Arctic obsession drove explorers to seek the North Pole

Risking life and limb, countless expeditions braved Arctic cold and crushing ice in the 1800s. All failed, but each one came closer and closer to the top of the world. By Javier Cacho The phrase “on top of the world” carries ebullience and enthusiasm, as if nothing could be better than standing at 90° north latitude. In reality, Earth’s remote North Pole is frigid and barren, an inhospitable region of ice and snow. Finding this last “undiscovered” place became an obsession for European and American explorers in the 19th and 20th centuries. Few people lived near the North Pole. A small Inuit community had settled the closest, but for the most part the region remained isolated from the rest of the world for centuries. A few intrepid explorers – John Cabot, Martin Frobisher, Henry Hudson, and James Cook – tried to navigate the region in search of the Northwest Passage, a sea route believed to connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans in the waters above North America. The North Pole was not a concern for these early explorers, but their work laid the foundation for a polar obsession to come. After the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815, Great Britain, the foremost colonial power of the time, mounted a series of Arctic expeditions to reach the Bering Strait by crossing the Arctic, which was at the time believed to be an open sea surrounded by a belt of ice. Sir John Ross and Sir William Edward Parry led several expeditions in the 1820s and 30s, but none located the passage itself. In 1831 a scientific milestone was achieved by James Clark Ross, nephew of John and an officer on his uncle’s Arctic voyage of 1829-1832. While on a sledge excursion, the young Ross became the first European to locate the planet’s north magnetic pole. These early voyages revealed how dangerous exploration of northern waters could be but whetted explorers’ appetite for discovery. Complications often arose from frigid waters trapping ships in newly forming ice. If a crew could not free their vessel, they often had to wait for months – either for a rescue or for the ice to thaw enough for them to sail away. In May 1845 another British expedition launched to find the Northwest Passage. Led by celebrated British explorer and naval officer Sir John Franklin, a crew of 133 sailed the H.M.S. Erebus and H.M.S. Terror into Arctic waters and disappeared without a trace. Over the next decade more than a hundred European ships went looking for Franklin and his men, searching the labyrinth of islands and inlets that make up the Canadian Arctic. These rescue missions weren’t successful in finding Franklin (his two ships would not be found until 2014 and 2016), but they did have unexpected results… https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/magazine/2020/01-02/expedition-to-the-north-pole/