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VERRAZZANO'S HORIZON
      by Roger M. McCoy
 EBOOK AND PAPERBACK ON AMAZON                 

A historical fiction about Verrazzano's voyage to the New World in 1524. A well researched and engaging story.
   Click below for book information and a synopsis.

Book Details

Wintering in the Arctic.

3/26/2015

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Picture
Bringing Hecla and Griper into harbor for the winter. Artist W.E Parry. Wikimedia
PictureShip ready for winter. W. W. May artist. Scott Polar Institute.
Roger M. McCoyRoger M. McCoy

    In 1819 the British navy sent Lieutenant William E. Parry into the Arctic with the intention of finding the Northwest Passage and sailing through to the west end. Two ships, the Griper and Hecla expected to stay through the winter. Until that time no expedition had purposely wintered in the Arctic and all voyages had returned home when sea ice began to form.
    One major technological innovation made such over-wintering possible for the navy: food preservation by canning. In 1810 a Frenchman, Nicolas Appert, discovered that food cooked in a sealed jar or canister did not spoil. Appert won a well-deserved 12,000 francs for his discovery, and the English firm, Donkin, Hall, and Gamble, immediately adopted the idea and began canning food under contract for the Royal Navy. This new discovery, canned food, changed everything. Now ships could explore the Arctic water for two consecutive seasons or more without having to return home between summers.
    Wintering, however, required some additional innovations regarding outfitting and supplying the ship and, more importantly, keeping idle crews occupied during the seven to nine-month period while the ship was bound in ice. Lieutenant William E. Parry’s expedition was the first to develop the routine which became common practice for  future expeditions.
    Outfitting the ships was the first priority. They devised heat ducts to distribute heat from a central coal stove throughout the ship, and lined the inside surface of the hull with cork for insulation. They built a system to draw in fresh air and exhaust stale air. This was especially necessary to prevent build-up of water vapor and resulting condensation in the living quarters. Snow was melted in tanks surrounding the flue to produce a steady supply of water for cooking, washing, and drinking. All these modifications provided comfortable living quarters through the worst of the Arctic winter.
    During an expedition in 1850 Lieutenant Osborn wrote: “Fancy the lower deck and cabins of a ship, lighted entirely by candles and oil lamps; every aperture by which external air could enter secured, and all doors doubled to prevent draughts. It is breakfast time and reeking hot cocoa from every mess table is sending up a dense vapor, which, in addition to the breath of so many souls, fills the space between decks with mist and fog. Should you go on deck, and go from 50° above zero to 40° below in eight short steps, a column of smoke will be seen rising through certain apertures, whilst others are supplying a current of pure air.”
    The ships had to find a protected inlet away from the path of moving crushing ice floes. The above illustration by Lieutenant Parry shows crews of the Griper and Hecla cutting a channel into a bay for the winter of 1819-20. Once in position for the winter the ships quickly became icebound. The crew then enclosed the deck with canvas, forming a large tent as protection against snow and wind, and providing a place for exercise in bad weather. Snow was banked around the hull, adding insulation as shown in the second illustration by Lieutenant W. W. May on a later expedition.
                           
    Winter activities for the officers involved daily scientific measurements of snow, wind, ice, temperature, and the earth’s magnetic field. Such measurements taken by subsequent expeditions throughout the nineteenth century created a benchmark of data for comparison by scientists today. Occasional hunting parties supplemented the ship’s rations with meat from caribou and musk ox. Most of the time, however, no game could be found. Parry wrote that there were few animals available due to the migration farther south. Occasionally they would see Arctic foxes or wolves, but most of the time nothing moved in the silence of the long winter, which Parry called “a death-like stillness.”
    “Officers inspected the men,” Osborn wrote, “and every part of the ship to see if both were clean, and then they dispersed to their several duties, which at this severe season were very light; indeed confined mainly to supply snow to melt for water, and keeping the fire-hole in the ice open [for water in the event of fire].”
    In addition to the daily cleaning and maintenance performed by the crew, the men attended daily classes to learn reading and writing. Officers taught the mostly illiterate crew to read the Bible and reported how pleased the men were with themselves that they could return to their homes as readers. Sherard Osborn wrote, “There, on wooden stools, leaning over the long tables, were a row of serious and anxious faces, tough old marines curving ‘pothooks and hangers’ [learning to write the letters] as if their very lives depended on it. Then some big-whiskered scholar top-man [sail rigger], with slate in hand, recites his multiplication-table, and grins approval.” This education, while good for the men, also kept them from the boredom and discontent of idleness. “Monotony was our enemy,” said Osborn. “Men who had no source of amusement—such and reading, writing, or drawing—were much to be pitied. ...nothing struck one more than the strong tendency to talk of home and England; it became quite a disease. We spoke as if all the most affectionate husbands and dutiful sons had found their way into this Arctic expedition.”
    Osborn wrote, “If it was school night, the pupils went to their posts, artists painted, some played cards or chess combined with conversation and an evening’s glass of grog [a mixture of rum and water], and a cigar or pipe served to bring round bedtime again.” For their part, the officers performed plays and played musical instruments to entertain the crew. Some dressed as women to play female roles, and the crew took great amusement to see their officers in silly costumes and playing comical roles.
    A later phase of exploration by the Royal Navy turned to winter overland treks by sled, either man or dog drawn. This activity began when they realized that much could be explored on foot while the sea was frozen, providing an easy avenue of travel. Exploration on foot began as soon as the first glimmer of daylight ended the constant darkness of winter in late January or early February, and continued until thawing began when neither sea nor land could be traversed on foot.
     Occupying the crew with education was a brilliant idea, serving as a positive mental activity and also giving the men skills that strengthened their self-esteem. Keeping an ice-bound crew busy, both creatively and intellectually, was essential to the success of such a voyage.

References
McCoy, Roger M. On The Edge: Mapping the Coasts of North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Osborn, Sherard. Stray Leaves From an Arctic Journal: Eighteen Months in the Polar Regions in Search of John Franklin’s Expedition, in the Years 1850-51. New York: George Putnam,1852.

Parry, W. E. Journal of a Second Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage. London: John Murray, 1824.





     


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Companies as Explorers, Part 2: The Company Men

3/15/2015

2 Comments

 
PictureJohn Rae of Hudson's Bay Company. Wikimedia



Roger M McCoy

     In part one we saw that the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company financed much exploration of the North American Arctic. The stories of men who made those expeditions are especially interesting for the hardships they endured along with the great gains they made in knowledge of the area and in our understanding of survival in the Arctic environment.
    Henry Kelsey began working for the Hudson Bay Company in 1684 at the age of seventeen, when the HBC was still in its formative years. He was assigned to the York Factory fort and trading post on the west shore of Hudson Bay. The company’s main interest lay in expanding trade with Indians in the far-flung, unexplored territory beyond Hudson Bay. This required someone to search the vast region to find unknown tribes and induce them to bring furs...preferably beaver...to the far-away trading post. As new trade grew the company built additional trading posts in the interior. Kelsey was instructed to carry hatchets, knives, beads, and tobacco as payment for pelts.
    He began the journey in 1690 with a group of Indians canoeing up the Nelson River trending southwest from York Factory. They traveled by canoe through forests and lakes of Manitoba with many portages between water bodies. They lived off the land by hunting as they went, which meant a meager diet part of the time, then feasting on buffalo when they reached the plains of Saskatchewan near present day Saskatoon. Kelsey was the first European to visit most of the tribes he encountered and probably the first to see the great herds of buffalo on the Great Plains. After a journey of nearly 1,400 miles and two years of exploring the wilderness, he had mixed results in opening trade with the tribes.  
     Now fast-forward eighty years for another example of the intrepid HBC explorers: Samuel Hearne (see Explorer’s Tales blog of 9/15/2014). In 1770 Hearne traveled with a band of Chipewyans who scouted the territory and hunted for meat. Hearne recorded that the Chipewyan women carried the baggage, put up tents at night, and cooked meals. The group traveled from York Factory on the west shore of Hudson Bay to the Arctic shore of North America, a round trip of about 1,500 miles. There he made celestial measurements to determine his position and provided the first bit of information on the location of the north edge of the North American mainland between the east and west shores.
    The initial purpose of Hearne’s expedition was to check out reports of copper deposits far to the north. Indians occasionally brought bits of copper to the trading post at York Factory and HBC decided to learn if copper mines might be developed. Not far from the Arctic shore Hearne found the place where Indians had taken small amounts of copper, but no mineable deposits. The Coppermine River, so named by Hearne, is the only reminder of that episode.
    Probably the best known HBC employee/explorer was John Rae. His ability to learn survival techniques from the natives of the region allowed him to travel very light and exist for long periods in the Arctic. Rae lived entirely off the land for months with a crew of eighteen or twenty men. The technique was simple. They made snow shelters in less than one hour at the end of every day of travel, hence no need to carry the extra weight of tents. They wore animal skin clothing for reliable warmth in the coldest weather, and they slept in animal skin sleeping bags. Rather than travel in one large group, they broke into small groups to better utilize the scattered resources.
    In 1853 Rae found some Inuits who told him about the ill-fated Franklin expedition which left England in 1845 and never returned. The Inuits had a number of artifacts taken from the dead men of the expedition, and reported signs of cannibalism among the bones. When Rae reported this news back in England, he met with disbelief and severe criticism for accepting the “savages” stories. Rae’s acceptance of native ways in the Arctic played against him as much as the disbelief that an Englishman could resort to cannibalism. He was roundly criticized for dressing and living like the natives and not dealing with the wilderness in a “proper” way. Many British naval officers received knighthood for far less accomplishment than John Rae, but he was denied such honors and never received the £10,000 award due him for discovering the fate of Franklin.
    Rae’s accomplishments actually surpassed those of any other Arctic explorer. He surveyed 1,776 miles of uncharted territory and traveled 6,555 miles on snowshoes as well as another 6,700 miles in small boats along the shores. Yet Rae received no recognition because he dared to utter the truth about the Franklin expedition. Later Rae passed his knowledge of survival to the Admiralty, but it was ignored, and several future expeditions faced scurvy and starvation that could have been avoided.    
    The North West Company also had several outstanding, the best known of whom was a Scot named Alexander Mackenzie. In 1789 he embarked on an expedition with twelve Indians in canoes on the northwest flowing river called Dehcho by the native people. Despite Samuel Hearne’s failure to find a northwest passage nineteen years earlier, Mackenzie hoped to find such a passage in this more westerly location. He expected the Dehcho River to reach Cook’s Inlet in Alaska but found instead  that it emptied into the Arctic Ocean. His dismay at this discovery led him to name the river Disappointment River. Despite Mackenzie’s feeling of failure, this expedition provided a second, very significant surveyed point marking the northern limit of the North American mainland. Together with Hearne’s earlier survey, Mackenzie proved, to his disappointment, that there is no navigable waterway through the continent to the Pacific Ocean.
    Mackenzie made a second important expedition in 1792-93 beginning from Fort Chipewyan in the northwest portion of present-day Saskatchewan. With two Indian guides and six Canadian voyageurs, Mackenzie traveled up the Peace River westward to the continental divide, then down the Bella Coola River to the Pacific Ocean at the present day site of Bella Coola, British Columbia. This feat made Mackenzie the first person known to have completed a crossing of the North American continent north of Mexico. Furthermore his efforts provided the Northwest Company a great amount of information about western Canada and its native people.
    The Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company were a primary support for exploration in Canada until after the defeat of Napoleon in 1814. After that time the Royal Navy decided to utilize their resources in a search for a sea route through the Arctic archipelago and added many men and ships to the exploration effort.
    This exploration effort by the British navy along with exploration by the U. S. government in the nineteenth century opens another topic for consideration: exploration by government organizations such as the Royal Navy, the U. S. Army, the U. S. Topographical Engineers, the U.S. Geological Survey, and others. All this governmental interest in exploration resulted in the great surveys of the American West by Lewis and Clark, Clarence King, Ferdinand V. Hayden, John Wesley Powell, and George Wheeler, and soon opened the wilderness to settlement.

References
McCoy, R. M. On the Edge: Mapping the Coasts of North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Phillips, P. C., Smurr, J. W. The Fur Trade. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 1961.

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