Arctic explorers

According to the Saga of the Greenlanders, the tenth-century explorer Bjarni Herjólfsson sighted North America as early as 986 but did not land. Sometime after 1000, Norseman Leifr Eiriksson retraced Herjólfsson’s course, coming first to a land covered with glaciers and, between them and the shore, what appeared to be a high, flat expanse of rock. To this land Leifr gave the name Helluland (Flagstoneland), which may confidently be identified as present-day Baffin Island.

In 1508 Sebastian Cabot sought a sea passage by the north of the continent and believed he had to have discovered such a passage. Spanish chronicler López de Gómara, who may have known Cabot in Spain, recorded that Cabot intended “to go by the north to Cathay, and to bring thence spices in a shorter time than the Portuguese did by the south.”

Interest in exploring the Arctic was revived in the early 19th century. In 1818 John Barrow, the Admiralty’s second secretary and a noted traveller, proposed Arctic exploration as an ideal means of employing naval officers and men left idle owing to the end of the Napoleonic wars. His particular interest was in finding the northwest passage; it became the focus of British naval exploration for the next 36 years, and the names Sir John Franklin, William Edward Parry, and John Ross are now inseparably linked with it.