2 MAEIOIS^ EXPEDITION TO DAVIS STEAIT AND BAFFUST BAY 



HISTORICAL SURVEY 



It is impossible to state who were the first peoples to direct their 

 ships northward into the frozen seas, but Norse legends and sagas 

 as early as the tenth century credit their viking navigators with 

 several such adventures. The first historical records are of a voyage 

 of discovery to Davis Strait in the year 1500, under tlie joint leader- 

 ship of Scandinavians and Portuguese. Willoughby's voyage to the 

 sea north of Europe, and Frobisher's to Baffin Land, then followed 

 heading a list of Arctic explorations that is still continuing 



The central polar cap of sea ice has been deeply penetrated by but 

 few ships or men. Since this region is the site of and maximum 

 development for all sea-ice forms, it has attracted the interest and 

 attention of many explorers and scientists. Our knowledge of the 

 polar cap is largely due to the following : Hayes, Hall, Weyprecht 

 and Paver, Scoresbv, Kane, Bering, Nordenskiold, DeLong, Nansen, 

 Cagni, ' Peary, Toll, Kolchak, Stef ansson, Bartlett, MacMillan, 

 Storkerson, Vilkitski, Amundsen. Nobile, Byrd. and Wilkins. Ber- 

 ing in three voyages, 1728-1741, explored northward from the Pacific, 

 discovering the strait bearing his name and surveyed the land of 

 either continent, in the open water of the polar sea. The Scoresbys, 

 Scotch whalers, in 1806 determined to see how far north they could 

 go and forced their ship to latitude 81° 30', in the longitude of 

 Spitsbergen. AVeyprecht and Payer, Austrian naval officers, em- 

 barked in 1872 on a voyage of discovery on the Barents Sea and 

 eastward. They were caught in the heavy polar ice and carried from 

 Novaya Zemh^a to newly discovered islands which were named Franz 

 Joseph Land. Weyprecht (1879), as a result of scientific observa- 

 tions, wrote a treatise on the various forms of polar ice. Norden- 

 skiold, in 1878, commanded the Vega which made a complete passage 

 along the Russian edge of the polar sea, entering the Arctic Ocean 

 around the northern end of Norway and emerging through the 

 Bering Sea into the Pacific. The fruit of this voyage was a great 

 addition to our knowledge of the sea ice and the Vegans also still 

 bears the unicjue distinction of being the only complete west to east 

 navigation. Pettersson (1883) one of the Vega's scientific staff, 

 made many important studies on the physical properties of sea ice. 



The ill-fated DeLong expedition, which was aimed for the pole, 

 met disaster when the Jeannefte sank in June, 1881, nearly 300 miles 

 north of the New Siberian Islands, at a point deeper in the polar 

 cap ice than ever a vessel had penetrated before. The westerly 

 drift of several hundred miles along the Siberian shelf revealed for 

 the first time definite information on the movement of the great 

 sea-ice cover. The expedition, however, which stands out above all 

 others in Arctic annals was the Norwegian north polar expedition, 

 1893-1896, led by Nansen. The Fram was forced into the polar 

 cap ice north of the New Siberian Islands in September, 1893. 

 For nearly three years she remained tightly surrounded by heavy ice 

 fields, all the while valuable observations were being taken on the 

 drift, behavior, and physical state of the ice. This is the only craft 

 that has ever been carried across the deeper part of the north polar 

 basin, and mainly as a result of Nansen's observations we have 

 learned it to be one vast central expanse of ice interrupted only by 

 temporary leads and pools. Nansen's observations that the ice con- 



