We have seen how quickly a lucrative trade and remunerative returns followed on the heels of Arctic discoveries. It was so in the Spitsbergen seas, it was so in Greenland and Davis Strait, and now we shall see that it was so in Hudson’s Bay. The Hudson’s Bay Company, under the auspices of Prince Rupert, was founded in 1668, and an expedition was sent out, consisting of the ship Nonsuch, under the command of Captain Zachariah Gillam. That officer wintered with his crew in Rupert’s river and established a station called Fort Charles. A charter was granted by which the sole right to trade in Hudson’s Bay and Strait was given to the Company, with territorial rights and jurisdiction. Stations were formed and a trade in furs was established with the Indians, who received European goods in exchange.

Discovery was not altogether neglected, although nothing was thought of but trade during the first 50 years. In 1720 a sloop was sent on a voyage of discovery under two officers named Knight and Barlow, but they were never heard of more. A Captain Scroggs was sent in search, but without result. Again in 1737 a sloop and shallop were despatched by the Company, also without result.

In 1741 a Mr Arthur Dobbs became the chief projector of an expedition to discover a north-west passage by Hudson’s Bay. The Admiralty gave assistance, and Captain Christopher Middleton received the command of an old bomb vessel called the Furnace, with a pink called the Discovery, under Captain William Moore, as a consort. Arriving late in the season of 1741, Captain Middleton resolved to winter in the Churchill river, housing his men in an old fort. In February, 1742, scurvy broke out. The only efficacious treatment was not then understood, and Captain Middleton’s panacea was plenty of rum with sugar to make punch. There were some deaths in March but not enough to hinder the expedition, and in July 1742 the voyage was resumed, the plan being to explore the great opening called by Luke Foxe “Sir Thomas Roe his Welcome,” and to seek a passage by that route. The cape on the western side of the sound in 65° 10′ N. Middleton named Cape Dobbs. Proceeding up the Welcome he discovered an opening which at first seemed likely to lead to the desired passage, but it turned out to be the estuary of a river which was named the Wager River, after Sir Charles Wager, then First Lord of the Admiralty. A point of land was named Cape Hope, because hopes of a passage were revived on rounding it and further north another opening to the west was seen, but it could not be explored owing to the ice and the state of the weather. It received the name of Repulse Bay. Then Frozen Strait was discovered at the head of the Welcome and, on climbing a high hill, Middleton saw that the coast trended south-east to the Cape Comfort of Baffin, thus proving the insularity of Southampton Island. The expedition then shaped a course down Hudson Strait, arriving in the Thames in October 1742.

Middleton had done his work well, and had made some important discoveries. But he was subjected to an unjustifiable attack100 from Mr Dobbs, the projector, who accused the explorer of stating that the Wager River was only a river when he knew it to be a strait. Dobbs had sufficient influence to enable him to raise funds for a second expedition. Two vessels, the Dobbs and the California, were fitted out and despatched under the command of Captain Moore, who fully confirmed Middleton’s report. Mr Ellis wrote the history of this voyage, and pointed to Chesterfield Inlet as a possible passage. Accordingly Captain Christopher was sent to settle the question in the sloop Churchill in 1761, and again with Captain Norton in 1762, when the survey of Chesterfield Inlet was completed.

The next expedition of the servants of the Hudson’s Bay Company was by land, and was conducted by Samuel Hearne, who had been a naval officer. Through the Indians who traded with the Company’s factories rumours were received of a tribe which possessed copper mines on a river which emptied itself into a northern sea, and the Governor of Fort Prince of Wales on the Churchill river resolved to despatch an expedition to ascertain the truth of these rumours.

Hearne made two false starts. In the first journey he was robbed by Indians, in the second, when some months on the way, he had to return owing to an accident to his great Cotton’s quadrant. At last he set out in December, 1770, under the guidance of a remarkable Indian chief, named Matonabi, and without any European companion. This guide was the son of a northern Indian by a slave woman. His father had died, and the boy was adopted and brought up by the Governor of Fort Prince of Wales, who employed him as a hunter. He was a fine man, of nearly six feet, and possessed of many good moral qualities. He had been on an embassy to a powerful tribe, establishing peace and trade, and had also visited the Coppermine river. It was indeed owing to his report that the expedition was undertaken. Matonabi’s influence was so great that he was made Chief of the northern Indians, and caused great quantities of furs to be brought to the Churchill factory.

The method of travelling was for each man to drag his own little sledge. These one-man sledges were 8 to 9 feet long by 12 to 14 inches wide, made of boards a quarter of an inch thick sewn together with thongs of deer-skin, with wooden cross-bars on the upper side. The fore part was turned up so as to form a semicircle, to prevent the sledge from diving into soft snow. The trace was a strip of leather with a loop across the shoulders. The snow-shoes were 4½ feet long by 13 inches broad.

The country crossed by Hearne and Matonabi, accompanied by a large party of Indians with their wives and children, was fairly well supplied with game. In May, 1771, a lake was reached where they began to build canoes and were joined by more Indians, eager to rob and massacre the Eskimos.

The women and children were left behind, and the party of Indians, in company with Hearne and Matonabi, entered the Arctic regions, and began the descent of the Coppermine River on July 14th, 1771. Then five Eskimo tents came in sight on the left bank. The Indians put on their war-paint, formed an ambuscade, and approached stealthily. The wretched Eskimos were completely taken by surprise, and Hearne was an unwilling witness of a horrible massacre. One young girl clung to Hearne’s legs, writhing in agony while the Indians drove their spears into her.

Hearne continued his voyage down the Coppermine River with his bloodthirsty companions, until he reached the mouth on July 18th, 1771. He found that it was full of islets and shoals, with many seals on the ice outside. For 30 miles there had been nothing but barren hills and marshes. Above that distance there were stunted pines and dwarf willows on the river banks. In returning, he visited one of the surface copper mines. He gives an interesting account of the musk oxen, deer, wild geese, salmon, and other sources of food-supply, and of the building habits of beavers, and describes the Eskimo weapons and mode of life.

On June 29th, 1772, Hearne returned to Fort Prince of Wales, and was soon afterwards rewarded by being made Governor. But in 1782 a French Expedition under La Pérouse destroyed the fort, carrying off Hearne and the other Company’s servants as prisoners. Hearne was several years a prisoner of war, and only returned to London to die. This disaster so affected the faithful Matonabi that he committed suicide.

It was 18 years after Hearne’s discovery of the mouth of the Coppermine that a young man named Alexander Mackenzie undertook to trace the course of another river, flowing north from the Great Slave Lake. This explorer was not one of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s servants, but at an early period of life he had been led, with commercial views, to the vast region north-west of Lake Superior. His voyage down the river which received his name was undertaken in six canoes, chiefly manned by French Canadians. Starting in June, 1789, he reached the numerous channels which form the estuary of the Mackenzie river on July 13th, and thus was the second European to reach the American polar ocean. The river journey was over 1000 miles in length. Mackenzie was knighted in recognition of the value of his discovery.

It was in a year between the dates of the two river mouth discoveries that Captain Cook, during his third voyage, made his researches in the Arctic Sea between the two continents of Asia and America. The Resolution under the command of the great navigator himself, and the Discovery under Captain Clerke, were commissioned in 1776, but it was not until August, 1778, that they crossed the Arctic Circle. The first Lieutenant of the Discovery was James Burney, so well known to geographers as the historian of voyages in the Pacific, and the writer of an interesting account of Cook’s Arctic discoveries.

The Sandwich Islands had been discovered on January 18th, 1778, and on August 4th the Resolution and Discovery anchored off Sledge Island in 64° 30′ N. The westernmost extremity of the American continent in Bering Strait, 65° 45′ N., received the name of Prince of Wales Cape. Captain Cook then stood over to the Asiatic side, and landed to investigate the Tchuktches, of which tribe he gives an interesting account. Continuing his exploring work he crossed Bering Strait, and proceeded along the American coast, naming a cape after another Arctic explorer, Lord Mulgrave. On the 18th August the two ships were close to the edge of a very heavy pack which was drifting towards the coast. The furthest point seen was very low and much encumbered with ice. Captain Cook gave it the name of Icy Cape, in lat. 70° 29′ N., long. 161° 42′ W. This was the furthest point reached on the American side.

Captain Cook found himself in a narrow lane in shoal water with the ice coming down upon the ships. He plied to the westward, making short boards between the ice and the shore. On the 19th the ships were among loose pieces, and were brought to at the edge of a close pack. There were immense herds of walrus on the ice, which afforded them a welcome change of diet from the salt beef. Much attention was given to soundings and to the force and direction of the currents. The sea in Bering Strait is shallow, and the strait exercises no influence on the general direction of the movement of the water. The principal current in the strait is tidal and intermittent, flowing north with the flood and south with the ebb.

From the 21st to the 29th of August the exploring ships were sailing along the coast of Asia, which was low, with elevated land behind. The furthest point was in lat. 65° 56′ N., long. 179° 11′ W., and received the name of Cape North. The thick weather made it prudent to return. The greatest depth north of Bering Strait was 30 fathoms, the current slight. Passing through Bering Strait on a southerly course, the distance across between Tchuktchi-nos and Prince of Wales Cape was found to be 13 leagues. The ships arrived at a large bay on the American side, which received the name of Norton Sound, after the Speaker of the House of Commons (Lord Grantley). Here spruce was collected to make spruce beer, and the men were sent on shore to collect berries, for Captain Cook was ever thoughtful for the health of his people. A corporal of Marines, John Ledyard, volunteered to go in search of settlers in one of the frail baidor, a light wooden-frame boat covered with whale skin, and he brought back two Russians whose information was very useful to Captain Cook101.

Captain Cook’s expedition returned to the Sandwich Islands, where the great navigator was murdered. There was to have been a second voyage to the Arctic regions in the next navigable season. Captain Clerke succeeded to the command, but he was in a dying state. In April, 1779, the Resolution and Discovery arrived at Petropaulovsky in Kamschatka, where they were most hospitably received by the Russian Governor, and in July the ships again passed through Bering Strait, and were among the ice in lat. 69° 20′ N. But on the 27th further attempts were relinquished and it was decided to return to England. Captain Clerke died on the 23rd of August.

The Arctic discoveries of Captain Cook extend on the Asiatic side to Cape North, and on the American side to Icy Cape. For nearly 50 years the knowledge of the polar sea north of America was bounded by Cook’s Icy Cape, with the mouths of the two rivers Coppermine and Mackenzie.

A gun brig had been fitted out to meet Captain Cook in Baffin’s Bay, the Lion, commanded by Lieutenant Pickersgill, who had served in Cook’s second voyage. But he never got north of 68° 14′, though he fixed several positions in Davis Strait. He left the Scilly Islands June 20th, 1776, with instructions to protect the whalers from any attacks from colonial rebels, as well as to meet Captain Cook’s expedition102. In the following year the Lion was sent north again, under Lieutenant Young, but did still less.

Our Government then had a far clearer perception of their duties as regards discovery than is the case now. By Acts George II cap. 17 (1745) and George III cap. 6 (1776) £5000 were offered for reaching 89° N. and £20,000 for making the North-West Passage. In 1818 a further attempt to stimulate discovery was made by offering proportionate rewards for reaching high latitudes from 83° to 89°. But it was due to the persistent representations of a private geographer that the Government itself was induced to take action.

The Hon. Daines Barrington—brother of the excellent Dr Shute Barrington, Bishop of Durham, and friend of Gilbert White of Selborne—was born in 1727, and after leaving Oxford became a barrister, and eventually a Bencher of the Inner Temple and Recorder of Bristol. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the Society of Antiquaries, and the author of a translation of King Alfred’s work on Orosius. He was deeply interested in northern voyages, and collected many accounts of ships reaching high latitudes from English and Dutch whaling captains. He published the information he had collected in his Possibility of approaching the North Pole asserted103, and at the same time made strong representations to the Royal Society on the scientific importance of a northern voyage. At last he induced that body to make an appeal to the Government, and Lord Sandwich, then First Lord of the Admiralty, resolved that an expedition should be fitted out and despatched.

Two ship-rigged bomb vessels, the Racehorse and Carcass, were selected and specially strengthened. Captain Constantine John Phipps, the eldest son of Lord Mulgrave, a scientific officer and a good seaman, received the command of the expedition on board the Racehorse, and Captain Lutwidge was appointed to the Carcass. The Board of Longitude appointed Mr Israel Lyons as astronomer. Great pains were taken with the outfit, but the ships were not intended to winter. The surgeon, Dr Irving, had invented an apparatus for distilling fresh from salt water, which was very simple, but answered its purpose admirably. Lord Sandwich visited the ships on the 22nd April, and on June 4th, 1773, the expedition left the Nore.

Phipps’s expedition was well conducted throughout. A latitude of 80° 50′ N. was reached, and the edge of the ice was examined along all the meridians north of Spitsbergen, without a sign of any opening. Near the Seven Islands the ships were closely beset, the ice piling up to a great height, and there seemed little hope of extricating them without a strong north-east wind. A party was sent to an island about 12 miles off, under a midshipman, named Walden, to see if any open water was in sight from its summit. He reported that there was water to the westward. The island received the name of Walden. Boats were also sent to see if a passage could be found into open water. One of the boats of the Racehorse was attacked by a herd of walrus, and was in danger of being swamped when she was rescued by one of the boats of the Carcass under the command of Horatio Nelson, a young midshipman not quite 15 years old.

The same young midshipman was keeping the middle watch on board the Carcass, when a bear came in sight, and he started off after it with a musket and one companion. A fog came down over the ice, and when it rose young Nelson and his friend were seen at a considerable distance, attacking the bear. A gun was fired which frightened their intended quarry, and the boys returned. Nelson’s excuse to his Captain was that he wanted the bear’s skin for his father.

The danger to the ships appeared to be so imminent that preparations were made to abandon them, and all the boats were got ready. At the same time all sail was made, and taking advantage of every slight opening, the ships at length reached open water. They passed Hakluyt Headland, and came to anchor in Smeerenburg Harbour in company with some Dutch whalers. Very heavy weather was encountered during the voyage home, but the ships reached the Thames safely and were paid off in October, 1773.

This was an ably conducted expedition, and should have shown the folly of attempting to approach the pole by trying to make headway against ice drifting south, without the refuge of a land-floe. But it did not. Captain Phipps published an interesting narrative of the voyage, prefaced by a review of former attempts, with some valuable scientific appendixes. He succeeded to the barony of Mulgrave on his father’s death in the following year, and marrying into an old naval Yorkshire family, Cholmley of Howsham, left an only daughter when he died in 1792. Captain Phipps was among the ablest of our scientific Arctic explorers104.

One important interest connected with the expedition of Captain Phipps is the presence of Nelson as a midshipman on board the Carcass. The future hero thus gained his first naval experience in the Arctic regions, as other naval heroes of lesser fame have done before and since his time. Nelson’s continued friendship for, and correspondence with, his old captain show that his Arctic work was not forgotten in after life. It is this phase of exploration that has the highest importance. Great as are the commercial advantages obtained from Arctic discovery, and still greater as are its scientific results, the most important of all are its uses as a nursery for our seamen, as a school for our future Nelsons, and as affording the best opportunities for distinction to young naval officers in time of peace.