Chapter 1 - From Nifelheim to Fram

Abstract

To the north, beyond the known world, was water, a part of the ocean surrounding the world. The first dedicated exploration of the high north was made by ship. In 325 bce (before the common era), the Greek geographer Pytheas left Massilia (Marseille) and sailed through the Pillars of Hercules and turned north into the North Atlantic. He circumnavigated the British Isles and reached the Shetland Islands and, perhaps, the Faroe Islands. The identity of his Ultima Thule is still unknown and open to debate. Was it Iceland? Was it Norway? Or perhaps the island Ösel in the Baltic? Pytheas’s own narrative is lost and only later commentaries on his voyage have reached posterity. Many of these commentators doubted and questioned his account and it was all but forgotten. Later descriptions of the northern regions mainly focused on travel on land and described, more or less fancifully, the different peoples and their mores and customs. Almost 1000 years would pass before sailing and exploration of the North Atlantic were again mentioned: the voyage of St. Brendan towards the west and the settlement of Irish monks on the Faroe Islands and Iceland. The Vikings primarily sailed south and southwest, along the European coasts and around the British Isles for trade and plunder, but many also sailed west, reaching the Faroes, Iceland, and eventually Greenland and Vinland. One voyage to the northeast, Ottar’s sailing to the White Sea, was well recorded. The next burst of activity started when Christopher Columbus, on his search for a western sailing route to India, encountered the New World, and when Magellan passed through the straits named after him and crossed the Pacific to Southeast Asia. If a passage to India and to Cathay (China) existed south of the Americas, there should also be one in the north, and searches for the Northwest passage and for a Northeast passage north of the Old World began. These endeavors were largely fruitless, being stopped by ice and the forbidding climate. However, this opened the riches in the northern North Atlantic, the fisheries and whale and seal hunting. Fleets of Dutch and British whalers started to work in the Nordic Seas, west and north of Svalbard and along the Greenland coast. New efforts to discover and navigate the Northeast and Northwest passages began in the 18th century. Russia started its Great Northern Expedition led by Vitus Bering. Bering reached Alaska and found the passage between the North Pacific and the Arctic Ocean, the Bering Strait. The sailing along the northern Eurasian coast from the Barents Sea to Bering Strait was explored along shorter sections that, together, showed that a Northeast passage existed. The Northwest passage was found difficult to discover and navigate, and the search resulted in several fateful expeditions. In 1751, captain Henry Ellis lowered a bucket fitted with a thermometer and sampled the deep water in the equatorial Atlantic. He found that the temperature decreased with depth until 1200m after which it remained constant. The deep temperature was low, around 9°C. It was later suggested by Benjamin Thompson that this was an indication that colder and denser water from high latitudes flowed towards the equator in the deep and that a corresponding surface flow from the equator should exist. This insight regarding the deep circulation of the oceans has been present ever since, but in the 19th century it led to controversy. Were the ocean currents mainly driven by the winds, or were the cooling at high and heating at low latitudes the main force of large-scale ocean circulation? This question is still with us today. During the 18th century, the idea of an ice-free Arctic Ocean was put forward by several scientists and this idea has remained for a long time, influencing the explorations conducted in the late 18th and 19th centuries. The goal was now not the Northeast or Northwest passages but to sail to the North Pole and find a direct route from the North Atlantic to the North Pacific across the Arctic Ocean. The hope, or illusion, of an ice-free Polar sea was not dispersed until Fridtjof Nansen with Fram entered the sea ice north of the New Siberian Islands in 1993 and started the Fram drift across the Polar sea.