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 * Intro

Background
From the sixteenth century English sailors and adventurers had penetrated the Arctic in pursuit of whales and furs. The likes of Martin Frobisher (1576), John Davis (1585), Henry Hudson (1610), Thomas Button (1612), William Baffin (1615), Luke Foxe (1631) and James Knight (1719) reached as far as Baffin Island, Baffin Bay and Foxe Basin. There was little appetite for Arctic exploration in a Royal Navy almost continuously at war during the eighteenth century, but by a variety of means a number of naval officers found their way to the Arctic. By 1800 there was a general consensus that if a Northwest Passage existed, it was permanently closed by the Arctic ice.

Christopher Middleton
Christopher Middleton, although not a Royal Navy officer, was commissioned for an expedition to find the Northwest Passage. He sailed in 1741 with HMS Discovery (1741) and Furnace, but had to winter at the entrance of the Churchill River in Hudson Bay. He then proceeded as far North as Repulse Bay, but was prevented from going further by the ice. His cousin, William Moor, led an unsuccessful expedition after a public falling-out with Middleton.

Samuel Hearne
Samuel Hearne was a former Royal Navy officer who took service with the Hudson's Bay Company. He led three expeditions overland between 1769 and 1772, and during the third of these he followed the Coppermine River to the Arctic Ocean, proving that any Northwest Passage must be found in Arctic waters.

Constantine Phipps
Constantine Phipps, 2nd Baron Mulgrave led a 1773 expedition to find the Northwest Passage in HMS Carcass and HMS Racehorse. The ships reached the impressive latitude of 80° 37′N before turning back. The expedition was particularly notable for the presence of Midshipman Horatio Nelson, later Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson.

James Cook
James Cook's third voyage was principally intended to discover the Northwest Passage. Having searched long and hard for a strait separating Alaska from the continent of North America (and shown on a Russian map by Jacob von Stählin), he turned North and passed through the Bering Strait, but was turned back at Icy Cape by the sea-ice.

George Vancouver
During his 1791-1795 expeditions George Vancouver confirmed Hearne's findings that any Northwest Passage would be found in the Arctic by showing that no passage existed on the Pacific coast below the latitude of 60°N.

Barrow and the Open Polar Sea
At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the Admiralty found itself in possession of large numbers of enterprising officers and thousands of unrequired ships. John Barrow, the Second Secretary to the Admiralty encouraged interest in the possible existence of a Northwest Passage. Whalers in the North Atlantic in 1815 and 1816 described an unprecedented breaking up of the ice in the Davis Strait, that had apparently sent icebergs as far south as 40°N. The prevailing theory held that seawater could not turn to ice (supported by observations that melted icebergs released fresh water), and therefore that all Arctic ice formed around coastlines. It further held that the waters around the North Pole might therefore be ice-free, forming an Open Polar Sea. If the barriers of ice surrounding this open sea were breaking up, then there might be an opportunity to sail across the top of the North American continent, either by the proposed Northwest Passage, or perhaps by sailing north past Spitzbergen, across the Polar Sea, and down through the Bering Strait. Barrow, with the support of Sir Joseph Banks, prepared two simultaneous expeditions, one to be led by John Ross, heading West through the Davis Strait, and the other to be led by David Buchan, taking the polar route. An arrangement of prizes for achievement both West and North were adopted by an Act of Parliament in 1818. Thus began a series of expeditions that lasted for sixty years.

The Ross and Buchan expeditions (1818)
The 1818 expeditions of Ross and Buchan achieved relatively little: Ross re-explored waters that Baffin had visited in the Seventeenth Century and was turned back by a mirage that he mistook for range of mountains; Buchan became stuck fast at 80°34′ N in July 1818, and spent the rest of the expedition mapping the packice as far as Greenland. What they did achieve was to fire the imagination of the British public, and more importantly, build up the experience of a generation of explorers; among the officers accomanying Buchan and Ross were William Edward Parry, James Clark Ross, Henry Parkyns Hoppner, John Franklin and the army officer Captain Edward Sabine.

The Parry and Franklin expeditions (1819)
William Edward Parry was to seek an entrance to the passage from Baffin Bay; his highly successful expedition eventually determined that Lancaster Sound (N.W.T.) opened a passage towards the west. A second expedition, for which Barrow proposed Franklin as leader, would set out overland from Hudson Bay to explore and chart the north coast of the American continent eastwards from the mouth of the Coppermine River and thereby, in theory, delineate the most direct route for a northwest passage. The plan set many difficulties before Franklin. The coast had been sighted by explorers only twice before – by Samuel Hearne at the Coppermine in 1771 and by Alexander Mackenzie at the Mackenzie River’s delta in 1789 – and it lay hundreds of miles north of the territory explored by fur traders. The Hudson’s Bay and North West companies were expected to convey Franklin to the edge of unknown territory and to equip him for the coastal journey, but they were only established as far north as Great Slave Lake (N.W.T.), their supply lines were tenuous, and they were engaged in trade warfare. Franklin had just three months to prepare for an expedition that had few precedents in the history of exploration. Advice was scarce and often misleading or excessively optimistic, and he received assurances of greater assistance from the fur-trading companies than they could actually provide. The party selected to accompany him consisted of midshipmen George Back and Robert Hood, surgeon and naturalist John Richardson, and seaman John Hepburn."

NMM - Parry's Exped of 1819

The Antarctic

 * Sir Clements Markham