Eight THE INTENT OF MONKS We left our camp on Pingok Island one morning knowing a storm was moving in from the southwest, but we were not worried. We were planning to work in open water between the beach and the edge of the pack ice, only a few miles out, making bottom trawls from an open 20-foot boat. The four of us were dressed, as usual, in heavy clothes and foul-weather gear. You accept the possibility of death in such situations, prepare for it, and then forget about it. We carried emergency and survival equipment in addition to all our scientific gear—signal flares, survival suits, a tent, and each of us had a pack with extra clothing, a 302 The Intent of Monks 30; sleeping bag, and a week's worth of food. Each morning we completed a checklist of the boat and radioed a distant base camp with our day plan. When we departed, we left a handwritten note on the table in our cabin, saying what time we left, the compass bearing we were taking, and when we expected to return. My companions, all scientists, were serious about this, but not solemn or tedious. They forestalled trouble by preparing for it, and were guided, not deterred, by the danger inherent in their work. It is a pleasure to travel with such people. As in other walks of life, the person who feels compelled to dramatize the risks or is either smugly complacent or eager to demonstrate his survival skills is someone you hope not to meet. Our camaraderie came from our enthusiasm for the work and from exhilaration with the landscape, the daily contact with sea-birds, seals, and fish. We rarely voiced these things to each other; they surfaced in a word of encouragement or understanding around rough work done in unending dampness and cold. Our mutual regard was founded in the accomplishment of our tasks and was as important to our survival as the emergency gear stowed in a blue box forward of the steering console. We worked through the morning, sorting the contents of bottom trawls and vertical plankton tows. Around noon we shut the engines off and drifted under overcast skies, eating our lunch. The seas were beginning to slap at the hull, but we had another couple of hours before they built up to three or four feet—our match, comfortably. We decided, then, to search for seals in the ice front before heading in. An hour later, by a movement of the ice so imperceptible it was finished before we realized it, we were cut off from the sea. The wind, compacting the ice, was closing off the channels of calm water where we had been cruising. We were suddenly 200 yards from open water, and a large floe, turning off the wind and folding in from the west, threatened to close us off even deeper in the pack. Already we had lost steerageway—the boat was pinned at that moment on all four sides. In those first hours we worked wordlessly and diligently. We 304 ARCTIC DREAMS all knew what we faced. Even if someone heard our distress call over the radio, we could not tell him precisely where we were, and we were in pack ice moving east. A three-day storm was coming on. The floes might crush the boat and drive it under, or they could force it out of the water where we would have it for shelter. We took advantage of any momentary opening in the ice to move toward open water, widening the channels with ice chisels, pushing with the twin 90-horsepower engines, the four of us heaving at the stern and gunnels. We were angling for a small patch of water within the pack. From there, it seemed, after a quick reconnoiter ahead on foot, we might be able to get out to the open sea. Thirty feet shy of our patch of water, we doubted the wisdom of taking ice chisels to one particular chunk of weathered pressure ice that blocked our path. Fractured the wrong way, its center of gravity would shift and the roll could take the boat under. The only way around it was to pull the boat, which weighed 3000 pounds, completely out of the water. Wirh an improvised system of ice anchors, lines, and block and tackle, and out of the terrific desire to get free, we set to. We got the boat up on the floe, across ir, and back into the water. Had rhat been open water, we would have cheered. As it was, we exchanged quick glances of justifiable but not foolish hope. While we had been winching the boat over the ice toward it, this patch of water had been closing up. And another large floe still separated us from the ocean. Where the surf broke against it, it fell a sheer four feet to the sea. Even if we got the boat over that ice, we could never launch it from such a precipice. Two stayed in the boat. I and one other went in opposite directions along the floe. Several hundred yards to the east I found a channel. I looked it over quickly and then signaled with the upraised shaft of my ice chisel for the others. It was barely negotiable to begin with, and in the few minutes it took to get the boat there, the channel closed. We put che prow of the boat against the seaward floe and brought both engines up to full power, trying to hold it The Intent of Monks 305 against the wind. The ice beside it continued to move east. The channel started to open. With the engines roaring, the gap opened to six feet. With a silent, implicit understanding each of us acted decisively. The man at the helm reversed the engines, heeled the boat around, and burst up the channel. We made 20 quick feet, careened the boat over on its port gunnel, and pivoted through a 120° turn. One ran ahead, chopping swift and hard at the closing ice with a chisel. Two of us heaved, jumping in and out of the boat, stabbing at chunks of ice closing on the props. One man remained at the throttles. Suddenly he lunged away, yanking the starboard engine clear of fouling ice. The man ahead threw his ice chisel into the boat and jumped across to help lift at the port gunnel. We could feel how close. The starboard side of the boat slid off the ice, into the water. The bow lifted on the open sea. There was nothing more for our legs to strain against. We pulled ourselves over the gunnel and fell inro the boat, limp as feed sacks. Exhausted. We were out. We were out, and the seas were running six feet. And we were miles now from a shore that we could not see. In the hours we had been in the ice, the storm had built considerably, and we had been carried we did not know how far east. The seas were as much as the boat could handle, and too big to quarter—we had to take them nearly bow-on. The brief views from wave crests showed us nothing. We could not see far enough through the driving sleet and spray, and the arctic coast here lies too low, anyway. We could only hope we were east of Pingok, the westernmost of the batrier islands, and not to the west, headed down into Harrison Bay, where the wind has a greater fetch and the shore is much farther on. We took water over the bow and shouted strategy to each other over the wind and the sound of engines screaming as the props came out of the water. We erected a canvas shelter forward to break the force of the sea and shed water. We got all the weight we could out of the bow. A resolute steadiness came over us. We were making headway. We were secure. If we did not broach and if we were far enough to the east, we would be able to run up on a leeward shore somewhere and wait out the storm. 30Ó ARCTIC DREAMS We plowed ahead. Three of us stood hunched backward to the weather. I began to recognize in the enduring steadiness another bind of calmness, or relief. The distance between my body and my thoughts slowly became elongated, and muffled like a dark, carpeted corridor. I realized I was cold, that I was shivering. I sensed the dry pits of warmth under my clothes and, against this, an opening and closing over my chest, like cold breath. I realized with dreamlike stillness that the whole upper right side of my body was soaked. The shoulder seams of my foul-weather gear were torn open. I knew I had to get to dry clothes, to get them on. But desire could not move my legs or arms. They were too far away. I was staring at someone, then moving; the soaked clothes were coming off. I could not make a word in my mouth. I felt suspended in a shaft in the earth, and then imagined I was sitting on a bare earthen floor somewhere within myself. The knowledge that I was being slammed around like a wooden box in the bottom of the boat was like something I had walked away from. In dry wool and protected by a tarp from the seas, I understood that I was safe; but I could not understand che duration of time. I could not locate any visual image outside myself. I concentrated on trying to gain a sense of the boat; and then on a rhythmic tensing and loosening of my muscles. I kept at it and at it; then I knew time was passing. There was a flow of time again. I heard a shout. I tried to shout myself, and when I heard an answer I knew that I was at the edge of time again, and could just step into it. I realized I was sitting up, that I was bracing myself against heavy seas. The shouts were for the coast. We had found Pingok. We anchored the boat under the lee shore and went into the cabin and changed clothes and fixed dinner. Our sense of relief came out in a patter of jokes at each other's expense. We ate quietly and went to bed and slept like bears in winter. * » * The Intent of Monks 307 The storm blew for two days. We nearly lost the boat when an anchor line parted, and got wet and cold again trying to secure it; but that seemed no more than what we had chosen by coming here. I went for a long walk on the afternoon of the second day, after the storm had become only fretful gusts and sunlight threatened to break through the low clouds. I still felt a twinge of embarrassment at having been reduced from a state of strength to such an impassive weight, to a state of disassociation, so quickly. But T did not dwell on it long. And we would go out again, when the seas dropped. We would go into the ice again. We would watch more closely; but nothing, really, had changed. With the experience so fresh in my mind, 1 began thinking of frail and exposed craft as I walked down the beach, of the Irish carraughs and Norse knarrs that brought people across the Atlantic, bucking pack ice streaming southward on the East Greenland Current. My God, what had driven them? All we know is what we have deduced from the records of early historians. And the deference those men showed to their classical predecessors, to Ptolemy, Solinus, and Isidore, their own nationalism and religious convictions, their vanity, and the shape of the ideas of their age— all this affected what they expressed. And when it was translated, or when they themselves translated from others, interpolations, adaptation, and plain error colored the historical record further. So the early record of arctic exploration is open to interpretation. And this refined history is less real, less harrowing than what had happened to us in the boat. It is events mulled and adjudicated. I wanted to walk the length of the seaside beach on Pingok, knowing the storm was dying away. I brooded over the fates of those early immigrants, people whose names no one knows, who sailed in ships of which there are neither descriptions nor drawings, through ice and storms like this one—but so much farther from a shore, with intentions and dreams I could only imagine. The earliest arctic voyages are recorded in the Icelandic sagas and Irish imramha. But they were written down hundreds of years 3o8 ARCTIC DREAMS after the fact by people who did not make the journeys, who only heard about them. The Norse Eddas and Icelandic sagas, wrote the arctic explorer and historian Fridtjof Nansen, are "narratives somewhat in the light of historical romances, founded upon legend and more or less uncertain traditions." The same can be said of the imramha and the records of Saint Brendan's voyage, though in tone and incident these latter are different from the sagas. In the following pages, beginning in a time before the sagas, the notion of a road to Cathay, a Northwest Passage, emerges. The quest for such a corridor, a path to wealth that had to be followed through a perilous landscape, gathers the dreams of several ages. Rooted in this search is one of the oldest of all human yearnings— finding the material fortune that lies beyond human struggle, and the peace that lies on the other side of hope. I should emphasize two points. Few original documents point up the unadorned character, the undisguised sensibilities, of the participants in these dramas. And the most common simile of comparison for these journeys—the exploits of astronauts—falls short. The astronaut is suitably dressed for his work, professionally trained, assiduously looked after en route, and nationally regarded. He possesses superb tools of navigation and observation. The people who first came into the Arctic had no photograph of the far shore before they left. They sailed in crude ships with cruder tools of navigation, and with maps that had no foundation or geographic authority. They shipwrecked so often that it is difficult to find records of their deaths, because shipwreck and death were unremarkable at the time. They received, for the most part, no support—popular or financial. They suffered brutally and fatally from the weather and from scurvy, starvation, Eskimo hostility, and thirst. Their courage and determination in some instances were so extreme as to seem eerie and peculiar rather than heroic. Visions of achievement drove them on. In the worst moments they were held together by regard for each other, by invincible bearing, or by stern naval discipline. Whether one finds such resourceful courage The Intent of Monks 309 among a group of young monks on a spiritual voyage in a carraugh, or among worldly sailors with John Davis in the sixteenth century, or in William Parry's snug winter quarters on Melville Island in 1819-10, it is a sterling human quality. In the journals and histories I read of these journeys I was drawn on by a sharp leaning in the human spirit: pure desire—the complexities of human passion and cupidity, Someone, for example, had to pay for these trips-, and whoever paid was looking for a way to be paid back. Rarely was the goal anything as selfless as an increase in mankind's geographical knowledge. An arctic voyage in quest of unknown riches, or of a new passage to known riches, could mean tangible wealth for investors, and it could mean fame and social position for a captain or pilot. For a common seaman die reward might only mean some slip of the exotic, or a chance at the riches himself—at the very least a good story, probably something astounding. Enough, certainly, to sign on. As I read, í tried to imagine the singular hunger for such things, how desire alone might convey a group of people into those fearsome seas. The achievement of one's desires may reveal what one considers moral; but it also reveals the aspiration and tack of an individual life, and the tenor of an age. In this light, one can better understand failures of nerve in the Arctic, such as Bering's in the Chukchi Sea in 1728—he simply did not have Peter the Great's burning desire to define eastern Russia. And one can better understand figures in arctic exploration so obsessed with their own achievement that they found it irksome to acknowledge the Eskimos, unnamed companions, and indefatigable dogs who helped them. Arctic history became for me, then, a legacy of desire—the desire of individual men to achieve their goals. But it was also the legacy of a kind of desire that transcends heroics and which was privately known to many—the desire for a safe and honorable passage through the world. As I walked the beach I stopped now and then to pick over 3IO ARCTIC DREAMS something on the storm-hardened shore-^-bits of whale vertebrae, waterlogged feathers, the odd but ubiquitous piece of plastic, a strict reminder against romance. The narratives I carried in my head that afternoon fascinated me, but not for what they recorded of geographic accomplishment or for how they might be used in support of one side or another of a controversy, such as whether Frederick Cook or Robert Peary got to the Pole first. They held the mind because of what they said about human endeavor. Behind the polite and abstemious journal entries of British naval officers, behind the self-conscious prose of dashing explorers, were the lives of courageous, bewildered, and dreaming people. Some reports suggest that heroic passage took place for many just offstage. They make clear that orhers struggled mightily to find some meaning in what they were doing in those regions, for the very act of exploration seemed to them at times completely mad. They wanted to feel that what they were doing was necessary, if not for themselves then for the nation, for mankind. The literature of arctic exploration is frequently offered as a record of resolute will before the menacing fortifications of the landscape. It is more profitable I think to disregard this notion— that the land is an adversary bent on human defeat, that the people who came and went were heroes or failures in this. It is better to contemplate the record of human longing to achieve something significant, to be free of some of the grim weight of life. That weight was ignorance, poverty of spirit, indolence, and the threat of anonymity and destitution. This harsh landscape became the focus of a desire to separate oneself from those things and to overcome them. In these arctic narratives, then, are the threads of dreams that serve us all. Apsley Cherry-Garrard, a companion of Robert Scott, said that exploration was the physical expression of an intellectual passion. His remark was made in an age when royal societies and governments underwrote most expeditions, out of a Victorian The Intent of Monks 5" sense of duty, curiosity, and orthodoxy. More exploration, by far, was instigated, and more geographical knowledge gained, with the underwriting of men of commerce, war, and religion, who went out for commercial gain or for national or religious conquest. Still. Cherry-Garrard's observation, concise and idealistic, is worth remembering. It points up the relationship between toil and belief, and alludes to the hope of reward that is so much a part of a decision to enter the unknown, ft might at first seem to be no visionary Elizabethan merchant's slogan; nor serve to explain the voyages of Irish monks in search of Terra Repromissionis Sanctorum, the blessed landscape where one stepped over that dark abyss that separated what was profane from what was holy. But, in a sense, Cherry-Garrard's summation describes all arctic travel—the intellectual passion is whatever anyone imagined would be there for him. Desire for material wealth, for spiritual or emotional ecstasy, for recognition—strains of all three are found in nearly every arctic expedition. From the beginning, however, the promise of financial reward proved the most enduring. Nansen, writing in 1911, regarded all arctic exploration as simply evidence of the power of the unknown over the human mind. "Nowhere else," he wrote, "have we won our way more slowly, nowhere else has every new step caused so much trouble, so many privations and sufferings, and certainly nowhere have the resulting discoveries promised fewer material advantages." Leaving aside the Irish peregrinatores and the Norse for the moment, it became clear fairly quickly to early European explorers that beyond furs in the subarctic and fisheries at the arctic periphery, the land held no tangible wealth. Carder's famous remark about southern Labrador came to stand for a general condemnation of the whole region: it looked like "the land God gave to Cain." "Praeter solhudinem nihil video" wrote one early explorer—"I saw nothing but solitude." And yet, fatal shipwreck after shipwreck, bankruptcy after bankruptcy, the expeditions continued, strung out on the thinnest hopes, with the most sanguine expecta- 3^ ARCTIC DREAMS dons. Men of character continued to sail to their death for men of greed. And unscrupulous promoters and aggrandizing individuals of every stripe continued to manipulate and take advantage of whatever new was learned. One looks in vain for a rational explanation for this dedication —the exploration of the Arctic made as little sense as Pizarro's march in search of El Dorado, or Coronado's surreal wandering over the trackless llanos of the Southwest. There was at least gold and silver to be had in the Spanish conquest, high-grade ore in record rime. Hiking down the empty beach at Pingok, my head full of the volumes of Hakluyt, the scholarly deliberations of Samuel Eliot Morison, the personal narratives of John Davis, of William Parry, I arrived always at the same, disquieting place: the history of Western exploration in the New World m every quarter is a confrontation with an image of distant wealth. Gold, furs, timber, whales, the Elysian Fields, the control of trade routes to the Orient—it all had to be verified, acquired, processed, allocated, and defended. And these far-flung enterprises had to be profitable, or be made to seem profitable, or be financed until they were. The task was wild, extraordinary. And it was complicated by the fact that people were living in North America when we arrived. Their title to the wealth had to be extinguished. The most philosophically troubling issue of our incursion in the New World, I think, grows out of our definition of wealth— the methods for its acquisition and our perception of what sorts of riches can actually be owned and transferred. A fresh landscape brings out awe, desire, and apprehension in us. But one like North America, undeveloped, also encourages a vague feeling that we can either augment or waste our lives in such places, depending on what we do. Our colloquy with the original inhabitants, of course, is unfinished. And we are still asking ourselves: What is worth acquiring here? In the following narratives, it is not solely the desire of some men for different sorts of wealth that becomes clear but the sus- The Intent of Monks 313 picion that North America offered more than material wealth. It offered wealth that could not be owned, like the clarity of the air and the sight of 300,000 snow geese feeding undisturbed on the Great Plain of the Koukdjuak. One cannot change the historical fact that the air is no longer clear in some places and that geese no longer feed in such numbers along the Koukdjuak, while the silver mines in the great mountain of Potosi are entering their fifth century of production in an atmosphere of urban despair and destitution. And that the native people have been abused. Our anxieties about these things are honest and deeply perplexing. Our difficulty lies in part, I think, with our insistence on defining completely the terms of our encounter with new-found wealth. We do not like to be countermanded in our categories by having something define itself. We seem vaguely uneasy, too, with the notion that a flock of snow geese tising like a snowstorm over Baffin Island is as valuable or more to mankind than the silver, tin, and copper being dug out of the Bolivian Andes at Potosi. These are not modern misgivings; they date in North America from the time of Columbus and John Cabot. What every culture must eventually decide, actively debate and decide, is what of all that surrounds it, tangible and intangible, it will dismantle and turn into material wealth. And what of its cultural wealth, from the tradition of finding peace in the vision of an undisturbed hillside to a knowledge of how to finance a corporate merger, it will fight to preserve. Walking down the long beach at Pingok that day I understood something else about our encounter with North America, which I did not at first have words for. It had to do with tolerance. It seemed clear to me that we need tolerance in our lives for the worth of different sorts of perception, of which the contrasting Umwelten of the animals on the island are a reminder. And we need a tolerance for the unmanipulated and unpossessed landscape. But what I came to see, too, was that we need to understand the relationship between tolerance and different sorts of wealth, how 3'4 ARCTIC DREAMS a tolerance for the unconverted things of the earth is intertwined with the substance of a truly rich life. When Pytheas sailed from Marseilles through the Gates of Hercules (the Strait of Gibraltar) and turned north in search of tin and amber, he was likely not the first. Carthaginians probably preceded him. His journals and maps are lost. Roman historians, jealous of his success, later disparaged his accomplishment, which was probably the circumnavigation of Britain and the discovery of the Orkneys. He sailed as far as the north coast of Norway or perhaps as far as Iceland—both have been suggested as his Thule* Pytheas' journey (330-325 b.c.) commonly serves as a starting point for a history of arctic exploration, but this is history from a Mediterranean point of view. People ancestral to the Celts of northern Europe and to the Norse no doubt plied the same waters Pytheas sailed, at the same time. The Mediterranean view of the Arctic, down to the time of the Elizabethan mariners, was shaped by two somewhat contradictory thoughts. The Arctic represented both threat and salvation. In the classical mind—which means in most learned European minds in the Middle Ages—invasion and destruction came from the North, at the hands of roving warrior peoples, from vaguely known Cimmerians about 800 b.c., to the Teutonic tribes that fought the Romans, to the Norse and Saxons of later centuries. The North was a region of fierce, fabulous people like the Amazons and the Cynocephali, or dog-headed people. Of barbaric Sythians whose lands bordered the bleak prospect of the Northern Ocean. One might go there for tin or amber, or for horses and furs, but these lands "under the pivot of the stars" were held by "hasty and evil-tempered folk" who had "the nature of bears." They ate raw meat and fat, and the eggs of "fen fowl" (plovers, gulls, and geese), and were as curious and dangerous as nightmares. • In the writings of Pytheas the term "Thule" refers to a place six days' sail north of Britain. The Intent of Monks 315 The Northern Ocean itself was a place of whirlpools (Chaos and Maelstrom) and rip tides. (Mediterranean sailors did not discover tides until they left that inland sea.) The Hyperborean Sea, wrote a sixth-century monk, "was one known only to Him who created it." Oceanus innavigabilis and Oceanus caligans vel rigens, it said on the maps. Unnavigable. A hardened ocean shrouded in darkness. Beyond this, however, beyond Boreas, Caecias, Argestes, Thrascis, and the other northern winds, on the other side of the Rhipaean Mountains, "terrible with snow," was a land more graceful and sweet, less troubled and more fecund than any anyone had ever known. The pastures were so excellent that "if the cattle were allowed to graze more than a small part of the day, they burst in pieces." The sound of moving water was as the music of a string quartet. Vines bore fruit twelve times a year. Wheat headed not in grains but in loaves. People lived in perfect peace, "far from the evils of tyranny and war." Their place of worship was within clouds of wheeling swans. The Land of the Hyperboreans, which lay beyond all the malevolence symbolized by the barbarians, was in its different guises, including the various Isles of the Blessed in the Western Ocean and the "Wineland" of the Norse, one of the most powerful projections of the Western imagination. These same ideas of a land where "no enemy pursues" (the Elysian Fields, the Hesperides, Avalon, El Dorado, and Irish Brasil) were inseparably a part of early arctic exploration.* The Irish imramha, or sea sagas, recount the voyages of monks searching for the Isles of the Blessed and, as it happened, for bleak outposts in the "desert of the Ocean" suitable for contemplation. The most widely known of these was written down sometime in * Most maps located these fabulous islands to the west of Europe, but their association was with visions of the North as well. The discovery of the Azores and Madeira by the Portuguese in the fifteenth century (they may have been known earlier to Phoenician traders) lent support'to the notion that there were other isles farther to the west. JIÓ ARCTIC DREAMS the ninth or tenth century, the Navigatto Sancti Brendani Abbaus, the story of the seven-year voyage of the abbot Saint Brendan, in a carraugh with seventeen monks. Brendan was born about a.d. 489 in County Kerry and was abbot at Clonfert in East Galway when he left on his journey (or a series of journeys). Their craft, the carraugh, was a long, narrow, open but seaworthy boat consisting of a wickerlike basket frame covered with oak-tanned oxhide caulked with tallow. Brendan and his monks sailed with wine and cold food, used oars and a single stepped mast to convey themselves, slept on a mattress of heather, and dropped a stone anchor in bays where they explored. Their journey is a wondrous epic, filled with ecstatic visions and astounding events. They met strangers with gestures of courtesy and used their healing arts among them. They took little note of the hazards they faced. The themes are of compassion, wonder, and respect (as distinct from the themes of property, lineage, bloodshed, and banishment that distinguish the later, Icelandic sagas). Reading loosely, it is possible to imagine that Brendan reached the Faroes and Iceland, and perhaps saw the towering volcanic peak of Beerenberg on the eastern end of Jan Mayen Island. At one point the monks saw an iceberg that took three days of hard rowing to reach. Transfixed by its beauty, Brendan suggested they row through a hole in it, which in the evening light seemed "like the eye of God." These impeccable, generous, innocent, attentive men were, one must think, the perfect travelers. In the fifth and sixth centuries Ireland was the center of high culture in Europe. Its tribal monasteries were refugia for intellectual thought and spiritual practice. Under pressure from Rome to bring their tradition into line with Christian orthodoxy and pressed as well by barbaric Vikings, these monks, like fierce Essenes, moved north and west to the Faroes and to Iceland, where they built their cells and monasteries on promontories and plains facing the Western Ocean. Tradition, but scant reliable record, holds that The Intent of Monks 317 they moved on to Greenland ahead of the Norse, and thence to Labrador, Newfoundland, and the Saint Lawrence River Valley. The Norse who came in their tracks, the second European culture after the Celts to enter the Arctic, are often cast as plunderers and wastrels, but the characterization is inaccurate. Many of the Norse who came to Iceland—the country was discovered in 860, according to the sagas, by Gardar Svavarsson, a Swedish-born Dane—were fleeing the tyrannic reign of Harald Haarfager or the rebellion of local inhabitants in Norse-occupied Ireland, Scotland, and Normandy. They were farmers and fishermen, not sea raiders. They began arriving in Iceland sometime after 870. Greenland, which may have been discovered by a Norwegian named Gunnbjorn Ulfsson, was made famous by Eirik Raude, made an outcast in Iceland in 981 for twice taking human life without reason. His banishment lasted three years, during which time "Eric the Red" stayed in present-day Julianehäb District in Greenland, on Eriks Fiord.* In 986 Eric again sailed for Greenland from Iceland with twenty-five ships, of which fourteen, with about 500 people, arrived at Eriks Fiord. The settlers built houses of stone and turf, with turf roofs over driftwood frames. They raised a small breed of cattle, sheep, and goats, hunted seals and walrus, and caught fish. The community at Eriks Fiord, called the Eastern Settlement, and another 175 miles farther up the coast called the Western Settlement, came near to thriving during periods in the eleventh and twelfth centuries when there was some regular trade with northern Europe—walrus ivory, gyrfalcons, polar bear hides, and sealskins for iron, grain, manufactured implements, and simple machinery. It was a self-governing free state but, because of its tenuous economy, never politically stable. In 1261 it came under * Most Norse and Danish place names in Greenland are being changed to Greenlandic Eskimo names. To avoid confusion I have used the older, more familiar names. The modern terms appear in the gazetteer. 3i8 ARCTIC DREAMS Norwegian rule. The trade on which it depended, strictly regulated by a Norwegian charter, withered for a variety of reasons— the rise of the Hanseatic League, the shift of the Norwegian capital to Copenhagen in 1397, and financial collapse in Bergen, the Norwegian city from which ships for the Greenland trade sailed. The two colonies in Greenland were soon forgotten. Without trade to sustain them, a subsistence economy never being their forte, the remnant Norse population died out or intermarried with their Eskimo neighbors. Some last few may have been abducted by English slave traders in the sixteenth century.* According to a widely accepted interpretation of the two pertinent sagas, that of Eric the Red (also called the Saga of Thorfinn Karlsevni) and the Tale of the Greenlanders, one Bjarni Herjulfsson, en route to Greenland in 986 and blown far to the west in a storm, stood off the coast of Labrador and then Baffin Island before arriving in Eriks Fiord. Eric's son Leif sailed in 1001 for the lands Bjarni had seen, in search of a precious commodity— timber. He landed first at Baffin Island (Helluland, "the country of flat stones"); then on the Labrador coast, perhaps at about 54°N, where there is a dense strip of coastal timber (Markland, "the forest land"); then, finally, on the northeast coast of Newfoundland, near the Strait of Belle Isle (Vinland).t The Norse settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, excavated in the 1960s by Helge Ingstad, may have been used continuously by Leif and his brothers and Thorfinn Karlsevni before being abandoned in 1014. Apparently Norse skirmishes with * There is a poignant line in the seventeenth-century Annals of the Icelandic Bishop Gisli Oddsson. He writes that the Norse, who had adopted Christianity about a.d. iooo, finally abandoned their morals, their faith, and their superior culture "et ad Americae populos se converterunt"—"and converted to the way of the American people." t The sagas were not written down for another joo years. The authors of the sagas, with a penchant for making what they heard fit what they believed (i.e., had read), may have invented this last name to signify a land of self-sown wheat and wild grapes suitable for winemaking. The Intent of Monks 319 the Indians and Eskimos proved too troublesome and costly. A child, Snorri, was »born to Gudrid, the widow of Leif's brother Thorstein, and to Karlsevni at L'Anse aux Meadows in the autumn of 1009. When the Greenland colonies faded away, Europe's sense of the Arctic receded to include only Iceland, with which she maintained a regular trade. Well into the sixteenth century, in fact, western Europe remained more aware of the voyage of Saint Brendan than of the existence of the Greenland colonies and Leif Ericsson. A European understanding of world geography in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries was derived from wheel maps and older T-maps. The former presented the world arranged as a disk, with the Mediterranean at the center of a large continent and with á watery border beyond. The continent's outer shore was indented with the three embayments of the Outer Ocean—the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Caspian Sea. The T of the latter map was formed with the Mediterranean as a vertical line and with the Nile and Don rivers connecting horizontally through the Black Sea. Islands on the wheel maps were "distributed more or less according to taste, and as there happened to be room." At the utmost edge of the world, the realms of the sky, the sea, and the underworld met—but this was a cartographic abstraction. The idea that the world was a sphere was widely held. (It was the absence of spherical projections—the modern globe was not introduced in Europe until about 1492—that led people to talk about the earth as though it were flat.) Beginning in the fourteenth century, cartographic representation of the world from Ptolemy's point of view slowly changed. With the development of compass, or portolano, charts, the coasts became better defined. The fanciful lnsulae FortuTiatae, variously titled, were moved farther north and west, into lesser-known waters. (Brasil, moved hither and yon, could still be found on British Admiralty charts in 1873.) Greenland, the quintessential }20 ARCTIC DREAMS remote Arctic for Europeans in the fifteenth century, was drawn in on maps and the first globes as a peninsula stretching north and west from Scandinavia (as on the Fra Mauro map of 1459); or as land extending north from central Asia (Clavus' Nancy map of 1472); or as the farthest-east extension of Asia (Contarini map, 1506). The region of the North Pole was depicted as open water; as a separate continental mass (Terra Septemtrwnalis [Land of the North] or Terrae Polaris Pars ľPart of the Polar Land]); and later in the fifteenth century, after the magnetic compass had come into use in Europe, as a dark, magnetic mountain. Fifteenth-century Europe was neither empirical nor discriminating in its geography. The spurious geographical entertainments of Sir John Mandeville's Travels (1356) were read as avidly as the eyewitness accounts of Marco Polo (1198), and both were held in the same regard. As was the case with the mariner's compass and the portolano chart, the introduction in Europe of authentic new geographic knowledge was no guarantee it would be welcomed and acted upon. When John Cabot sailed from Bristol to find Newfoundland, he held a letter patent from Henry VII; but what he found was of little interest to Englishmen and was soon all but forgotten. His vision, wrote Samuel Eliot Morison, was "like an exotic flower springing up in unfilled soil" in England. Bristol fishermen, in the view of American geographer Carl Sauer, had been fishing on the Newfoundland banks for several years before Cabot arrived, with no great concern for who owned the land or what sovereign might claim it. Their business was cod. Cabot's arrival, however, began the modern period of an Arctic more rigorously defined in the European mind. His voyage (1497) stirred the first serious European interest in the possibility of a Northwest Passage—through a strait separating North America from Polo's Chinese province of Ania, down which ships could sail unimpeded to the harbors of Cathay, the Moluccas, and the ports of India. Before such a passage was sought to the north of Cabot's Newfoundland landfall by the English, the region to the south was The Intent of Monks 32i explored for the French by Verrazano and Carrier. Verrazano was Italian, from Tuscany. Like Columbus, a Genoese sailing for the Spanish, and like Cabot, a Genoese sailing for the English, Verrazano was a freelance explorer in an age when monarchs and merchants were not as enthusiastic about New World as Old World prospects. Their overriding interest was in finding a protected, unencumbered trade route to China. The Caribbean was a Spanish ocean, and the route around Africa was Portuguese. The overland route through the Middle East entailed payments to Turkish middlemen. (As far as England was concerned Spain also posed a threat to her export trade with continental Europe.) The possible routes for the French and the English, then, were to be found, it was thought, either southward along Cabot's new coast (if his New Founded Isle was the hoped-for Asian promontory); to the north of his landfall if North America was a continent; or somewhere to the west, Newfoundland being just one more of the many islands thought to comprise "the western lands." The English also knew of the possibility of a Northeast Passage, around Norway's North Cape; Alfred the Great had transcribed the sober and accurate report of Ottar about his and his Norse companions' voyage into the White Sea about 880. Since England was looking for markets for its West Country woolens, the northeastern route was especially appealing. But it was not tried until 1553. Verrazano was sent west in 1524 by the French, who were constrained as much as the English by Spanish and Portuguese control of the Southern Ocean and by middlemen in the Levant; and as much in need of "spices" from the Orient—not only condiments to preserve food (or enhance the taste of spoiling food) but drugs, dyes, oils, cosmetics, and perfumes. He coasted the eastern shore of North America, eliminating the possibility of any passage between Florida and Nova Scotia (except at North Carolina's Outer Banks, where Pamlico Sound looked like the Pacific to him). Ten years later Carrier sailed into the Gulf of Saint Lawrence for the first time. Again, there were Spanish, French, Portuguese, and 3" ARCTIC DREAMS English cod fishermen there ahead of him—not to mention Esteväo Gomes (a Portuguese sailing for Spain) and Joao Alvares Fagundes, a Portuguese shipowner with colonial ideas. On his second voyage (1535), Carrier pursued a search for "Saguenay" (a land invented by a Huron named Donnaconna to flabbergast the French), and an exploration of the Saint Lawrence River. The rapids at this farthest-west point he named, sardonically, "La Chine" (China) Rapids. (The French interest in a western passage would continue to be a middle-latitude search for a river route, a guiding vision in North American exploration, for another 300 years.) Because they thought Cabot's Newfoundland might He to the east of the meridional line of demarcation established in the Treaty of Tordesillas (at roughly 45 °W), and therefore belong to them, the Portuguese sailed from both Lisbon and the Azores to explore. Joäo Fernandes, a lavrador, or small landed proprietor like a Spanish hidalgo, sailed as far as Cape Farewell, Greenland, in 1 joo. (The landfall was initially named for him, an Anglicized version, Labrador, later being shifted to the west by mapmakers.) Also in that year, Gašpar Corte Real landed on Newfoundland, found relics of Cabot's (lost) second expedition, and kidnapped fifty-seven Beot-huk Indians, whom he took back to Lisbon. He returned to the region in 1501, and he too disappeared. He was followed by a brother, Miguel, on a similar voyage in 1501; his caravel vanished as well. An English merchant, Robert Thorne, was of the opinion that Cathay could be reached on two tacks—straight over the Pole, or west through a strait somewhere north of Newfoundland, which was coming to be called Fretum Trium Fratrum, the Strait of the Three Brothers (whether for the three Corte Real brothers or John Cabot's three sons is not known). Henry VIII obliged Thorne and sent out two ships in 1527—the Dominus Vobtsctrm, which was lost, and the Mary of Gmlford, John Rut, master. Rut went a third of the way up the Labrador coast and then lost his nerve. He reversed course and sailed for the West Indies. The Intent of Monks 323 Henry VIII was notably uninterested in finding a Northwest Passage; but the idea was fertile in the minds of northern European entrepreneurs, who, if not sanguine, were at least hopeful. America, before and after Verrazano's and Carrier's voyages, was viewed by the English as a land discovered by accident and around or through which it was desirable to sail. The northern route was not encouraging because of the ice. Those who still subscribed to Parmenides' theory of geographical zones believed the frigid zone was impenetrable or represented too dangerous a passage to be feasible as a trade route. Others, like Robert Thorne, thought that the worst ice lay on the Arctic Circle—beyond that was an open ocean, good weather, and clear sailing all the way to the Strait of Anian, the western counrerpart to the Strait of the Three Brothers. The attitude among investors in England and the Netherlands, the two nations in most pressing need of a reliable, tariff-free route to the East, was cautious. Sebastian Cabot, a charming and forceful man trading on his father's reputation, and a fabricator of northern voyages in which he claimed to have participated, was as persuasive in arguing for venture capital for a northern voyage as geographers, who sensed North America taking shape out there on the horizon, were eloquent. In 1553, as governor of what came to be called the Muscovy Company, he sent three ships to the Northeast under the command of Sir Hugh Willoughby. (The ships were hopefully sheathed with lead to prorect them against shipworms when they reached rhe warm Southern Ocean.) Willoughby and the officers and men of two ships froze to death on the north coast of the Kola Peninsula. The third ship, under the command of Richard Chancellor, reached the White Sea. During the winter, Chancellor made a óoo-mile journey to Moscow and established what would become an overland trade route for Russian furs. In 1556, a Muscovy ship passed through Karskiye Vorota Strait, and its master, Stephen Borough, became the first European to see the Kara Sea, the vast and intimidating icescape that lay beyond Novaya Zemlya. Daunted, Borough returned to England. Cathay seemed suddenly closer by way of Moscow. 3M ARCTIC DREAMS The Dutch also tried in this direction. In 159tí Willem Barents, pilot for Jacob van Heemskerke, accompanied by a second ship under the command of Jan Cornelis Ryp, discovered the archipelago they called Spitsbergen (probably known 500 years earlier to Norse sailors, who named a land in this region Svalbard, "the cold coast"). The two ships later parted, Ryp returning to Amsterdam and Barents sailing west for Novaya Zemlya, thinking a way across the Kara Sea might be found to the north of the island. He rounded the island's northern cape before he was forced into winter quarters by heavy ice. At Ice Haven the men built a hut of driftwood, burned polar bear fat for light, and skirmished with curious foxes. They felt terrorized by polar bears; they were weakened by scurvy; and they endured relentless, crushing cold. Heat from a fire kept blazing in the hut did not melt ice on the floor only a few feet away. In the spring they refitted one of the ship's boats (the ship itself having been crushed during the winter, a sight that "made all the hairs of our heads rise upright with fear") and made a spectacular 1600-mile journey across ice and open water to the Kola Peninsula. Barents died on the way, of scurvy. Gerrit de Veer's narrative of this adventure, The True and Perfect Description of Three Voyages, so strange and ivoonderfull, that the like has never been heard of before . . . , chronicles the awful conditions they endured and conveys a certain nightmarish aspect, particularly because of their fear of the animals. Finding a Northeast Passage was of no further interest to the Dutch or anyone else, until the opening of Russia's far eastern frontier by Cossacks, expanding the Stroganov fur empire, and the expeditions of Peter the Great.* * Some of the impetus to open a Northeast Passage, across Asia and south through a "Strait of Jezzo," was a restriction imposed by the emperor of Japan against trade in the Kamchatka region for vessels coming up from the south. Japan took a significant tribute from Kamchatka, from silver mines it was thought. The Dutch were certain such a northern passage existed because Dutch traders wrecked on the The Intent of Monks 325 Under Elizabeth I, daughter of Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII, England became a formidable maritime power and achieved, as well, a national sense of identity and purpose, of which Elizabeth was the embodiment. These were the years (1558-1603) when Shakespeare wrote, when Francis Bacon established the scientific method, when Richard Hakluyt wrote The Principal Navigations, and when the queen's "West Country sailors" greatly expanded England's sphere of political influence. Francis Drake sailed around the world. Walter Raleigh organized the English colonization in Virginia. John Hawkins, a freebooter like both Drake and the circumnavigator Thomas Cavendish, made numerous improvements in ship design and distinguished himself with some of the others, including Martin Frobisher, at the defeat of the Spanish Armada (1588). In 1587 John Davis, the least warlike and piratical of them all, would sail up the west coast of Greenland and quietly into Baffin Bay. Belief in a navigable Northwest Passage flourished under Elizabeth. It was energetically promoted by a highly visible merchant, Michael Lok, and it had the support of well-regarded minds, like Hakluyt's and the philosopher John Dee's. It was hotly argued for by Sir Humphrey Gilbert, a favorite of the queen (and yet another Devon neighbor of Drake, Raleigh, and Davis, though not their match at sea), in A Discourse of a DiscoveHe for a New Passage to Cathaia. Finally, at least two well-touted stories in support of a Strait of AnJan were circulating in England at the time. A monk, one Antonio Urdaneta, claimed to have sailed through it in the 1550S; and a Portuguese mariner, Martin Chacque, claimed to have come through in 155Ó, west to east like Urdaneta. (Both tales were unfounded.) In the thrall of this enthusiasm, Michael Lok founded the Korean coast in those years found a stranded whale with a harpoon in it from the Spitsbergen fishery. The whale could only have gotten there through a strait between Asia and North America. 326 ARCTIC DREAMS Cathay Company and outfitted Martin Frobisher for a voyage of discovery in 1575- Frobisher sailed from London in a small bark, the Gabriel, with a crew of eighteen, accompanied by another small bark, the Michael, and an even smaller, unnamed pinnace with a crew of four. The pinnace went down in a gale that sprung the Gabriel's mainmast and tore away her fore-topmast. The captain and crew of the Michael, "mistrusting the matter" as they neared Greenland, "conveyed themselves privilie away" from Frobisher and returned home, reporting the Gabriel lost in a storm. Frobisher entered what he thought was a strait (actually Frobisher Bay, Baffin Island) on August 11. He spent fifteen days exploring both coasts, thinking the west one North America, the east one Asia, before he sailed for home, convinced this was the eastern opening of the Passage. A stone picked up by a sailor on the east shore, "merely for the sake of the place from whence they came," fell into the hands of Michael Lok, who had it declared gold-bearing ore, drummed up financial support, and dispatched a second expedition in 1577. Frobisher, with a belief in the Passage and a master mariner's keen desire to find it, probably cared very little for these plans, but went mining as directed and limited his explorations to Frobisher Bay. The three ships, Gabriel, Michael, and the Aid, a flagship ten times At size of the two former ships, returned to England on September 23 with 100 tons of worthless bronze-lustered mica (amphibolite and pyroxenite). In hopes of gaining new investors, Lok arranged for the rock to be assayed at a high value. He was partly successful in attracting investors, though the canny stayed away. The third voyage ended in tragedy. Fifteen ships sailed in May 1578. The Deny s was lost in a storm when they arrived, and on the return voyage, with 1350 tons of the spurious ore, they encountered more storms and forty men drowned, many of them Cornish miners. Queen Elizabeth did not lose faith in Lok*s enterprise until the very end. On their first voyage she waved to the ships from the palace window at Greenwich, as they passed by on the Thames. The Intent of Monks 327 On the eve of the second voyage she let Frobisher kiss her hand. Before the third, she placed a gold chain around his neck and extended her hand for each of the captains to kiss. Frobisher's men, during the second voyage, and on the peninsula Elizabeth herself had named Meta Incognita, found a badly decomposed narwhal, from which they took the tusk. In his account of the voyage, Dyonyse Settle writes that the men placed spiders in the hollow base of the tooth and that the spiders died. "I saw not the triall hereof," he writes. "But it was reported unto me of a trueth: by the vertue whereof we supposed it to be the sea Unicorne." Frobisher made a present of the tusk to Elizabeth. This enterprise left Lok in debt and the Cathay Company bankrupt. The transparent greed of some of the investors, chicanery to keep the scheme alive, and the loss of workingmen's lives left a foul taste in many mouths. Frobisher cleared his own name in battle, was knighted, and died in 1594 fighting the Spanish. Voyages of a very different sort were undertaken eight years later by John Davis, perhaps the most highly skilled of all the Elizabethan navigators, a man of a more serene disposition than the volatile Frobisher, much less the disciplinarian among his men, less acquisitive and less self-promoting of his achievements—part of the reason that he, of all the West Country mariners, was the one never knighted. With the backing of Adrian Gilbert, a prominent Devonshire physician, and William Sanderson, a London merchant-adventurer, and under the patronage of the Duke of Walsingham, Davis outfitted two small ships, the Smineshine and the Moone-shine, the former with a four-piece orchestra, and sailed from Dartmouth on the Devon coast on June 7, 1585. Their first landfall was near present-day Cape Walloe on the southeast coast of Greenland, but fog and the ice stream in the East Greenland Current held them off. "[T]he irksome noyse of the yse was such, that it bred strange conceites among us, so that we supposed the place to be vast and voyd of any sensible or vegitable creatures, whereupon I called the same Desolation." The Jí8 ARCTIC DREAMS two ships stood out from Cape Farewell (Davis would so name it on his second voyage) and came to shore, finally, near the old Norse settlement at Godtháb on July 29. And here took place one of the most memorable of meetings between cultures in all of arctic literature. Davis and several others were reconnoitering from the top of an island in what Davis had named Gilbert Sound when they were spotted by a group of Eskimos on the shore, some of whom launched kayaks. They made "a lamentable noyse," wrote John Jane, ".. . with great outcryes and skreechings: wee hearing them, thought it had bene the howling of wolves." Davis called on the orchestra to play and directed his officers and men to dance. The Eskimos cautiously approached in kayaks, two of them pulling very close to the beach. "Their pronunciation," wrote Jane, "was very hollow through the throate, and their speach such as we could not understand: onely we allured them by friendly imbrac-ings and signes of curtesie. At length one of them poynting up to the sunne with his hande, would presently strike his brest so hard, that we might hear the blowe." John Ellis, master of the Moone-shine, began to imitate, pointing to the sun and striking his breast. One of the Eskimos came ashore. They handed him pieces of their clothing, having nothing else to offer, and kept up their dancing, the orchestra playing all the while. The following morning the ships' companies were awakened by the very same people, standing on the same hill the officers had stood on the day before. The Eskimos were playing on a drum, dancing and beckoning to them. (Davis's courteous regard for the Eskimos is unique in early arctic narratives. He found them "a very tractable people, voyde of craft or double dealing. . . ." He returned to the same spot on his second voyage; the moment of mutual recognition, and his reception, were tumultuous.) Two days after meeting the Eskimos, Davis crossed the strait later named for him and sailed far up Cumberland Sound, which he judged, from the lack of ice, the breadth of the channel, the The Intent of Monks 329 set of the tides, the sight of whales passing to the east, and the "colour, nature, and qualities" of the water, to be the entrance to the Northwest Passage. Satisfied, he sailed for home. (There was no thought of overwintering on these early voyages. The ships were too small to carry a year's provisions.) On October 3 he wrote Walsingham that the passage was "nothing doubtfull, but at any tyme [of year] almost to be passed, the sea navigable, voyd of yse, the ayre tollerable, and the waters very depe." Gilbert, Sanderson, and Walsingham were pleased with Davis's progress, and, with additional backing from merchants in the city of Exeter, he sailed again on May 7, 1586, with a fleet of four ships—the large ship Mermayde, the barks Sunneshme and Moone-shtne, and a small pinnace, the North Starre. Davis sent the Surme-shine and the North Starre up the east coast of Greenland with instructions to explore as far as they could in search of a route over the Pole. With the other two ships he sailed for Godtháb, where he assembled a second, prefabricated pinnace on the beach, launched with the help of forty Eskimos. The meeting with the people at Godtháb was marked initially by a spirit of fellowship, but the mood began to deteriorate once the Eskimos became "marvellous theevish, especially for iron." Davis tried to ameliorate the situation. He continued to trade generously with the Eskimos, and he cajoled his men to forbear. One afternoon a rock-throwing incident escalated into a fight and one of his men was wounded. That was enough for Davis. With a fair wind he sailed north. On the 17m of July the two ship and the pinnace fell in with an enormous tabular iceberg "which bred great admiration to us all," a sight so incredible to them that Davis declines to write about it, saying only, "I thinke that the like before was never seene." They coasted its perimeter for thirteen days. Davis Strait, as it was later named, was full of ice where they had seen none the year before; the sight so worked on the minds of the men that they begged Davis to turn for home. He landed on the Greenland coast, disassembled the pinnace, transferred stores, and sent those 33° ARCTIC DREAMS who wished to go home on the Mermayde. With the rest he sailed in the Mooneshme for Baffin Island. He passed the entrance to Cumberland Sound without recognizing it, crossed Hudson Strait in a snowstorm, and then sailed south along the Labrador coast, where they made several prodigious hauls of codfish on improvised hooks. At Trunmore Bay (perhaps), where they anchored to dry fish, they were attacked by "the brutish people of this countrey." Two of Davis's men were killed and three wounded. Immediately afterward the ships were all but driven onshore by a storm when an anchor cable parted. On September 11 Davis turned for home, arriving to find that the Sunneshine and North Starre had been turned back by the ice before advancing very far, and that the North Starre had gone down with her crew in a storm. Though not as enthusiastic as they had been, Davis's supporters underwrote a third voyage in 1587, with the understanding that while Davis himself sailed into the places he now thought might offer passage (Davis Strait, Cumberland Sound, Hudson Strait, and Hamilton Inlet on the Labrador coast), the accompanying ships would fish for cod to defray the expense of the expedition. Davis's own ship, a small, clincher-built pinnace, the Ellen, broke her tiller the first day out and, overall, sailed "like to a cart drawen with oxen." At Godtháb, Davis explored the interior of the fiord while the crew of one of the other ships assembled a fourth craft, another pinnace on the beach. (Davis intended to explore in this pinnace while the other three ships went south to fish for cod.) Again hostilities broke out, with the Eskimos stealing nails from the shipwrights. Davis could not settle the issue. After a gunner fired a blank shot from a cannon, Davis ordered the half-assembled pinnace knocked down and stowed aboard the Elizabeth. With the Sunneshine leaking badly and that crew and the Elizabeth's nearly mutinous with a desire to be off, Davis bade them adieu. He set a course north in the Ellen along the Greenland coast, sailing as far as 72°4