276 FOLLOW THE WHALE 



not is, however, comparatively unimportant; what is vital to our 

 story is the mere possibility that the Arctic Ice-raft could have van- 

 ished between 700 and 1450 a.d. and then suddenly formed again, 

 because if it did so, it would explain the sudden expansion of the 

 Norse, how they could sail all over seas that were till recently ice- 

 bound, and how they could settle colonies in Greenland. It would 

 also explain why those colonies later withered away just about 1450, 

 and the Norse themselves retreated into virtual oblivion. Further, 

 it would give us a completely different picture of the Arctic whal- 

 ing of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, for these 

 must have represented a period of much greater rigorousness than 

 the present, though one of slowly ameliorating temperatures. 



The western Europeans and even the Norsemen knew nothing 

 about ice when they first went to Spitsbergen, and their ships were 

 hardly suited to its penetration. Unless the Basques really reached 

 the Greenland seas in the early sixteenth century, it was the Holland- 

 ers who first came to grips with both sea ice in general and the 

 Arctic Ice-raft in particular. And they appear to have tackled it 

 with their usual methodical perseverance, just as if it were some 

 specially aggravating type of coast. When there were leads opening 

 into it, they sailed right in after the whales, and if these leads then 

 closed up on them, they went to work with pickaxes and crowbars 

 and tried to dig basins in the ice in which to keep their ships afloat, 

 just as they would have done had they been caught on the mud flats 

 of their own Zuider Zee. They also developed all manner of tedious 

 methods for warping their clumsy ships for miles through the floes, 

 and they consequently learned quite a lot about ice movements and 

 what may be called its "squeeze play." 



It was the British, however, who first tried the novel idea of for- 

 tifying the ship against the ice, rather than trying to keep the ice 

 away from the ship. The first ship so built, with an enormous thick- 

 ness of timber forward and specially heavy thwarts, sailed in 1 790. 

 It was not a success and was crushed early in its first season. This 

 failure was perhaps due more to overconfidence in the protection 

 that would be afforded by the new devices than to either faulty 

 construction or the impracticality of the idea. It was seventy-five 

 years before any real success was achieved along these lines and 



