4 MARION EXPEDITION TO DAVIS STRAIT AND BAFFIN BAY 



wide opening pointed out by Davis as " furious overfalls," ^ through 

 which Hudson eventually sailed. The first record of navigating 

 Baffin Bay was in 1616 when Baffin successfully followed along the 

 Greenland coast as far northward as Kane Basin before turning 

 back and sailing out along the Baffin Land shore. Baffin's voyages 

 to the northwestern extremes of the North Atlantic showed the 

 hitherto unknown openings from the polar ocean into Baffin Bay. 



The Dutch whalers being partly forced out of Spitsbergen by ihe 

 keen competition of the British were alert to adopt Baffin's sugges- 

 tion of fishing in Davis Strait, which they entered as early as 1620. 

 The British followed later, and heeding the reports of Ross and 

 Parry, extended their fishery northward to the very headwaters of 

 Baffin Bay, and in a short time became exceedingly proficient at ice 

 navigation. The designation of the pack as " middle ice '' and "" west 

 ice,'' and the description of the movements of the pack we owe to 

 Captain Marshall and Doctor O'Reilly (1818) of the whalers. The 

 long mysterious disappearance of Sir John Franklin and his ships 

 ancl men, 1845-1851, brought forth no less than nine relief expedi- 

 tions to the Canadian Arctic over a period of 10 years. Much knowl- 

 edge regarding the icy character of the waterways in the archipelago 

 was obtained through the drift of ice-beset ships of these expeditions 

 and in consequence it was learned that a surprising amount of ice 

 formed in the Arctic Ocean is drawn into Baffin Bay j^early. 



Smith Sound, also Kennedy and Robeson Channels, have often 

 been designated the American route to the pole, followed by Kane, 

 Hayes, Hall, and finally successfully on ship and sledge by Peary. 

 The results of these activities, separated from each other by a num- 

 ber of years in the nineteenth century, increased our knowledge of 

 the state of the ice at the head of Baffin Ba}^ Whaling has practi- 

 cally ceased in the nortliAvestern sector. Fur trading, however, is 

 still carried on by the Hudson Bay Co. but the returns are small 

 compared with years ago. Denmark still continues her colonization 

 of the Greenlanders along the eastern side of Davis Strait. Except 

 for the annual visit of the Canadian Government ship Beothic to the 

 mounted police and Hudson Bay posts in Ellesmere Land and Baffin 

 Land, ancl the regular steamers as far north as LTpernivik, Baffin Bay 

 is to-day cjuite deserted. The recent interest being displaj^ed by 

 Canada to establish a shipping port on the west side of Hudson Bay 

 at Port Churchill is the only activity in the region of Davis Strait 

 and to the westward. If this project is successful, much informa- 

 tion on the ice and currents of this region is, in time, bound to 

 accumulate. 



Greenland supports the greatest reservoir of land ice in the 

 Northern Hemisphere. The German geologist Giesecke, in the course 

 of a mineralogical survey beginning in 1806, described many of the 

 ice fjords. Rink, the Danish geologist, and later governor of 

 Greenland, 1848-1851, studied the motion of glaciers and the calving 

 of icebergs, his publications receiving a wide distribution and arous- 

 ing lively interest in scientific circles. The names of the other scien- 

 tists who have carried out investigations on the ice fjords, the gla- 

 ciers, and the calving of icebergs, practically all on the west coast of 



1 Chart of Davis Str.iit published Apr. 20, 1875, by the Britiah Admiralty. London. 



