: Adventurers of the Far North: A Chronicle of the Frozen Seas by Leacock Stephen - Arctic regions; Northwest Canadian Description and travel

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SAMUEL HEARNE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . " " 42 From the Dominion Archives.

FORT CHURCHILL OR PRINCE OF WALES . . . . . . . . . . " " 50 From a drawing by Samuel Hearne.

SIR ALEXANDER MACKENZIE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . " " 70 From a painting by Lawrence.

SIR JOHN FRANKLIN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . " " 112 From the National Portrait Gallery.

THE GREAT ELIZABETHAN NAVIGATORS

The map of Canada offers to the eye and to the imagination a vast country more than three thousand miles in width. Its eastern face presents a broken outline to the wild surges of the Atlantic. Its western coast commands from majestic heights the broad bosom of the Pacific. Along its southern boundary is a fertile country of lake and plain and woodland, loud already with the murmur of a rising industry, and in summer waving with the golden wealth of the harvest.

But on its northern side Canada is set fast against the frozen seas of the Pole and the desolate region of barren rock and ice-bound island that is joined to the polar ocean by a common mantle of snow. For hundreds and hundreds of miles the vast fortress of ice rears its battlements of shining glaciers. The unending sunshine of the Arctic summer falls upon untrodden snow. The cold light of the aurora illumines in winter an endless desolation. There is no sound, save when at times the melting water falls from the glistening sides of some vast pinnacle of ice, or when the leaden sea forces its tide between the rock-bound islands. Here in this vast territory civilization has no part and man no place. Life struggles northward only to die out in the Arctic cold. The green woods of the lake district and the blossoms of the prairies are left behind. The fertility of the Great West gives place to the rock-strewn wilderness of the barren grounds. A stunted and deformed vegetation fights its way to the Arctic Circle. Rude grasses and thin moss cling desperately to the naked rock. Animal life pushes even farther. The seas of the frozen ocean still afford a sustenance. Even mankind is found eking out a savage livelihood on the shores of the northern sea. But gradually all fades, until nothing is left but the endless plain of snow, stretching towards the Pole.

Yet this frozen northern land and these forbidding seas have their history. Deeds were here done as great in valour as those which led to the conquest of a Mexico or the acquisition of a Peru. But unlike the captains and conquerors of the South, the explorers have come and gone and left behind no trace of their passage. Their hopes of a land of gold, their vision of a new sea-way round the world, are among the forgotten dreams of the past. Robbed of its empty secret, the North still stretches silent and untenanted with nothing but the splendid record of human courage to illuminate its annals.

For us in our own day, the romance that once clung about the northern seas has drifted well nigh to oblivion. To understand it we must turn back in fancy three hundred years. We must picture to ourselves the aspect of the New World at the time when Elizabeth sat on the throne of England, and when the kingdoms of western Europe, Britain, France, and Spain, were rising from the confusion of the Middle Ages to national greatness. The existence of the New World had been known for nearly a hundred years. But it still remained shadowed in mystery and uncertainty. It was known that America lay as a vast continent, or island, as men often called it then, midway between Europe and the great empires of the East. Columbus, and after him Verrazano and others, had explored its eastern coast, finding everywhere a land of dense forests, peopled here and there with naked savages that fled at their approach. The servants of the king of Spain had penetrated its central part and reaped, in the spoils of Mexico, the reward of their savage bravery. From the central isthmus Balboa had first seen the broad expanse of the Pacific. On this ocean the Spaniard Pizarro had been borne to the conquest of Peru. Even before that conquest Magellan had passed the strait that bears his name, and had sailed westward from America over the vast space that led to the island archipelago of Eastern Asia. Far towards the northern end of the great island, the fishermen of the Channel ports had found their way in yearly sailings to the cod banks of Newfoundland. There they had witnessed the silent procession of the great icebergs that swept out of the frozen seas of the north, and spoke of oceans still unknown, leading one knew not whither. The boldest of such sailors, one Jacques Cartier, fighting his way westward had entered a great gulf that yawned in the opening side of the continent, and from it he had advanced up a vast river, the like of which no man had seen. Hundreds of miles from the gulf he had found villages of savages, who pointed still westward and told him of wonderful countries of gold and silver that lay beyond the palisaded settlement of Hochelaga.

But the discoveries of Columbus and those who followed him had not solved but had only opened the mystery of the western seas. True, a way to the Asiatic empire had been found. The road discovered by the Portuguese round the base of Africa was known. But it was long and arduous beyond description. Even more arduous was the sea-way found by Magellan: the whole side of the continent must be traversed. The dreadful terrors of the straits that separate South America from the Land of Fire must be essayed: and beyond that a voyage of thirteen thousand miles across the Pacific, during which the little caravels must slowly make their way northward again till the latitude of Cathay was reached, parallel to that of Spain itself. For any other sea-way to Asia the known coast-line of America offered an impassable barrier. In only one region, and that as yet unknown, might an easier and more direct way be found towards the eastern empires. This was by way of the northern seas, either round the top of Asia or, more direct still perhaps, by entering those ice-bound seas that lay beyond the Great Banks of Newfoundland and the coastal waters visited by Jacques Cartier. Into the entrance of these waters the ships of the Cabots flying the English flag had already made their way at the close of the fifteenth century. They seem to have reached as far, or nearly as far, as the northern limits of Labrador, and Sebastian Cabot had said that beyond the point reached by their ships the sea opened out before them to the west. No further exploration was made, indeed, for three-quarters of a century after the Cabots, but from this time on the idea of a North-West Passage and the possibility of a great achievement in this direction remained as a tradition with English seamen.

It was natural, then, that the English sailors of the sixteenth century should turn to the northern seas. The eastern passage, from the German Ocean round the top of Russia and Asia, was first attempted. As early as the reign of Edward the Sixth, a company of adventurers, commonly called the Muscovy Company, sailed their ships round the north of Norway and opened a connection with Russia by way of the White Sea. But the sailing masters of the company tried in vain to find a passage in this direction to the east. Their ships reached as far as the Kara Sea at about the point where the present boundary of European Russia separates it from Siberia. Beyond this extended countless leagues of impassable ice and the rock-bound desolation of Northern Asia.

It remained to seek a passage in the opposite direction by way of the Arctic seas that lay above America. To find such a passage and with it a ready access to Cathay and the Indies became one of the great ambitions of the Elizabethan age. There is no period when great things might better have been attempted. It was an epoch of wonderful national activity and progress: the spirit of the nation was being formed anew in the Protestant Reformation and in the rising conflict with Spain. It was the age of Drake, of Raleigh, of Shakespeare, the time at which were aroused those wide ambitions which were to give birth to the British Empire.

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