Establishing the Ocean

Encounters between Arctic Ocean coastal communities and temporary settlements and cultures and people from elsewhere are not known until historical times. In Antiquity there are tales of travels to vaguely described northern lands, for example that of Pytheas of Massalia in 325 BCE to ‘Thule’, which may have been Norway or the Shetland Islands.

The Norse settlements in the North Atlantic were on the fringes of an Arctic Ocean history but provided most of the early Arctic Ocean encounters that helped draw the contours of the ocean for European elites. In the European Middle Ages Norse colonisers sailed to places such as Ellesmere Island, Skraeling Island and Ruin Island for hunting expeditions and trading with the Inuit and people of the Dorset culture.^[788] The local Inuit, or skraeling population (so called by the Norse), were in several skirmishes with the colonisers and added to their weakening and final abandonment of their Greenland colony which coincided with the onset of a long cooling period from the late Middle Ages.^[789] The accessible entry point to the Arctic Ocean was through the thermohaline warming Atlantic, and as geographical interest and seafaring skills grew in Europe in the late Middle Ages and the early modern period the Arctic Ocean drew increasing attention and curiosity. Cartographers, lacking information, rendered the region - still known under names such as Septentrionalis, or Boreas - ‘Arctic’. It had long been a mythical place.

Renaissance and early modern speculation got most of its visions from Greek sources. Tales of the northern ‘Thule’ and of a ‘Hyperborean’ people, living north of Boreas, the northern wind, by Herodotus and many other authors, were surprisingly merry, presenting an exuberant and liveable region of remarkable beauty. The trope lived on all through to Linnaeus in the eighteenth century, who praised the virtues of winter, with ice skating and the friction free logistics of sled travel, and to Vilhjalmur Stefansson in the twentieth, whose imaginary of the Arctic

Ocean turned it into a domesticated Polar Mediterranean of trade and exchange.^[790] Yet for some time there was little consensus on what existed so far north. Was it land or sea? Some cartographers, for example Johannes Ruysch in 1507 and Gerardus Mercator in 1595, drew it as land, or a set of islands, keeping with interpretations of the vague Hyperborean geography that could be drawn from ancient sources.

The 1539 Carta Marina map by Swedish Catholic chronicler Olaus Magnus, published in Rome, used the typical miracula and mirabilia in the shape of sea monsters to impress the Church and draw attention to the North and possibly return it from Protestant reformation to the pope. Olaus Magnus had good information of the terrestrial North, but lacking information on the Arctic Ocean there was not much he could insert there. He did, however, include the phrase Mare glaciale and depicted appropriate ice floes close to what must be Greenland, where he had pencilled in some armoured cavalry.^[791] Others followed Olaus Magnus and preferred to regard it as sea, like Willem Barents and Martin Waldseemüller, arguably the most influential of Renaissance mapmakers.

By the late sixteenth century the perception that the far north consisted at least to a large extent of open sea became dominant, chiefly informed by explorers navigating to Spitsbergen and encountering only sea, much of it covered with ice (see below). The recurring speculations of northern sea routes to the East maintained the interest in an Arctic Ocean. Early expeditions to discover the Northwest Passage were undertaken in 1497 by John Cabot, dispatched by Henry VII; in 1524 by Estevao Gomes on the commission of emperor Charles V; and in 1576 by Martin Frobisher, travelling through what is now the Canadian Arctic.^[792] Only later did explorers enter the Arctic Ocean proper. Alexander McKenzie, travelling in 1789 down the river that now carries his name all the way to the Arctic Ocean, repeated the Arctic paradise trope: ‘Set nets and catch the Tickameg, Carp-Perch- Pike-and the Unknown Fish-Geese, Ducks, Swans and breed here in great numbers-Water not least Salt-quite fresh-Owls found here-and Sacuttim berries.’^[793]

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Source: Armitage David, Bashford Alison et al. (eds.). Oceanic Histories. Cambridge University Press,2018. — 338 p.. 2018

Establishing the Ocean

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