Shipwrecks at the Top of the World
Icy, desolate, and rock-bound, the Arctic is notorious for the destruction of ships. The five-century quest for a Northwest Passage to connect Europe to Asia witnessed dozens of expeditions across the top of the world from the 1500s through the early years of the 20th century. In an age of global communication, satellite mapping, and travel by air, it may be hard to imagine years spent threading a maze of islands, peninsulas, sand shoals, ice bergs, and frozen seas. To do so in small wooden ships that were easily torn and crushed by ice, in an environment that quickly froze exposed flesh may also beg the imagination.
The perseverance of those who went – Elizabethan “gentlemen explorers,” naval officers, whalers, fur traders and scientists – gradually revealed a land hitherto known only to its indigenous peoples such as the Greenlanders, Inuit, Inupiat and “Esquimaux.” Those expeditions did more than map the Arctic and find passage. They mapped the extent of the best and worst of human nature as tales of folly, cruelty, bravery, and selfsacrifice were told as ice-scarred ships and men emerged from the North, sometimes after years of entrapment.
Names of explorers and their ships resound in popular memory – Frobisher, Hudson, Perry and Peary, Ross, Franklin, M’Clintock, Amundsen, Bartlett and Larsen –Isabella, Fury, Hecla, Erebus, Terror, Fox, Jeanette, Fram, Gjoa, Karluk, and St. Roch are among them. Some are famous because they made great strides or simply survived incredible odds, others, like Franklin, because they failed so spectacularly. The loss of 129 men and two ships –Erebus and Terror – when Franklin set out to conquer the Northwest Passage remains the best known and one of the most horrifying tales of the Arctic.
It follows that the icy waters of the far North are the grave of these ships and in some cases their crews. Arctic shipwrecks are scattered throughout the Northwest Passage at the top of North America, and the Northeast Passage across the top of Europe and Asia, while others lie farther north. All told, only a few hundred ships have been lost in the Arctic, however. Very few vessels traveled these waters until recently. Even now, in the 21st century, it remains an isolated frontier and an extreme environment.
It then follows that very few of these lost ships have been found. Some went missing and sank with no survivors, beyond the reach and the view of any other living soul. Others were caught, crushed and sank on open stretches of ice-choked ocean. And even when a position was marked and placed on a chart, the last place a ship grounded, or was left frozen in
