With the voyages of Weymouth, Knight, and Hall, which occupied the first few years of the seventeenth century, we need not concern ourselves at all, for they resulted in no discoveries of any importance. In the year 1607, however, Henry Hudson started off on the first of that series of travels by which his name became famous, and during the course of which he succeeded in carrying the British flag to places that had never before been trodden by the foot of civilised man.

As has already been seen, the north-west and north-east passages to the Indies had been tried and found wanting. British merchants, however, were by no means disposed to let Spain and Portugal retain their lucrative monopoly without making a struggle to wrest it from them, so they determined to send out a fresh expedition which should attempt to force its way to the land of gems and spices over the North Pole itself. The command of this expedition was entrusted to Henry Hudson, a seaman of such daring and skill that he was well able to accomplish the work if it lay within the power of a human being to do so. Hudson started off from the Thames on May 1, 1607, in a small barque which was manned by ten men and a boy, and made direct for the east coast of Greenland. By June 22 he had reached lat. 72° 38′, where he discovered the land which still bears his name, the chief promontory of which he named Cape Hold-with-Hope. He then set his course for Spitzbergen, which, as we have seen, had been first sighted by Barents eleven years earlier, and there he reached the high latitude of 80° 23′. His provisions being now nearly exhausted, he was obliged to return home.

On his second voyage he attempted to discover a north-east passage round Nova Zembla, but was so hampered by ice that he was unable to proceed far on his way, while the only geographic result of his third voyage was the discovery of the Hudson River. These early expeditions, however, though they achieved little in the way of discovery, proved of great commercial value, for they gave rise to the great Spitzbergen whale fishery.

Hudson’s fourth and last voyage, that of 1610, was organised by Sir John Wolstenholm and Sir Dudley Digges, who were convinced of the existence of the North-West Passage, and felt that Hudson was the man to find it. Accordingly, Hudson sailed on April 17 in the Discovery, a ship of 55 tons, which was provisioned for six months. By June 9 he had reached Frobisher Strait, and here a contrary wind arose which compelled him to ply westward into Hudson’s Bay. Several British seamen had already visited the mouth of the strait, and it is believed that Portuguese fishermen had actually entered the bay; but the terrible circumstances which attended Hudson’s voyage to it made it only natural that it should be named after him in commemoration of his achievements and his fate.

The Discovery had penetrated the bay to a distance of over three hundred miles further than ever an English ship had penetrated it before when she was beset by ice, and all chance of retreat was cut off. As we have already seen, she was only provisioned for six months, and the unfortunate crew found themselves, in consequence, with starvation staring them in the face. Hudson, fortunately, was a man of resource, and he lost no time in organising hunting and fishing parties which provided his party with sufficient provisions to tide over the winter. Had his crew remained faithful to him all might have been well, but disaffection broke out early in the winter, which, gathering force as the store of provisions grew more and more scanty, broke out into open mutiny in the spring. The ringleaders were the former mate and boatswain, whom Hudson had been obliged to displace for using improper language, and a young man named Greene, a protégé of Hudson, who repaid his benefactor’s kindness by deserting him when he most needed friends. These men, seeing that when the ship broke out of winter quarters in June there were barely fourteen days’ provisions left for the whole crew, determined to place Hudson and eight other men in a boat, and, leaving them to shift for themselves, to sail home for England. This heartless plan was promptly carried into execution. Hudson was seized and bound when he came out of his cabin, and with five sick men, John Hudson and John King, the carpenter, who bravely refused to join the mutineers, was thrown into a boat and deserted. Of the unfortunate castaways nothing more was ever heard, and the most careful search of Sir Thomas Button, who examined the whole of the western shore of the bay, failed to discover any clue to their fate. Of the mutineers, Greene and four others were killed in a fight with the natives, while the rest only just succeeded in reaching England.

The voyages of Hall in 1612 and Gibbons in 1614 did not result in much, but in 1615 William Baffin started out on the first of his two expeditions which were destined to add so much to the world’s store of knowledge of the Arctic seas. Baffin, who was described by Sherard Osborn as “the ablest, the prince of Arctic navigators,” was in 1615 appointed by the Merchants Adventurers pilot and associate to Richard Bylot, of the Discovery, which was now to make her fourth voyage in search of the North-West Passage. Making first for Hudson Strait, they soon discovered that they were being led into a blind alley. As the conditions, however, did not permit them to extend their voyage much that season, they were obliged to return home. In the following year, however, they were sent out once more by the Merchants Adventurers, and on this occasion they determined to push on north along the coast of Greenland. On May 30 they reached Sanderson’s Hope, Davis’s farthest point, and there they entered upon an entirely new field of discovery. With such energy did they apply themselves to the work that they had crossed Melville Bay by the beginning of June, and were sailing merrily on their way past Cape York, Cape Dudley Digges, and Whale Sound. At last, when they had exceeded Davis’s farthest north by over three hundred miles, their triumphant career was stopped at the entrance to Smith Sound, within sight of Cape Alexander. This latitude, 77° 45′, remained unequalled for over two centuries.

Unable to proceed any further to the north, Baffin and Bylot determined to sail south-west, and to see if they could not add to their growing list of discoveries on their homeward journey. Their hopes were amply fulfilled, for on July 12 they found themselves off the entrance to Lancaster Sound, which was the gate, as it afterwards proved, to the North-West Passage. The ice, unfortunately, did not permit them to enter the Sound, so they made for the coast of Greenland, where they rested their men prior to their return to England.

For the next hundred years or so very little was done in the way of Arctic discovery. A Dane of the name of Jens Munk started out to seek for the North-West Passage, and succeeded in making a few discoveries in Hudson’s Bay. In 1631, again, Captain Luke, alias “North-West,” Fox sallied forth on the same mission, bearing with him an epistle from the King of England to the Emperor of Japan, which, however, remained undelivered. The work which he did was not of much value, but he made up for this deficiency by writing a very humorous account of his experiences. Captain James, who went exploring in the same year, seems to have been dogged by ill-luck from the beginning to the end of his voyage, and Barrow describes his narrative of it as “a book of lamentation and weeping and great mourning.”

Though, however, very little was done in the way of exploration during the second half of the seventeenth century, great strides were made in the development of the country already explored by the formation of the famous Hudson Bay Company, which for two hundred years did a tremendous trade in Northern Canada. The inception of this Company was mostly due to a certain French Canadian of the name of Grosseliez, who, after an ineffectual attempt to induce the French Government to consider his schemes for founding a great industry, came to England, where he obtained the ear of Prince Rupert. The Prince sailed for Hudson Bay with Grosseliez, saw the possibilities of the country, and obtained from King Charles a charter, dated 1669, which conferred on him and his associates, exclusively, all the trade, land, and territories in Hudson’s Bay. The charter further ordained that they should use their best endeavours to find a passage to the South Sea, but the Company soon became so rich from its trade that it seems to have conveniently forgotten this clause.

Occasionally, it is true, it attempted to do something in the way of exploration, but these efforts were for the most part only half-hearted, and resulted in little. In 1719, for example, James Knight, allured by reports of mines of pure copper by a great river to the north, gave the Company to understand that he would call upon the authorities to examine their charter unless they arranged an expedition and appointed him its leader.

Very reluctantly they consented to do as he wished, and equipped two ships for the purpose of surveying the northern coast of their territories. Not a single member of the expedition returned, and nothing was known of their fate until, forty years later, a quantity of wreckage was found on Marble Island.

With the exception of Middleton’s expedition of 1741, during the course of which Wager Inlet, Repulse Bay, and Frozen Strait were discovered, nothing much more was done in the way of Arctic exploration for the next fifty years. In 1769, however, the Company determined to make another effort to find the mines of copper of which the natives brought so glowing an account, and with this end in view they sent out an overland expedition under the command of Samuel Hearne. This expedition, which started out in November, was a complete failure, because it began its work too late in the year, while the second expedition, which left in February, failed because the preparations were inadequate. Warned by these two experiences, Hearne sallied forth once more in December 1670, and on this occasion he claimed to have found the mouth of the Coppermine River. His observations, however, were rather hazy, and it is doubtful whether he really reached the Polar Sea. The end of his journey was marred by an unfortunate collision between his Indian guides and a tribe of Eskimos, during the course of which all the unfortunate natives were massacred. The effects of this incident were to be felt later on, when Franklin, visiting those inhospitable shores with his gallant companions, was regarded with such suspicion by the Eskimos that he could hardly obtain that assistance which he so sorely needed.

One other early attempt to reach the Polar Sea by the land route deserves to be recorded: that of Alexander—afterwards Sir Alexander—Mackenzie, the discoverer of the river which bears his name. Having been led to believe by the accounts of Indians that the sea could be reached by a large river issuing from the Great Slave Lake, he determined to test the story himself, and set out on June 3, 1789. The difficulties in his way were innumerable, for not only was the river broken up by dangerous rapids, but it was only after infinite trouble that he could induce any guides to accompany him, for the natives believed the river to be peopled by monsters, who were ready to devour the unwary traveller without the least provocation. However, he succeeded in reaching the sea near Whale Island, and had the satisfaction of knowing that the tales of the Indians were true, though he was unable to use his knowledge for any practical purpose.

Meanwhile, Russia was busily opening up the north-east coast of Siberia, partly with a view to getting some control over the unmanageable Chukches, the only Siberian tribe who succeeded in resisting their somewhat rough and ready methods, and partly with a view to developing trade in that direction and to discovering whether or not the Asiatic and American continents were united. Many expeditions set out with these ends in view, among them being those of Ignatieff, Deshneff, Alexieff, and Ankudinoff, but of these it is impossible to give a detailed account here, and we need not take up the story of exploration in these regions until 1725, when the Great Northern Expedition, conceived by Peter the Great and carried into execution by the Empress Anne, set forth under the command of Vitus Bering, a Dane in the Russian service.

Immense difficulties had to be overcome before the expedition could start at all. Long overland journeys had to be made across Siberia, supplies had to be accumulated at Okhotsk and a vessel had to be built there, with the result that it was not until the end of June, 1727, that Spanberg, Bering’s assistant, was able to sail for Bolsheretsk in the Fortuna. Here more supplies had to be accumulated and a second ship built, which involved a delay of yet another year. At last, however, on July 24, 1728, Bering sailed gaily down the Kamchatka River, in the Gabriel, on his voyage of exploration. The preparations had extended over more than three years, and the voyage occupied about seven weeks, during which no discoveries whatever were made, so that the game seems to have been hardly worth the rather expensive candle. During the following summer he sallied out of his harbour once more, but he does not seem to have prosecuted his work with very much ardour, for he returned at the end of three days, during which he had sailed about a hundred miles. He then made his way to St Petersburg.

The Empress Anne seems to have been easily pleased, for although Bering had been away for five years and had accomplished nothing whatever, she gave orders that a second and even larger expedition should be placed under his command. The preparations for this voyage occupied some seven years, but at last, in September 1740, Bering was ready to start, and before winter closed in upon him he succeeded in rounding Kamchatka and reaching Avatcha, now known as Petropaulovsk; not a very remarkable voyage, perhaps, but a step in the right direction. There he spent the winter, and in June of the following year he started out in the St Peter, accompanied by the St Paul, under the command of Tschirikoff. Even now, however, he could not succeed in overcoming his passion for dawdling, and much valuable time was wasted in searching for the land of Gama, which, in point of fact, did not exist. At last, however, the two ships set their course north-east, and a few days later they parted company during a heavy fog. Both of them succeeded in making America, a feat, however, which had already been accomplished by Gwosdef during Bering’s absence at St Petersburg. Tschirikoff made the American coast on July 26, and after some exciting experiences, during which two parties who were sent ashore to explore were completely lost, he returned in safety to Petropaulovsk. Bering, who reached America three days later than his companion, was less fortunate. Caught by contrary winds and heavy gales, his vessel was ultimately stranded on Bering Island, where she broke up. Her commander, utterly disheartened, refused to eat or drink or to take shelter in the hut which had been constructed of driftwood, with the result that he died on December 19. The command of the party now devolved on Lieutenant Waxell, who, ably assisted by a brilliant young naturalist, named Steller, succeeded in bringing the party safely out of its quandary. Their stay on the island, though it was miserable in the extreme, had its compensations, for they found that the place abounded in the rare blue fox and the no less valuable sea-otter, of the skins of which the men secured such quantities that they took twenty thousand pounds’ worth home to Russia.

Bering did not succeed in discovering either the sea or the strait which have been named after him, but he mapped out a large tract of the Asiatic coast with some accuracy and opened up a trade which proved to be of immense value.

Up to the middle of the second half of the eighteenth century the efforts of navigators had, for the most part, been directed to finding a passage to the Indies either by the north-western or by the north-eastern route. Robert Thorne, it is true, had come forward with a bold plan for attempting to sail across the North Pole, but he had not succeeded in getting very far on his way, and the idea had been allowed to lapse. In 1773, however, the Earl of Sandwich, then First Lord of the Admiralty, having been approached upon the subject by the Royal Society, suggested to George III. that an expedition should be sent out to discover how far it was possible to sail in the direction of the Pole. The King was pleased with the idea, and preparations for the venture were at once set on foot. The Racehorse and the Carcase, two of the strongest ships of the day, were selected as being best suited for the purpose, and were fitted out as the ideas of the time dictated. The command was entrusted to Captain Constantine John Phipps, afterwards the second Lord Mulgrave, Captain Skiffington Lutwidge was appointed second in command, two masters of Greenland ships were attached to the expedition as pilots, and an astronomer, with all the latest instruments, was recommended by the Board of Longitude.

So far as actual achievements were concerned, there is nothing much to be recorded. Phipps was unfortunate in his year, and north of Spitzbergen he found a solid wall of ice which it was quite impossible for him to penetrate. He had the satisfaction, however, of reaching lat. 80° 48 N., a higher point than any of his predecessors. One episode deserves to be noticed as it came near causing the death of Nelson, who was serving in the humble capacity of captain’s coxswain. “One night,” says Southey, “during the mid-watch, he stole from the ship with one of his comrades, taking advantage of a rising fog, and set out over the ice in pursuit of a bear. It was not long before they were missed. The fog thickened, and Captain Lutwidge and his officers became exceedingly alarmed for his safety. Between three and four in the morning the weather cleared, and the two adventurers were seen, at a considerable distance from the ship, attacking a huge bear. The signal for them to return was immediately made; Nelson’s comrade called upon him to obey it, but in vain. His musket had flashed in the pan, their ammunition was expended, and a chasm in the ice, which divided him from the bear, probably preserved his life. ‘Never mind,’ he cried, ‘do but let me get a blow at the devil with the butt-end of my musket, and we shall have him.’ Captain Lutwidge, however, seeing his danger, fired a gun, which had the desired effect of frightening the beast; and the boy then returned, somewhat afraid of the consequences of his trespass. The captain reprimanded him sternly for conduct so unworthy of the office which he filled, and desired to know what motive he could have for hunting a bear. ‘Sir,’ said he, pouting his lip, as he was wont to do when agitated, ‘I wished to kill the bear that I might carry the skin to my father.’”

It was three years after the return of the Racehorse and Carcase that Captain Cook made his only expedition into the Arctic seas. His success in the Antarctic had led his friends in England to hope great things of his voyage through the Bering Strait, but, unfortunately, his two ships, the Resolution and the Discovery, proved but ill-adapted for service in the Arctic, and though he succeeded in charting a good deal of the unknown American coast, he made no approach to finding that North-West Passage for the discovery of which he had been set out. He had intended to return to the Arctic again with a view to prosecuting his discoveries there, but his death at Hawaii in 1779 prevented him from fulfilling his purpose, and his second in command, Captain Clerke, on whom the leadership of the expedition devolved, died of consumption at Petropaulovsk.