Our Arctic Province: Alaska and the Seal Islands
9781465678386
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
The story of the first few centuries of Arctic exploration can, of course, never be written. The early Norsemen, to whom must go the credit for most of the first discoveries, were a piratical race, and their many voyages were conducted, for the most part, in a strictly business-like spirit. Occasionally one of them would happen on a new country by accident, just as Naddod the Viking happened upon Iceland in 861 by being driven there by a gale while on his way to the Faroe Islands. Occasionally a curious adventurer would follow in the footsteps of one of these early discoverers, but no serious attempt was made to widen the field of knowledge thus opened up, unless the Norsemen saw their way to entering upon commercial relations with the natives, to the great disadvantage of the latter. Rumours of the existence of Iceland, or Thule as it was then called, were first brought home by Pytheas, while Irish monks are known to have stayed there early in the ninth century, but probably the first attempt to colonise it was made by Thorold about a hundred years after Naddod’s visit. This worthy Viking, feeling it advisable to leave his native land after a quarrel with a relative, during the course of which the latter had been killed, set his course for Iceland, and made himself a new home there. Shortly afterwards his son Erik, who seems to have inherited his father’s taste for murder, followed him to his new abode, and later on, when on a voyage of adventure, set foot upon Greenland. Erik’s son, Leif, who was also of a roving disposition, sailed far westward in 100 A.D., and landed either on Newfoundland or at the mouth of the St Lawrence, thus anticipating the discovery of America by Columbus by nearly five hundred years. It was not until the end of the fifteenth century that the first serious attempts at Arctic exploration were made by John Cabot and his son Sebastian. John Cabot was a Venetian, who settled at Bristol probably about the year 1474, and to him belongs the honour of being the first to suggest the possibility of finding a north-west passage to India. In 1496 he received a commission from Henry VII. to sail out for the discovery of countries and islands unknown to Christian peoples, and though the real object of his voyage, discreetly veiled beneath these purposely vague terms, was not attained, he immortalised his name by the discovery of Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island. The history of the earlier Cabot voyages is sadly obscure, and was rendered more so by Sebastian himself, who in his later years seems to have claimed discoveries which properly belonged to his father.
