno’simaginative consider this to be an alibi to mask more concrete reasons. In description with his fictitious islands, such as Frislande to the theopinion of other authors theearly motives faded very west of , an island still depicted in M. Pitt’s atlas pub- quicklyas soon as more accessible resources such as cod, lished in Oxford in 1680. whales, beavers, andtobacco were discovered in regions The secondmap is entitled “Carte desnouvelles dCcou- already explored. vertes au nord de la mer du Sud, tant 21 I’Est de la Sibtrie et du Few people are prepared to admit that faulty maps, errors, Kamt‘chatka qu’8 I’Ouest de la Nouvelle France” (1750). The and fictive accounts could have playedan important role in the Delisle family was distinguished in the service of the king of organization and execution of voyages of discovery. Modern France from the end of the seventeenth century: Guillaume history, with its liking for certainties - measurable facts and Delislebecame the king’s geographer in 1718;one ofhis clear social analysis - errs, perhaps, in projecting its reason- brothers wenton the great Russian expedition to the north ing on the past, in setting aside too quickly the mistakes,delu- Pacific under Bering but died during it, as did his leader.14 It sions, and false portrayals that immersed the European elite was another brother, Joseph Nicolas Delisle, charged with the responsible for commerce, politics, religion, and science. This organization of Bering’s secondexpedition, who producedthis convention is reinforced by theabsence ofmaps now con- map (Fig. 2) with the help of Philippe Buache, the son-in-law sidered erroneous or imaginary from most contemporary his- of Guillaume Delisle. They employed the results of the Rus- torical atlases. Too rational a reconstruction of the past leads sian expedition, which came to their familyarchives. The map to a danger of misunderstanding it.lo was presented at the Academy of Science in Paris and was What then were the Cavelier de la Salle, Bering, LA VCren- followed a few years later by the authors’ detailed reports on 448 B. SALADIN d'ANGLURE

the northern route to China.l5 Buache, in his turn, became the Admiral de Fonte.I6 One is surprised today to see with what king's geographer, then tutor to the royal children anda mem- ease a French geographer of Buache's stature and standing at ber of the Academy of Science. He was one of the foundersof court - thoughnot pahcularly scrupulous - was ableto the scienceof physical geography throughhis theory on hydro- enhance his personal prestige with false data and to diffuse graphic basins. Here again the map itself shows a peakof these at the highest levels of French science in the middle of technical quality in its layout, projection, and coordinates-;yet the eighteenth century. the northwest of America and the Bering Straits are treated in an entirely fancifulmanner, with a "west sea" placed between SERVES NORTHERN EUROPE AND ITS DELUSIONS Hudson's Bay andthe Rockies, a veritableFrench mirage brought to life by the revival of the pseudo-discoveries of de The exploitsof the great explorer Henry Hudson are agood Fuca and the outlines of a between Baffin illustration of the great emphasis the countries of northern Bay and the Pacific, borrowed from the fictitious account of Europe (, France, Holland, Denmark, etc.) put on the NORTHERN EUROPE’S ARCTIC DELUSIONS 449 .-

FIG. 2. Joseph Nicolas Delisle and Philippe Buache, Carte desnouvelles &couvertes au nord de la mer du sud, tant d [’est dela Siberie et du Kamtchatka, qu ’à 1 ’ouest de la Nouvelle France ... 1750. Reproduced from Arctic Images, Public Archives of Canada, 1977. discovery of a northern route to China. Hudson searched alongThe “bastard” Elizabeth, whose legitimacy the Catholics every point of the compass calculated as likely, according to had contested and whom Pius V, the “inquisitor” pope, had the delusions of his epoch,and one after another the big mer- excommunicated and even deposed, had taken her revenge on chant states of the north soundedhim out and financed him in Spain. Even if she did not have the joy of leaving a new China an effort to compete with the Iberian trade monopoly in his passage to her country, she certainly left to her successor, Indies. James I, anEngland richer and stronger than ever, with At the dawn of the seventeenth century a fabulous inheri- established. trading companies, a war-hardened fleet, and new tance revealed itself to the bankers, traders, specialists, mis- stretches of sea opened by . The England of mer- sionaries, and seafarers - the new pioneers of the Occident- chants and sailors under the Stuarts made even more deter- a legacy of products, objects, and unknown animals from the mined efforts to find a route to Cathay. A new generation of Indiesto fill the curiosity showcases and royal gardens, a seafarers and adventurers was sent out to renew the search. legacyof maps, terrestrial globes, and charts jealously In the northwest, an Anglo-Danish expedition continued to guarded in new commercial companies or religious or royal look for a passage, at the same time searching for traces of the libraries. It was an inheritance also of delusions, errors, and old Scandinavian colony in Greenland. In the west, the hunt myths fed by the new discoveries, themselves a mixture of for the China route was includedin the terms of the charter of scienceand alchemy, of experiments and religiousbeliefs. the (1606), togetherwith the search for There was an immense thirst for knowledge and understand- gold and the establishment of a colony. ing. The fascination of the Orient- so different from the Oc- After religious peace had been restored with the Edict of cident, with another form of society- this harking back to the Nantes, France did not lag behind.It stepped up the search for originalsource of Paradise Lost and the Infernal Regions, a possible route through the St. Lawrence, with Champlain these fabulous riches and terrible scourges flowing in, made playing a great role. The Saguenay River was also considered northern Europejealous of the wealth and power of the Iberianworth further exploration. and Mediterranean states. InHolland, which had become the greatest maritime and 450 B. SALADIN d’ANGLURE commercial power in Europe, Plancius, the geographer, had Hudsonmanaged to persuadehis crew to sailfor North just published his “situati6n of the coasts of Tartary, Cathay Americato explore the new channel recently found by his and China” (1595) to support explorers in their search for a friend Smith. They sailed along the coasts of New England and passage. A reward of 25 OOO florins was offered to the first on 11 September 1609 entered a river ( Bay) that person to make the discovery. Barents, another Dutchman, they named North River (now the ). They sailed had already died at Novaya .Zemlya during an expeditionto the up it for ten days, fishing and bartering for furs withth‘e native northeast,where competition was becoming fierce between inhabitants, until they were satisfied the river didnot lead to a the Dutch and English. passage. (On 30 July, a month earlier, only a few days’ march At thispoint the of London, disap- from this spot, Champlain had inflicted a crushing defeat on an pointed by the tragic end of John Knight’s expedition to the Iroquois tribein the course of his search for a route,he but had northwest, became interested in Henry Hudson’s project to set out from theSt. Lawrence basin.) Hudson brought back his reach China by the North Pole, believed to be free of ice.Is observations and the results of his bartering to Amsterdam, Hudson reached Spitzbergen and discovered a whale-breeding which a few years later led to the founding of a flourishing fur area, but he had to return home on account of the ice. How- trade and the installation of a new Dutch colony, the New ever, his observations led to the Muscovy Company equippingNetherlands, with (the future New York) as ships in collaboration with Basque fishermen. Hudson its capital. was sent out again the following yearby the company to profit The year 1609was auspicious for the Dutch. They obtained from Barents’s discoveries in the northeast, but he could not a truce with Spain, and with it unofficial recognition of their getbeyond and returned once more to independence, and they founded the Bank of Amsterdam. A England, to the disappointment and dwindling interest of his number of territories in Asia and Africa had been taken from backers. the Portuguese by force, and it was now their intention to be He therefore left for Amsterdam, where he received a great the first to discover the northern route to the . In the deal of attention. He was offered employment by the recently meantime, they meant to play their part in the new lands dis- formed Dutch to continue the explora- covered in the north and west, as did the English already new- tions ended by the death of Barents. Hudson met Plancius, ly settled in Virginia and the French in .z3 These who showed him Waymouth’s log book, and he received let- three countriesnow had their own India companies and openly ters and a map indicating a possible passage to China north of disputed the hegemony of Spain and Portugal. the state of VirginiaI9 from his friend Smith, the governor of In this atmosphere of competition, rivalry, and excitement, that state (1608). In Amsterdam he also made the acquaintanceeach attempted to retain the services of the most experienced ofIsaac Le Maire, a rich shipowner of French Huguenot navigators as well as the least bit of information. Hudson had origin who shared secretly in the founding (1 609) of the Com-hardly returned from North Americawhen he was forbidden to pagnie francaise du P61e Arctique.20Le Maire tried to engage workfor any other country by theEnglish authorities. An Hudson to lead an expedition to Cathay via the northeast on English company for the Northwest Passage placed the con- behalf of this company. HenryIV and Sully, when informed of duct of another expedition under Hudson, wholeft Gravesend thissecret project, supported it enthusiastically and par- on 17 April 1610 in the Discovery, a ship that had already ticipated in its financing. However, the negotiationstook time served Waymouth and was to become famous in several later and the Dutch signed a contract with Hudson in the meantime. voyages. Hudson neverthelessagreed, unknown to his partners, toof- A victim of and the dreams and delusions of his con- fer help and adviceto the French. The French company bought temporaries, Hudson disappeared into the arctic mists of the a ship behind the cloak of Le Maire, which was to sail under bay that now bears his name. For another three centuries the Dutch coloursto avoid attention but was to continue under the northern countries continued to pursue thismyth of power and French flag if successful. Henry IV offered a prize ofS25 OOO riches to be found in the Paradise Lost on the other side of the to the leader of the expeditionif successful andwas graciously world. prepared to give his name to the straits commanding the en- trancetothe There was great confidence in Paris in the successful outcome of this expedition, which was placed NOTES under the leadership of Kerckoven. Plans were outlined for the‘The recent fine work of R. Boyer et al. (1981) on the North Sea and occupation of the “passage”: two forts were to be built, one the Baltic should, however, be cited. on each side, to control its use; the French flag would be im- 2Without wishing to overvalue Western historical perspectives before posed; and goods passing through would be subject to a four the great revolutions(which took place from the endof the eighteenth percent tax.22 Thevoyage out and back to Cathaywas century), perspectives too often taintedby Eurocentrism, one can find estimated at six months, while the Portuguese and Spaniards therein a wider approach better able to account for the links between the West and the rest of the world (as is the casein the work of Raynal took at least two to three years. The ship wasgo to to China, if and d’Alembert on the European settlements of the two Indies, 1770) possible, and then on to Japan and the Moluccas. The ship ac- than in the much narrower and nationalistic approaches that followed. tually left Holland a few days after Hudson and followed him ’Some very interesting recent work on Christopher Columbus shows as far as Novaya Zemlya, where an impenetrable mass of ice to what extent the transpositionof Marco Polo’s data onto a terrestrial forced it to turn back. globe, exaggerating the dimensionsof Asia, could have given him the NORTHERN EUROPE’S ARCTIC DELUSIONS 45 1

mistaken idea that the route to India and Cathay was shorter by the with England, took on a growing importance in Frenchplitical and west. intelld life. 4Cf. the critical work on Orientalism published by E. Sald (1980), l3From the Middle Ages to the middle of the nineteenth century the although the author only.deals in.detailwith the connections between belief in a warm polar sea, free of ice, remained deep-rooted.The ex- the West-and islam in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. istence of sea areas .free of ice, such as that of Smith Strait, northwest 5An importance that.should be given back not only to recent globes, of Greenland, helped to foster this illusion. One should also remember with their benefit.of the most up-to-date research, butalso to historical the tradition of a polar maelstrom, which gave rise to a strange ac- globes as a.means of .studying.past representations. CJ Randles count published anonymously in Paris in 1721 called “Le Passage du (1980). Bgle Arctiye au P61e Antarctique par le Centredu Monde”, a theme used since by several authors in fiction. For a commentary on this ac- 6Michel de Certeau has brilliantly raised the epistemological (1975) count C. Verner and B. Stuart-Stubbs problems posed by the practice and writing of history, after R. .Bar- see (1979). thes (1967), P. Veyne (1971), Moscovici. (1%8), andFoucault l4This was Louis Delisle de la Croykre, who, like Bering, died of scurvy in the Kamchatka region on .theway back with the ex- (1969). 1741 pedition. ’That is tosay thecontinental masses of what are actually Canada, the United States, and the Soviet Union. An amusing anecdote well il- 1% particular that of Buache (1753). lustrates this nonexistence of the Arctic and the contagion of false “Another Buache, J.N. Buachede la Neuville, a nephew and disciple descriptions. thought he had brought back an’au- of the former, was an ardent defender ofthe work and ideasof his un- thentic .Tartar or Samoyede from his first voyage to the bay now cle until his death in 1825. Holder of a professorial chair in the Ecole named after him, whichhe took for €he ‘passage separatingAsia in the Normale Sup6rieure (17941 and a member of the institute, it was he, north from America in the south. The native was therefore greeted as as thechief naval hydrographer, who drewup the. geographical anAsian on arrival in London, and if we believe Kirwan (1%1), nautical instructions in 1785 for the expedition of La P6rouse. In these shortly afterward Ivan the Terrible’s ambassador made a formal pro- instructions he quotes De Fuca and De Fonte as sources worthy of test to the Queen of England againstthe kidnapping of one ofthetsar’s credit. Cf:M. Emmanuel (1959). subjects .by the English explorer - the poor .Inuk died soon after 17C’ M. ,Emmanuel (1959) and N. Broc (1969, 1980)for detailed anyway. presentations of these discoveries and fanciful accounts, as well as 81t was, in fact;the voyages of Bering and, above alI, of Cook that N.M. Grouse.( 1x8) and ‘Williams (1962). established the existence of the Bering Strait; hence the insularity of ‘%See.the commentary of Verner and Stuart-Stubbs. the American continent..One has to wait until the great polar expedi- ‘9Cj W .P. Cumming et al. (1959). tions of the nineteenth century for precision and certainty with regard MCJ Ch. de La.Ronci&re (1907)and M. Emmanuel (1959). to the configuration of the Arctic. ZIAs Magellan gave his to the straits that he discovered in the south- 9Cf B. Saladin d’Anglure (1980), where the comparisonof the stories west. of the voyages, geographical maps, and terrestrial globes with the beliefs*inherited.from the Middle Ages and.the great novels, such as 22A similar tax was imposedby the Daneson all merchandise crossing those of More and Rabelais, brings out the important- ontological the sound, which made their fortunes. dimension in the .motivation of the voyagers and their monied sup- 2Qu6bec had been founded in 1608 by. Champlain. porters during the Renaissance. IoC’ M. de Certeau (1975)and some otherrecent works of the great representatives of French historiography, such as ArBs,Duby , Furet, REFERENCES LeGoff, and Leroy Ladurie, who try to reintroduce theimaginary in- to the field of history. AMILER, J. W60. Histoire universelle desexplorations. Vol. 2. La Renais- llIt would be interesting tu examine.the close relations between the sance.141.5-1600.Paris: Sous la direction de L.H. 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