Go North, Young Man

farther through the Northwest Passage than anyone. He's prepared to face any threat, from extreme cold, to open water to polar bear attacks. But now Perry is beginning to doubt his chances. His crew was hauling their equipment and food on heavy sledges through soft snow. They have to take time consuming detours when their way is blocked by giant piles of The slushy terrain is soaking the men up to their waists. They'd be fainting with cold if they

could actually feel their legs. They struggle to keep pace with their goal of thirteen and a half miles per day, otherwise they'll run out of food on their return journey, but something is against them. In six hours they managed just one and a quarter miles, and after dinner they go only two and a half more, according to their navigational reading. In four days they march a grand total

of eight miles. Perry's men are exhausted, their food is dwindling, and their exertions are not getting them any closer to the pole. Only a handful of people had ever been as far north as Perry and his crew. Whalers in the area and made sure to leave before the autumn ice closed in, so no one really knew what to expect day to day and season to season. One thing they did know was that the ice, the weather, and

the temperature were often unpredictable. The incurve for explorers who wanted to go north would be steep, but that definitely didn't prevent people from trying. In this episode, we'll dive into the first real attempts to conquer the North Pole by land or by sea, and we'll analyze what went so extremely wrong. From Mental Floss and I Heart Radio, this is the Quest for the North Pole. I'm your host, Cat Long, science editor at Mental Floss, and this is

episode two, Go North young man. A decade before Perry's expedition, a wailing captain named William Scoresby Jr. Who happens to be my four times great uncle, noticed a sudden change in the Arctic ice. The vast ice feels that he had observed over the past fourteen years as a whaler, and Spalbard had disappeared. He had never seen such a dramatic change in the polar region. He wrote about the ICE's disappearance to Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society,

Britain's leading scientific organization. Banks have been the naturalist on Captain Cook's voyage in seventeen sixty eight and elected President of the Royal Society in seventeen seventy eight. He ruled like a benevolent dictator and had directed the British government's scientific priorities for nearly forty two years. Scoresby told him that thousands of square miles of ocean between Spalbard and the east coast of Greenland was perfectly void of ice,

which is usually covered by it. He figured that something had forced all of the ice south, where it melted in warmer waters. He also suggested that now would be the perfect time for the government to launch an expedition to find the Northwest Passage. As a quick side note, some scientists today think this observation was a consequence of the huge volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia a few years earlier, but in the nineteenth century they didn't

know that. Back to the Passage. As we learned in our first episode, the Northwest Passage was a long sought waterway from Europe to Asia over the top of North America. Explorers like Martin Frobisher and Henry Hudson had searched for it back in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, but little progress had been made since, mainly because of all the ice in their way, but also because a lot of people died. They had old charts and some

information from earlier expeditions. That's Russell Potter, a historian of polar exploration at Rhode Island College, an author of most recently Finding Franklin, the Untold Story of a one and sixty five year search. We're going back here to Martin Frobisher in the late fifteen hundreds. But there's been a kind of a low in activity in terms of anything

sponsored by the government that area. If you were an explorer in the early nineteenth century and wanted the government to sponsor your voyage, you had to impress Banks, the gatekeeper first. The Royal Society didn't actually fund exploration, but Banks had to give your proposal the green light before the government would even look at it. Scoresby was in luck.

Banks could not resist the idea that the Northwest Passage might finally be discovered, and the idea made its way to Sir John Barrow, the second Secretary to the Admiralty, that's the government agency that ran the Royal Navy. If Banks approved an expedition, he could usually convince Barrow and the Admiralty to organize and pay for it. Unlike today, there was no National Geographic Society or Explorers Club to

sponsor expeditions. Aside from a few wealthy benefactors with Arctic fever, the Admiralty was the only organization that launched voyages purely for discovery. Barrow, like Banks, was obsessed with exploration because it spread Britain's empire ever farther across the globe. Barah realized that a program of polar exploration could be a boon for the nation. Having one Napoleonic wars, there were certainly a whole lot of ships and a whole lot of men available to do something else with The Royal

Navy was downsizing. Half a million soldiers and seamen were let go, and dozens of naval ships were taken out of service, but career naval officers couldn't simply be dismissed. According to historian Elaine Murphy, by the time the navy had been trimmed to twenty three thousand men, one in five was an officer, and nine out of ten of them had nothing to do. And I think that's why a teen eighteen turns out to be a kind of

of a pivotal point. You have the capacity, it seems that it's something you could do that would advance UH knowledge as well as national interests. And the reports from the whalers, particularly Willa and Scores me of course, where that the ice was more open than it had been in some time in that area, and so from his evations, seemed like this might be the best opportunity to revisit these long unvisited land. Barrow was also an enthusiastic believer in the theory of an open Polar sea, which we

talked about in our first episode. This theory proposed, for various reasons, that there was a huge ice free Arctic sea surrounding the North Pole. Scoresby, however, totally disagreed with the open Polar c theory. Over a dozen years, he had seen for himself that sea ice blanketed the Polar region with the exception of the year eighteen seventeen, and even if a Northwest Passage could be found in the Arctic, he believed the unpredictable ice and weather conditions from season

to season would make it commercially unworkable. Nevertheless, he fervently hoped that his letter would lead Barrow to appoint him as a commander of a voyage to the Arctic and maybe even to find the Northwest passage. His motive wasn't glory or fame. He wanted to imp prove geographical knowledge and he also hoped to find new whaling grounds to boost the British economy. He had years of experience in the ice, he was an excellent navigator, and he originated

the whole idea of jump starting the search. Clearly he had the credentials, but there was one problem. He was not a Royal Navy officer, and Barrow refused to consider anyone but a Royal Navy officer for the job. Because so many were out of work Following the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Barrow went ahead with planning an expedition, an objective he always claimed peculiarly British without scores by.

The expedition would explore two possible routes, one across the top of Canada and the other across the North Pole. For the Canadian approach, two naval ships, the HMS Isabella and the HMS Alexander, would proceed across the North Atlantic and search for an opening to the west over Canada towards the Bearing Strait. Some of this territory had been charted by Robisher and Baffin more than two years before,

and much was still unknown. Barrow appointed a tough and fearless Scottish commander, John Ross as captain of the Isabella, and William Edward Perry, then a twenty seven year old lieutenant, as his second in command of the Alexander. The North Pole approach involved two more ships, the HMS Dorothea and the HMS Trent. This pair would head due north from Spitzbergen to the North Pole, following the track laid by Constantine Phipps nearly fifty years earlier on the first true

expedition to the North Pole. All of these expeditions generally had two ships, with the idea that if one were damaged or traps in the ice, you get on the other ship and that would be escaped vehicle. I suppose, uh, And so that's pretty much what they did. The flagship door THEA was commanded by Royal Navy Lieutenant David Buchan, a Scottish officer who had spent most of his naval

career around Newfoundland. Not much is known about Buchan because he commanded only one Arctic voyage, this one, and was lost at sea on a voyage from India to England in eight He also never published a book or memoir about the voyage because he felt it didn't accomplish enough to interest anyone. The Trent was commanded by an up and coming Lieutenant John Franklin, and we know much more about him. Franklin was a thirty two year old rising star in the Royal Navy. He had seen action in

the Battle of Trafalgar and had circumnavigated Australia. The North Pole voyage would be his first time commanding a ship. Were people conscious of the dangers and the conditions involved. Well, yeah, although you know, partly because they hadn't been up there in such a long time, they had a number of rather peculiar ideas about what to expect. They didn't really understand the extent of permanent polar c ice at that time. They didn't understand what what affected the persistence of icebergs

or other hazards along the way. They didn't have any specially prepared ships, although I think the general idea was that if they were very strongly built, that would be a good thing. And of course some people continue to believe that if you could get through the initial ice barrier as they called it, there would be warmer water farther along the way, closer to the Pole, which of course wasn't true, but no one had been up there

to test that hypothesis. You might say. Barrow instructed Captain Dukin to sail along the western coast of Spitzberg and as far as possible in open sea, then force his way through the pack ice without stopping. The Admiralty had told Bucan incorrectly that the sea north of Pittsburg and was reportedly free of ice as far north as Parallel, just four hundred statute miles from the North Pole. Well, of course, one great way to discover the North is

just to head directly north. Uh And in fact they were in some ways Henry Hudson had tied this a long time ago, and they were in some ways following in his footsteps. You might say, I think that the fallback position was Spittsburgh Get in part because they could expect possible assistance, or if their ships were found to be unfit to continue, they could find some passage home. But no one really knew how long it would take

or how difficult it would be. None of the officers in charge had ever been to the Arctic before, though they did take experienced whaling masters as ice navigators, and no expedition had spent the winter locked in ice, darkness and extreme sub zero temperatures since William Barns was forced to in. But the Admiralty had a typically rosy outlook. If you can reach the poll, he was to head for bearing straight and complete the passage, or if that

was impossible. He should sail for home via Baffin Bay. If they were lucky, they'd meet up with the Isabella and Alexander there or north of Alaska. It sounded great on paper. Let's take a break here, we'll be right back. The four ships on the Admiralties Arctic Voyage left the River Thames in April eight eighteen. John Ross and the Isabella, William Edward Parry and the Alexander, David Buchan and the Dorothea and John Franklin in the Trent all sailed north

to the Shetland Islands and then parted ways. The Isabella and Alexander turned west, and the Dorothea and the Trent set their compasses on Phipps's route. The ladder ships ran into an extensive barrier of sea ice at the northwestern corner of Spitzbergen and struggled to force their way through. Chunks of ice came loose from the floes and congealed around them. At one point they were trapped for three weeks, frozen in place and unable to break up the eyes

around them to sail free. They even tried placing anchor lines in the ice and reeling in the lines to move the ship forward. After days of exhausting work, they realized a southerly current was taking them backward anyway. Bucan and Franklin hadn't made it any farther than Phipps had almost fifty years earlier, and they were in trouble. Ocean currents and the winds were piling hundreds of tons of ice against the sides of the Dorothea and Trent, squeezing

their hulls almost to the breaking point. Frederick William Beechey, a lieutenant on the Trent, said the ship was so twisted that the doors of all the cabins flew open, and the panels of some started in the frames. With her false stern posts moved three inches, and her timbers cracked to a most serious extent. Toward the end of summer,

a gigantic storm nearly wrecked the ships. Unable to sail away from the encroaching coast, Bucans heared the Dorothea into the pack ice, while tremendous waves forced the Trent broadside against the edge of the ice field. The vessels staggered under the shock, and for a moment seemed to recoil Beachy wrote, another wave curled under its hull and hurled

it onto the ice. It was so bad that, according to Sir John Franklin, who was the second in command there, the bell on his ship was ringing as it almost turned horizontal in this thrashing water and ice. Those ships were rather significantly damaged. When the storm finally passed, they limped into Harbor and Spitzberg, and where they made repairs. Buchan and Franklin were forced to return to England, having gotten no farther than previous explorers, wrote the naval officer

and historian Albert Hastings Markham. The expedition examined about the same extent of the pack edge as did Phipps in seventeen seventy three, and found the ice equally as impenetrable as he did, but England was in the grip of Arctic fever. Their escape from the storm made Buchan and

Franklin instant heroes. There's quite a popular painting of this that was done in London the year after, showing the arrival of the ships at Pittsburgh, and then showing all of the wildlife and all of the activity up there. The glorious, although unsuccessful, endeavor was painted on this giant

cannabis and displayed in Lester Square. Franklin even posed for his appearance in it, and then avoided less To Square because he was afraid someone would recognize him from the panorama, so it became kind of famous, even though like some others of Franklin's later exploits, it wasn't really a success as such. Meanwhile, Ross and Parry in the Isabella and Alexander had sailed up the western coast of Greenland searching

for an opening in the Baffin Bay pack ice. They reached a large bay between the seventy five and seventy six parallels, which Ross named Melville Bay. The crews also encountered a group of a New Wheat that had never had contact with Europeans the expeditions. In New Wheat interpreter, a green Lander named John Sacus, was able to communicate with them, and the two groups spent several days learning

about each other's lifestyles and customs. Ross noticed that the in New Wheat had knives with metal tips and asked where they came from, because metal is scarce in the Arctic. The New Wheat said they chipped small pieces from a black mountain some distance away. Ross concluded that they were talking about an iron bearing meteorite. Ross later wrote it was in several large masses, of which one in particular, which was harder than the rest, was a part of

the mountain. The others were in large pieces above ground. They cut it off with a hard stone and then beat it flat into pieces of the size of a sixpence. Ross didn't have time to visit the site, but will definitely hear more about these meteorites in later episodes. The Isabella and Alexander battled their way across the ice pack from Baffin Bay to the eastern coast of Canada. They proceeded south along the shoreline, over territory that William Baffin

had explored two hundred years earlier. Eventually they came to Lancaster Sound, which Baffin had seen so full of ice that he believed the channel would always be impassable, But now it was open water. Ross and Perry sailed ahead thirty miles in fog, stopped their progress. When the fog lifted for a few minutes, Ross clearly saw a chain of mountains at the foot of the channel. He had two officers take their bearings and enter them into the

ship's log. He named the apparent land mass Croaker's Mountains, after John Barrow's boss, the first Secretary of the Admiralty. Then, with their path seemingly blocked and autumn approaching, Ross ordered their convoy to turn around. When they got home, Ross was in for a rude surprise. Harry and a scientist on the voyage noted that they didn't observe the mountains, undercutting Ross's authority. The Arrow was incensed that Ross had

failed to fully explore Lancaster Sound. He rediscovered Baton Spay. He got farther north than anyone had gotten before. But I think his problem was that he didn't have enough risk and enough danger. John Barrow of the Admiralty famously mocked it as a pleasure cruise because there wasn't enough danger. There wasn't enough hazard. He didn't risk losing his life, and so I think even though that was successful, it didn't necessarily play well with the public. But it did

have one good consequence. So as he was skirting the edge of Batman Day, he came to the entrance to Lancaster Sound, which actually does turn out to be the key entrance to any northwest passage, that might be. The controversy over that, when it came back to the Admiralty, ended up spurring a second expedition under Parry, because Perry doubted Ross's beliefs that these mountains existed, and indeed they didn't.

They had been a fata morgana, a mirage resulting from the Sun's rays p saying through atmospheric layers of different temperatures. I always wonder what would happen if Ross had just continued sailing. The whole nineteenth century would have been different, That's right, we would just skipped the whole thing. It would be just cruise on through and come out the other side and return to universal praise. But I do

think there is that funny thing. It's a feature of all of these Arctic expeditions that the undertaking and hazard and the suffering of difficulties, loss of life or whatever is actually, in a weird way of kind of a plus. If you really risk something as you go up there that plays well back at home in Britain at least, And if you simply sail around and don't risk anything or discover anything, new than that. Even though you might achieve some scientific goal or another, that's not going to

play well back home. Right, So these tales of danger and survive, eival and courage, we're very romantic where the capital are. And so did it spark a lot of interest in the media. Did the public interest encourage the

Admiralty to send out more expeditions? Well, yes, I think so, and I think I think it is also important that this happened at a time of increasing literacy, of wider circulation of newspapers and magazines, the sort of the beginnings of a kind of a mass culture out there, and that culture was interested in partly just because it's sold newspapers, I suppose, but but it was interested that kind of dramatic story. So in addition to the press accounts, you

get paintings, you get woodcuts, you get artists, renditions. Everyone is exceedingly curious to learn more about these things. And everyone comes back, of course from their expedition and publishes a large folio volume with beautifully and grave pictures showing the strange and wondrous beauties and hazards of this land. So it is a kind of it's it's kind of the first exploration effort for Britain. It has a kind of a pr component where all of the books are

published by the same publisher. They all come out after the expedition. People line up to get them. An inexpensive smaller version is soon produced, and that actually does fuel public interests. You know, the Admiralty was doing this voluntarily. There wasn't some external imperative, and they weren't really competing initially with any other country, but they were competing for public attention with other things, so they really had to just had to be their their start performance for the

people back home. It's amazing to think of exploration as a performance, but I guess that does make sense. It's true. So the admirals he sent many more expeditions towards the Canadian archipelago to search ever westward. It did not attack the North Pool again until We'll be right back. Between eighteen eighteen and eighteen seven, Britain's Arctic campaign ramped up. Perry revisited the search for the Northwest Passage on three

more expeditions to different areas of Canada. At one time he was able to sail farther west through Lancaster Sound than anyone before or since, and earned a five thousand pound prize from the British government. John Franklin also went to the Canadian Arctic and charted vast stretches of territory over two land expeditions. One trip went so disastrously wrong that Franklin and his team of British sailors and Canadian voyageurs almost starved to death. This is how Franklin became

known as the man who ate his boots. He actually ate his leather boots when there was literally nothing else on the menu. The expedition was eventually rest keewed by the indigenous yellow Knife people. Their years in the Arctic wilderness burnished Perry's and Franklin's reputations as fearless romantic heroes. They were the most respected members of the informal club of Arctic Men at the Admiralty. That's why when Franklin and Perry started thinking about another trip to the North Pole,

Barrow was all in. By eighty six, it was clear that ice would block any ship that tried to sail to the North Pole. Franklin suggested going by ship on the same route as he'd done in eighteen eighteen and then walking the rest of the way over the sea ice. Barrow, who preferred Perry over Franklin for the job of Commander, made sure that Perry got a copy of Franklin's plan. Perry quickly made a formal proposal to the Admiralty, which was personally backed by Barrow and the Royal Society, though

the powers that be would never admit it. Much of Perry's proposal was based on a plan suggested by William Scoresby back in eighteen fifteen. In a scientific paper presented in Edinburgh, Scoresby said a journey over ice from Spitzberg into the North Pole could be possible. The key was bringing only a minimum of personnel and supplies, transporting the gear on light sledges pulled by reindeer dogs, and hiring native people to drive them. Scoresby recommended lightweight sledges that

could double as boats for crossing open water. Most importantly, Scoresby said an expedition to the North Pole should not start any later than late April or early May, when the ice was relatively flat and still frozen solid. Any later than that in the higher summer temperatures would melt

ice and make travel extremely difficult. However, while Perry adopted Scoresby's route from Spitzberg into the Pole over sea ice, he ignored his advice for how to travel from the lightweight sledges to the optimum season for departure, and that was a shame. Scoresby had sixty thousand miles of experience traveling through the ice and had been farther north than

any European explorer. In eighteen o six, as a first mate on his father's whaling ship, Scoresby sailed to eighty one degrees thirty minutes north, within five hundred nautical miles of the North Pole. The record still stood when Perry began planning his expedition. Perry brought the exact opposite of what scores We suggested. He had two boats that weighed

fifteen hundred pounds each when they were empty. Fourteen crew members were to drag each boat on two heavy oak and iron sledges, fully loaded with food, equipment, and every conceivable spare part. Each boat weighed an incredible three thousand,

five hundred seventy three and one quarter pounds. That meant each man, not dogs a reindeer, had to pull more than two hundred and fifty pounds over hundreds of miles of ice and snow, and in what might have been Perry's biggest mistake, he began way too late in a year. In the ship h M. S Hecla, Perry and the crew departed London in March and sailed due north for Spitzbergen.

Bad weather and ice delayed the start of the overland journey until June one, almost two months later than Scoresby had recommended, and Perry discovered that summer temperatures had made his root rough and treacherous. Boats are good for Britain, but Britain and boats go together. Land maybe not so much. Yeah, I mean it was an interesting um kind of overland by sea type of hybrid. Yes, and I think you know it has happened a century or so later with

scott and the South using ponies. The idea of having reindeered raw sleds and things. Are all these bizarre ideas of how to actually travel over the ice, none of which included, of course, traveling the Innuiquay, which would have worked perfectly fine if they had had dog teams and people who knew how to drive them. Perry discovered the heavy rain melted the surface of the ice and created knee deep pools. Oceanic currents broke up the ice fields and piled the floes on top of one another in

huge mounds. When the sun shone, the rays bounced off the reflective ice and caused snowblindness among Perry's men. Dragging the heavy sledges over the slushy surface and hummocks was impossible, yet the ponding water was too shallow to launch the boats. With every step they took, the men felt shards of ice poking like needles through their sodden boots. Perry calculated that they would need to travel about thirteen miles a day to stay on schedule, an ambitious goal in ideal

Arctic conditions, but totally impractical in the current situation. On one occasion, the crew spent two hours marching and dragging the sledges. Perry wrote a distance not exceeding one and fifty yards, about the length of a football field, including the end zones. Their slow pace was probably not helped by rations of just one and a quarter pounds of food per day. To understand how that made a big difference in the expedition's chance of success, let's take a

quick detour into Arctic sledge. In cuisine, Perry's men were eating mainly pemmican and ship's biscuit, too portable and high calorie foods. Pemmican, from a Cree word meaning manufactured grease, is a combination of roughly equal portions of animal fat and dried pulverized meat. The ingredients were melted together and then fashioned into bricks, which stayed edible for years without

needing refrigeration. Cree people in North America made pemmican with bison, moose, or deer meat and fat, along with berries for flavor and nutrients. Hudson Bay Company traders learned to take pemmican on their long River journeys, and the Royal Navy picked it up from the traders, though they substituted beef for the bison and moose. Perry's pemmican had been manufactured in London, according to a recipe by doctor John Ocock Holmes, a surgeon who had worked for the Hudson Bay Company in

Canada for several years. Ship's biscuits, also called hardtack, are rock hard baked crackers made of flour and water. They last longer than bread or other kinds of carbohydrates on long sea voyages, but sailors had to dunk them in tea or soup before they could be eaten. Stories abound of sailors breaking their teeth on unsoftened biscuits. The biscuit on Perry's North Pole expedition came from Francis Lehman, a

well known bakery that supplied the Admiralty. According to the Oxford Handbook of Expedition and Wilderness Medicine, a one hundred and sixty five pound man hauling a sledge might need more than ten thousand calories per day to maintain body weight. The caloric content of pemmican is not easy to discern, but a two thousand four study found that one hundred grounds or about three and a half ounces, of pemmican made from a South Dakota indigenous recipe had two hundred

and eleven calories. The naval historian Janet McDonald, in her book Feeding Nelson's Navy, wrote that one hundred grams of biscuit equaled four hundred and thirty six calories. Stay with me here. Remember that each of Perry's men was getting only a pound and a quarter of food each day. That's just twenty ounces. According to Perry's narrative, the daily rations included ten ounces of biscuit and nine of pemmican.

When we do the math, ten ounces of biscuit is one thousand, two hundred and thirty six calories and nine ounces of pemmican is five hundred and thirty eight calories. So each of Perry's men was consuming just one thousand, seven hundred and seventy four calories, plus what they got from an ounce of sweetened cocoa powder per day and some rum that is nowhere near the ten thousand calories they should have been getting. By the middle of July, Perry began to notice that they were not making any

progress despite their constant labor. On July, their position was less than five miles north of where they were three days before. A brief respite on hard level ice netted them only four miles after traveling for ten on July. On July, Perry obtained a reading of their location by the sun. They were at eighty two degrees forty minutes north, about four hundred and forty nautical miles from the pole, now an awful realization broke over the group. Perry realized

that they had actually lost ground. The ice field on which they stood was drifting south. In fact, they were three miles south of where they had been four days earlier, despite having struggled forward each day, and the trouble was their sort of contrived method didn't make enough progress. The ice drifted south faster than they could go north the

way they had things set up. So I think it could be an early example of the way in which these sort of British sense of self assurance and ignoring the solutions offered by other cultures is evidence in the failure of that particular expedition. The southward drift put any hopes of reaching the North Pole out of the question. Now Perry and the crew had to survive their return journey.

The highest point they had reached was eighty two degrees forty five minutes north on July, only one hundred and seventy two miles from where their ship Hecla lay at anchor. They had actually covered five hundred and eighty miles of ice in open water. Perry managed to venture seventy five nautical miles beyond Scoresby's six record and claimed a new farthest north. But as a historian Pierre Berton wrote in his book The Arctic Grail, had he taken Scoresby's advice,

he would have certainly achieved more. Britain's first two North Pole voyages of the nineteenth century both ended without achieving their goals. You can and Ekland's voyage of non discovery in eighteen eighteen can be chalked up to the leader's

ignorance of the Arctic conditions. Their only guidance had come from Phipps's account from fifty years before, and whalers like scoresby By, Though the Admiralties should have known better, its officers had spent almost a decade exploring and charting the polar regions. Just as importantly, they had observed a new eek clothing, food, and shelter that was perfectly adapted to

Arctic conditions. Scoresby had recommended in eighteen fifteen that traveling lightly more or less in the way of northern people's was the only way to go, but the Admiralty would have never entertained that idea. When you're talking about these Brittish sixplorers. They believed in Britain. They had this enormously elevated idea of the courage and bravery and accomplishment of

British people. That's Edward J. Larson Pulitzer Prize, an historian, an author of To the Edges of the Earth, the Race for the Three Polls, and the climax of the Age of Exploration. They could not conceive of any native people being better at doing anything than British people. There was the same way they were the British explorers and the British colonial leaders were in India, or that they

were in Africa. So I think it was a combination of their ethnic racial biases against these native peoples, which the British lived was true throughout the British imperial Empire, and at the same time a tremendously expansive and a few of their own people and their own powers and what they could do, and so will you combine the two, They just would think they do a much better job of it, and the British could figure out better foods

and better package shoots and package equipment. Perry's return journey to England in the fall of seven was much easier than the one toward the poll they were able to kill seals and reindeer to replenish their meager diets and regain their strength, but the Admiralty and the public were disappointed that he failed to reach his goal. Perry must have felt abashed, but he told the people in charge that he could not think of anything that he would

have done differently. Now Scoresby got the last word. In a published rebuttal, he pointed out the obvious fact that Perry did the opposite of what Scoresby's experience in the Arctic had recommended. After the disappointment of being passed over for leading an expedition in eighteen eighteen, Scoresby felt vindicated, but still hopeful, writing whatever probability there at any time was of reaching the poll by a journey over the ice remains little, if at all, diminished by the late

experiment of Captain and Perry. The Admiralty again paused its investigation of the North Pole and refocused on the peculiarly British enterprise of finding the Northwest Passage in Canada. In Barrow sent John Franklin, who was now a commander and a knight, to make one more stabbed the passage through Lancaster Sound. No expense was spared to make the Franklin

Expedition successful. Two strong ships were stuffed with the latest technology and comforts, including three years worth of food, lavish libraries, and a pet monkey named Jacko. The most experienced and skilled Arctic Hans were on board to ensure that they would emerge triumphant in the Bearing Strait, but then they seemed to disappear. They did not emerge on schedule. The British government launched more than a dozen expeditions to search

for the missing men. Along with them, American explorers and Hudson Bay Company traders combed the Arctic for a trace of Franklin for more than a gate. They searched literally everywhere except the one spot where evidence of their catastrophe was eventually found. In eighteen fifty nine. Searchers found a written note that explained that Franklin had died on June eleven. Several officers and men had also died, and the survivors

had abandoned ship. To this day, no one is sure what turned the best prepared Arctic expedition in history into a disaster, but one mystery was solved. The dozens of expeditions didn't find Franklin, but actually did find the Northwest Passage. The puzzle pieces were filling in the primary goal of Arctic exploration shifted once again from the passage to the poll, and this time British explorers had competition. The Quest for

the North Pole is hosted by Me cat Long. This episode was researched and written by Me, with fact checking by Austin Thompson. The executive producers are Aaron McCarthy and Tyler Klang. The supervising producer is Dylan Fagan. The show is edited by Dylan Fagan. For transcripts, a glossary, and to learn more about this episode, visit Mental flaws dot com slash podcast. The Quest for the North Pole is

a production of I Heart Radio and Mental Flaws. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, check out the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.