Why Go to the North Pole?

top of the world, the North Pole. Pierry's longtime assistant, Matthew Henson, and four in New Week guides scraped together a large amount of snow and then stand in front of it, holding the expedition's flags. Perry takes out his Codak camera and snaps the image, a rare moment in which he isn't the center of attention. The Pole at last, Perry writes in his journal, the prize of three centuries my dream and ambition for twenty years mine, and here

he underlines the word mine. At last. This group would be called the first men on Earth to reach the North Pole. Peery would be lionized throughout the world as the man who succeeded where all others, and there were a lot of others had failed. What made Henson and the rest of the crew follow Peery to the North Pole? What made Peery and generations of explorers before him want to unlock the mysteries of the Arctic And what did they get in return? That's what we're going to find

out 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 one. Why go to the North Pole? Before we dive in, I want to tell you a bit about why I'm so fascinated with the story of the North Pole and

Arctic exploration in general. When I was little, my grandmother mentioned in a very casual way that we were related to an Arctic explorer named William Scoresby Jr. I didn't think much about it until years later, but eventually I got curious about who this person was and what he did. In researching his life, I was introduced to the perils and excitement of polar history, and I felt a strange affinity for these feats of bravery and sometimes foolishness. We'll

hear more about him in this podcast. By the way, around this time I read a fantastic book by the British author Fergus Fleming called Barrows Boys. It's a lively history of the many British expeditions to different corners of the world in the nineteenth century, but primarily to the tick. It's filled with accounts of courage as well as hardship and suffering. In one expedition, the men got so hungry

that they ate their leather boots. When I finished it, I wanted to plumb the mystery of human kind's attraction to the unknown and uncharted. I had an incurable case of Arctic fever. Many explorers have probably felt the same way. A reporter once asked the mountaineer George Mallory why he wanted to climb to the summit of Mount Everest, a feat that had never been achieved. He answered, because it's there. We can apply the same thinking to the quest to

reach the North Pole. It has attracted adventurers, explorers, and scientists for centuries. On their quest to reach it, men have faced an unbelievably harsh and dangerous climate. People have lost fingers and toes to frostbite, or even cut off their own body parts to survive. But while the tales of North Pole adventure are filled with heroic sacrifice and achievement, the ills of society still trickled in. Nationalism was a driving force in the race to claim the Pole. Racist

attitudes and exploitation were common. White men took all the glory, while the black and indigenous people, without whom many expeditions would have failed, received little if any credit. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Before we get there, we need to try to understand what made these guys go north in the first place, and also what the North Pole even is. Today we know that the North Pole is actually a point in a vast ocean. It's almost permanently

covered in sea ice. But until the early twentieth century, no one had gotten really close to that point on the globe. It remained one of the last blank spots on the map of the Earth. The North Pole has served as a literal loadstar for European geographers, astronomers, mathematicians, and sailors. Because extensive polar ice blocked ships from reaching it, no explorers really knew what existed there. But in the mid sixteenth century it became critical to find out European

nations needed new trade routes to Asia. Spain and Portugal, already controlled well established southern trade routes circling the globe from Africa to the America's England and the Netherlands, launched voyages to find northern routes, which would avoid conflict with Spain and Portugal, but they would be an uncharted territory. To find those mythical passages, European navigators used a number

of tools. One was a compass. These instruments have a magnetized needle pivoting in a liquid and pointing to directions marked on the case. The needle always pointed north, but which north. The farther they sailed, navigators realized that their compasses were influenced by a magnetic force that didn't correspond with the directions on their charts. Accurate navigation depended on calculating the difference between what the compass pointed to and

where they were actually sailing. That's because there are two North poles and they're in different places. Magnetic north is a spot that compass needles point to in response to Earth's magnetic field. Its location is always shifting. During Perry's expeditions, it was an Arctic Canada, but it's been moving towards Siberia in recent years. True North is a geographical spot

located at ninety degrees north latitude. It's the pinnacle of the grid of latitude and longitude devised by Greek geographers as early as the third century BC that allows people to pinpoint their position on Earth. True North is what we think of as the North Pole. If you were to stand at this point, you would face south in every direction. So imagine yourself as a sixteenth century European

looking at a map. Between Europe and the North Pole lay a vast, uncharted belt of ocean punctuated with volcanic islands and impassable ice. To the west late unexplored Greenland and North America, and to the east stretched the frozen seas North Siberia. One possible route through this unmapped expanse was the hoped for Northwest Passage, believed to go westward across the Atlantic and over the top of North America to the Pacific Ocean. The other, the Northeast Passage, allegedly

extended the length of the Siberian Seas to Japan. No one knew if these roots truly existed or what mortal dangers explorers would face. An English adventurer named Martin Frobisher was determined to find the Northwest Passage. Born in Yorkshire, around Frobisher had sailed around the Eastern Atlantic as a privateer before setting his heart on the passage. He convinced a group of English traders to sponsor his voyage. He promised the riches of Cathay as a return on their investments.

Frobisher first obtained a fleet of tiny ships. The two larger vessels, the Gabriel and the Michael, weighed only thirty tons each, about a quarter of the size of the Golden Hind the ship Sir Francis Drake sailed around the world. The third ship was smaller than a dinghy. Frobisher departed in fifteen seventy six and Queen Elizabeth waved farewell. He rounded the southern tip of Greenland, and then a huge storm separated the ships. The smallest was never seen again,

but Michael turned back to England. Frobisher sailed onward to the north, eventually coming to an enormous bay at the southern end of what is now called Baffin Island. He mistook the bay for a strait to Asia. Inuite men and kayaks approached the ship, and their appearance convinced him incorrectly that he had indeed sailed through the Northwest Passage and reached some part of Asia. The first part of

his mission quote unquote achieved. Frobisher got down to the second part, locating ridges, but after a few weeks of exploring the area, cold weather forced the Englishman to leave. Frobisher made sure to gather some souvenirs, one of which was a rock as great as a halfpenny loaf. A

government official route back in England. Three appraisers said the stone was worthless, but a fourth set it contained gold that was enough to launch Frobisher's second voyage to North America, and what happened next would have huge consequences for the future of British exploration in the area. After landing at a place Frobisher called Countess of Warwick's Island, the crew began filling the ship's holds with as much of the

glittering rock as they could find. Unfortunately, they also clashed with the Inuit killing several and taking some this hostages back to England. We'll talk about what led to this event in a future episode. Frobisher escaped to England with two hundred tons of ore, thinking that it would prove the Northwest Passage was everything they'd hoped for. You might think that those deadly battles would have kept Frobisher away, but you would be wrong. In fact, he had even

bigger plans. In eight he set off from England with the Queen's blessing and a fleet of fifteen ships laden with supplies to establish a colony, England's first in North America, to guard and extract the gold. The crew had high hopes, but nothing went as planned. As they neared their destination, a huge storm sank the ship containing their housing materials. It was snowing in summer, so they knew it would

be impossible to build a colony that year. Instead, the crew filled their cargo holds with more than a thousand tons of ore and departed just a few days later. But the worst news was yet to come. The ore didn't contain any gold. It was iron pye write, appropriately known as Fool's gold. The so called Northwest Passage was a bust, Queen Elizabeth and the English merchants lost their investments.

The company founded to organize the colony went bankrupt. Brobisher's reputation was ruined, and it seemed like a northwest passage would remain elusive. England was out of the game for now, but another country was up for the challenge. We'll be right back. M explorers from the Netherlands were determined to

find a northeast passage. Following Frobisher's defeat, several Dutch expeditions had fanned out to the east, searching along the ragged coast of Siberia for an opening for Dutch merchants and traders seeking to expand commerce with Asia. It was their best option. The Dutch were fighting a war of independence with Spain for almost a century and eighty years work and so it was going on this whole time, and

Spain had such a fleet. The last thing they wanted to do was to be running into the Spanish fleet. That's Andrea Pitzer, journalist and author of the new book Ice Bound Hip Wrecked at the Edge of the World, which recounts the three polar voyages of Dutch explorer William Barrens If Spain had these southern roots that they were using, then it made a lot of sense for the new Dutch nation, which was trying to get away from Spain

and established his own empire and its own independence. It made sense for them to go north, and so they were very vested at first in this northern passage, as were England for some of the same reasons. There was one problem, you know, very little was known in Europe at this time about the hierarchic above the continental landmasks. People had gotten to southern Nova Zembla before people had gotten around to Archangel and had started trade with Russia.

But when he got up to the Hierarchic, there was just so much that was still unknown. Nova Zembla, now often known by its Russian name Novaya Zemblia, is a long, skinny archipelago off the coast of northern Russia, and it was William barrenss first destination on his search for a northeast passage on the fir to his three voyages in Barns and his crew sailed his ship Mercury as far as Nova Zembla's western shore. The island lies north to south,

creating a barrier for sailors going east. Barren sailed north along the coast and reached its uppermost point. Then he encountered a seed shop with ice. As historian Jeanettemursky writes in her book To the Arctic, he maneuvered his ship from patch to patch of open water, advancing, retreating, dodging, advancing, zig zagging over fire miles, looking for a way through.

After struggling for twenty five days, Barrens was forced to return home, but not before he and his men attempted to kill a herd of two thousand pound walruses with their hatchets. They got a couple of ivory tusks. One of the things Barents discovered was Nova Zembla was not

connected to any polar continent. For a long time, it was thought there was a group of islands or a continent at the top of the globe, and so when he was able to sail around these islands to the north, it was clear that it wasn't connected to a polar continent. That discovery prompted another voyage the following year, but Barons found his route barred by ice. In fifte six, Barons convinced a group of Amsterdam merchants to back another voyage.

They outfitted two ships captained by Jacob von Heemskirk and Jon Cornelis Rip, with Barrens serving as Van Heemskirk's pilot and navigator. This time, instead of sailing east along the coast of Scandinavia, they took what they hoped was a shortcut and sailed due north. A month after their departure, they reached a small island where they killed a polar bear, naming it Bear Island. They realized they had discovered a large archipelago of polar islands just six hundred miles from

the North Pole. The waters teemed with whales walrus. The men collected thousands of birds eggs on the beaches and cliffs. They charted the coast and named the island Spitzbergen, meaning jagged Mountains. Today's pittsburg In refers to the largest island, and the entire archipelago is named Small Bard. The two ships couldn't agree on what to do next. Rip eventually sailed home, while Barrens and Van Heemskirk sailed east to Nova Zembla, hoping that the fortune of their journey thus

far would continue, it did not. While they were able to dodge massive icebergs and round the northern point of the island, the constantly moving sea ice soon closed in and threatened to crush the ship. Only Barrens's skills saved them from disaster. As the temperatures dropped and signaled the coming of winter, they anchored in a small bay on

the northeast coast. The men suddenly understood that they had no choice, but, as crew member Garrett de Verer later wrote in Great Cold, poverty, misery, and grief, to stay all that winter. The men built a crude shelter out of driftwood without the help of their carpenter, who had inconveniently died during its construction. They had to lug the over frozen terrain eight miles to the side of the hut,

all while being followed by hungry polar bears. They burned more driftwood to stay warm, but even inside the shelter, one side of a freshly washed shirt would dry while the other side remained frozen. An inch of ice coated the walls. Inside the hut. Darkness rained twenty four hours a day, which was fine because it was so cold. That their clock froze. They had to tell time by a twelve hours sandglass. The climate there basically turns to

arctic desert. You know, it's really another world. And I think of how amazing it must have been for them to kind of come across the setting and then live in it. When the men managed to shoot a polar bear, they used the bears fat as fuel and lived on the meat. Weeks pass and then months. But wait, it gets worse. They eat polar bear liver and they almost die. Not the vitamin A. Here's the thing about polar bear liver. It contains a near lethal amount of vitamin A. Their

skin peels off. They got hyper vitaminosis. The men grew weaker and came down with scurvy and often deadly vitamin C deficiency. But in February the sun returned, and in May they seized the opportunity to escape. Their ship was beyond repair. That left two small rowboats, and the men made them seeworthy as best they could. In June seven, more than a year from when they set out from Europe, barrens and the crew began their way down the icy

coast for home. They hadn't gotten far when a gale threatened to capsize their boat, and they had to seek refuge on an ice flow. There After, sustaining the hopes of the crew for as long as he could, William Barrens died, but his men pressed on for more than sixteen hundred miles. Finally, the Arctic castaways were rescued by a ship sailed by Jon rip from whom they had

parted at Spitsbergen. The value of Barrens's discovery of spitzburg and his exploration and mapping of Nova Zembla was immediately apparent to European geographers and the public. He is the first in recorded history that actually rounded it and saw like what was that far north? And Small Bar is even farther north in the northern end of Nova Zembla.

And so the fact that on that third voyage he both discovered Spitzbergen, got that far north about just above Small Bard, and then came over and went over Nova Zembla, that's pretty incredible. They were not actively scientists, but they were sort of these proto scientists. They didn't always understand their discoveries, but they made it possible for us to understand what they saw. Even when they weren't able to

understand it at the time. Not long after survivors got back to the Netherlands, Garrett devere published his journal of Barnes's three voyages and the hardships at the men faced before they were rescued. The drama of the final voyage captivated readers within two years of the survive having sailors

getting back. There were additions in Dutch and in German and Latin, in French right away, in Italian and then a few years later in English, and their adventures were so legendary that William Shakespeare actually mentioned their ordeal in passing in Twelfth Night, and you know, it's kind of incredible to have this international bestseller in this pretty early

era of printing at that point. And then in addition, there were journals from Huigan von Wyncholten, who was on Barren's first two voyages, another Dutchman, and uh, those really changed some of the terrain and cartographical understandings of the territory that they saw as well. So you know, it's an amazing adventure story and it changed people's awareness of like the existence of the Arctic and what was going on there. But they did also make these scientific discoveries.

They didn't just map the geography of the High Arctic above Europe from Spitzberg and across the Nova Zembla. They also made discoveries in ornithology and optics. They really change the popular understanding of the Arctic. They also introduced the popular character of an explorer. In the published account, Barren's displayed remarkable endurance in the face of hardship. His courage when threatened by storms and ice, lifted the men's spirits

despite near impossible odds. Barrens helped save the men's lives and even sacrificed his own. These characteristics defined explorers from then on. Barren's suffering was so extraordinary, and the Arctic setting was so unique, particularly as we were saying, in terms of having this long account from the trip from the point of view of the people who actually survived it, and it kind of ended up redefining in some ways

the nature of what the explorer was. After Barrens, a few more explorers added important details to Europe's growing knowledge of the Arctic. English navigator Henry Hudson explored the possible northeast and northwest passages for his first two voyages, Hudson sailed east, reaching Spitsbergen in seven and reporting on the abundance of whales and seals. On the second voyage, in Sight, he was blocked by ice in the land mass of

Nova Zembla, just as Barns had been. The following year, working for the Dutch East India Company, Hudson investigated a possible northwest passage he'd heard about, the New York River that now bears his name. He explored it for a hundred fifty miles before realizing it went nowhere near Asia. On his final expedition, again under the English flag, he sailed into Canada's Hudson Bay, named after himself. Hudson mistook the giant inland bay for an ocean and sailed to

its southern extremity before realizing it was a dead end. Eventually, the crew turned restless and homesick. They mutinied, forcing Hudson, his teenage son, and several sick crew members into a small boat. The boat was set adrift and never seen again. A few years later, English mariner William Baffin, the eponym of the island search for the Northwest passage by sailing up the western coast of Greenland, farther than any European had at that time. He realized the waters west of

Greenland were basically a large bay. He sailed down the eastern coast of Arctic Canada and observed the entrances to three large waterways that appeared to go west from Baffin Bay. One of them was a true northwest passage, but Barons didn't know that because he saw the passages completely blocked by ice. He returned home and told his sponsors that

the roots he found were unnavigable. Explorers less interest in the region after that, and no navigators sailed that far north in Baffin Bay for another two hundred and thirty six years. We'll be right back over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, explorers continued to fill in the blank spaces on the Arctic map. They were learning the rules of surviving in the Arctic and what dangers lay in the

unforgiving region. They had mapped portions of the coastline of Spitzbergen, Greenland, Canada, and Russia. They discovered uninhabited islands and waterways. They'd met indigenous peoples and traded goods in exchange for geographical information, but beyond that, the Arctic was unknown territory. Was it land or water? Was it cold all the time? Did the ice melt? Or did an as yet undiscovered tongue of land linked Greenland to Siberia Across the top of

the world. People were only too willing to fill in the blank space at the top of the map with their aspirations and dreams. It seemed that the less people knew about the conditions at the North Pole, the more fantastic the theories, and the more important it became to find out if they were true. Armchair geographers seized on the observations made by the early explorers and devised their own theories about what lay beyond the ice. One theory

was called the open Polar Sea. The idea was that the North Pole lay in the center of a warm polar sea surrounded by a ring of thick ice. It seems ludicrous now, but in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

it dovetailed with the information explorers had published. Some suggested that the warm water currents that appeared to influence the growth of vegetation in the polar regions might stem from a large, warm sea at the north Pole, and it was wrong to presume that extremely cold temperatures duly recorded by explorers got progressively colder in higher latitudes. The open

Polar Sea theory emerged mainly from wishful thinking. Barns, Hudson and others failed to navigate the northwest or northeast passages, so many navigators hope that a passage due north over the North Pole would prove easier. Here is Andrea Pitzer. First, we have to remember that they're imagining a land that they don't know at all, and they're trying to picture

what's possible there. But also there is a kind of an internal logic that is certainly in play fairly early on, and by Baron's time, is very much in play in which they know that that you've got this part of the earth that's tilted closer to the sun, that's exposed to the sun for longer during these long, long days um in which the sun would not set in the summer, because that's what the Arctic circle is is once you're above the circle, that there's a point at which you're

going to have days where the sun is not setting. And of course the further north you go, you have you know a lot of days, you have whole months in which the sun is not setting, and so the idea was, if that's exposed to the sun all the time, then it's going to be warm. And so for a long time there was this idea that either ice just formed around the continents and if you could just sort of get away from the continents then you would get

to the open polar sea. And other people thought if you had as you got close to our to Trickle, there was like a ring of ice and if you could just break through that ring of ice, then you'd be golden. In England, the theory gained support thanks to a lawyer and government official named Danes Barrington. He studied the accounts of past polar explorers and interviewed whalers who worked in the Arctic. He concluded that an open polar see,

if not a certainty, was worth investigating. He presented his ideas in seventeen seventy to the Royal Society, England's leading scientific organization. Barrington's proposal made its way to the British Admiralty, the government agency that runs the Royal Navy. Barrington had no firsthand knowledge about the Arctic, but he was very persuasive. He convinced the admiralty to send an expedition to the North Pole in seventeen seventy three, the first true voyage

to the Pole ever attempted. A decorated naval officer named Constantine Phipps was put in charge. He captained a ship called the Racehorse, and his second in command, the awesomely named skeffing to Lutwidge, helmed the ship Carcass. They left London in June seventeen seventy three and sailed north to Spitsbergen, aiming for the Pole. In the one and seventy five years since Barents had discovered the islands, whaling fleets had set up operations on Spalbard's shores, but it was still

a dangerous outpost. Phipps got to the northern coast of Spitzbergen but ran into ice. He was forced to turn around without gaining much insight on the existence of an open polar sea. But on the other hand, the voyage didn't disprove the open Polar sea, and later expeditions could theoretically gain more clues. Phipps's main contribution to polar knowledge was the chart of his route due north for the

Pole that future voyages would follow. He also set a record for the farthest northern point reached by Europeans, the claim to fame that would stand for thirty three years, but further voyages to the poll were put on hold. The British government now had bigger things to worry about, like the revolution brewing and it's American colonies. Interest in a possible open polar sea remained high, though, influencing exploration

well into the nineteenth century. Perhaps the bizarre theory persisted for so long because no one could definitively disprove it. One thing was certain after centuries of exploration, reaching the North Pole would not be easy, but that wouldn't stop people from trying. They always seemed to underestimate how far they really needed to go. But they knew even then that rather than sailing across the middle latitudes, they would be quicker if they could go over the top of

the planet. So there was always this hope that that would happen. Another popular theory from the era seems even less likely. An American former army officer named John Cleave Simms, Jr. Proposed in April eighteen that the Earth was made up

of five concentric spheres. He suggested Earth's interior was hollow, with entry points at the north and south poles, no doubt inspired by the open polar c theory, Sims argued that refraction of the Sun's rays entering Earth at the polls would create never ending daylight and a warm environment. The concept became known as Sims holes. Sims proposed a

polar expedition to confirm his hollow Earth theory. He wrote, I asked one hundred brave companions, well equipped to start from Siberia in the fall season, with reindeer and slays on the ice of the frozen sea. I engage we find warm and rich land stocked with thrifty vegetables and animals. If not men on reaching one degree northward of latitude eight two, we will return in the succeeding spring. Sims

sent hundreds of copies to leaders in numerous countries. Let's keep in mind that no one in Sims's time had yet reached eighty two degrees north, which passes through the northern extremity of Greenland, much less one degree totaling sixty

nautical miles north of it. Sims's Son later wrote, so fixed in his mind was the belief of the truth of his theory that for ten years, although laboring under great pecuniary embarrassments and buffeted by the ridicule and sarcasm of an opposing world, he persevered in his endeavors to interest others in it so as to enable him to test its truth by a polar expedition, But without success. Undaunted, Sims lectured across America, gaining a few followers but many

more detractors. After he died in nine his theory of holes at the poles melded into what was left of the argument supporting the existence of an open polar sea. Yet the mystery of the North Pole remained enticing generation

after generation of explorers. Their appetites had been wetted by the tantalizingly incomplete conclusions of Frobisher, Barrens, Hudson, and Baffin, they were determined to uncover its secrets for themselves and for their national honor, reaching ever further into the Arctic, no matter the cost, presented an irresistible test of courage and endurance. As we'll see in future episodes, plenty of adventurers answered that Challenge. The Quest for the North Pole

is hosted by Me cat Long. This episode was researched and written by Me, with fat checking by Austin Thompson. The executive producers are Aaron McCarthy and Tyler Klang. The supervising producer is Dylan Fagin. 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 floss. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, check out the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you at your podcast. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.