The idea, widely believed by the world’s leading scientists and geographers, went like this: The weather wasn’t especially cold at the North Pole, at least not in summer. On the contrary, the dome of the world was covered in a shallow, warm, ice-free sea whose waters could be smoothly sailed, much as one might sail across the Caribbean or the Mediterranean. This tepid Arctic basin teemed with marine life—and was, quite possibly, home to a lost civilization. Cartographers were so sure of its existence that they routinely depicted it on their maps, often labeling the top of the globe, matter-of-factly, OPEN POLAR SEA.
Gerardus Mercator’s beautiful, if completely hypothetical, map of the Arctic published in 1595 showed an iceless polar sea that, although ringed by mountainous lands, freely communicated with the Atlantic and Pacific by means of four symmetrically arranged river channels. Emanuel Bowen’s late-eighteenth-century map called this apparently ice-free body of water the Northern Ocean. The British Admiralty had produced numerous maps throughout the 1800s that showed a largely iceless sea, and charts commissioned by the U.S. Navy showed much the same thing.
No one had ever seen this fantastical Open Polar Sea, but that did not seem to matter. Somewhere along the way, the idea had gathered a logic of its own. Fixing it on maps had fixed it in people’s minds. Like Atlantis or El Dorado, it was a beautiful vision based on legends, rumors, and tenuous scraps of information. Layer by layer, decade by decade, scientists and thinkers had contributed to the plausibility, the probability, and finally the certainty of this chimerical notion. No amount of contrary evidence could dislodge it from the collective imagination.
Many improbable ideas had been floated to explain the Open Polar Sea. Some people said it was due to the churning effects of the earth’s rotation. Others said it was caused by heat vents, or by some extreme magnification of the sun’s rays that occurred at the poles. Still others insisted that basking in sunshine twenty-four hours a day for six months of the year was more than enough to keep the pole ice-free. Then, too, many scientists at the time believed that a deep body of salt water could not freeze, that only shallow seawater, close to coastlines, was capable of forming ice—therefore, the polar sea was necessarily an open one. There was a desperation in these explanations, like trying to prove the existence of God by employing elaborate teleological arguments. It was extraordinary how much energy had been expended over the centuries in attempts to explain a thing that, although widely believed, had never been seen.
To be sure, the Open Polar Sea theory had its skeptics. At the time that De Long was coming into the story, the most prominent and vocal of these was Sir Clements R. Markham, the secretary of the Royal Geographical Society. In The Threshold of the Unknown Region, Markham called the Open Polar Sea a “mischievous” idea and insisted that it had done “much harm to the advance of discovery and the progress of sound geography.” Arguments supporting the Open Polar Sea were “all so obviously fabulous,” Markham scoffed, “that it is astonishing how any sane man could have been found to give credit to them.” But Markham’s naysaying was a minority view; the Open Polar Sea was a collective obsession, an idée fixe that tickled the human fancy. It had to be true.
Since the beginning of Arctic exploration, whenever an adventurer sailed north, the same thing invariably happened: He was thwarted by ice, usually somewhere in the vicinity of the 80th parallel. But the theory of the Open Polar Sea held that this Arctic ice barrier was merely a ring that encircled the large warm-water basin—a “girdle,” this ring was sometimes called, an “annulus,” an “ice-belt.” If an explorer could bust through this icy circle, preferably in a ship with a reinforced hull, he would eventually find open water and enjoy smooth sailing to the North Pole. The trick, then, was to find a gap in the ice, a place where it was thinner or weaker or slushier, a natural portal of some kind.
That portal was what George De Long was determined to find—and to do it, he would employ the best maps, the most up-to-date equipment, and the latest ideas from the fields of oceanography, meteorology, and navigation.
DE LONG WAS heavily influenced by a lengthy article that had appeared in the November 1869 issue of Putnam’s Magazine. The article, tantalizingly entitled “Gateways to the Pole,” enlarged upon all the theories supporting the Open Polar Sea, then went on to propose a surefire method for locating an easily navigable passage to these mythical warm waters. “There is reason to believe,” the piece began, “that the perilous question of a way to the Pole has been at last answered.”
The article focused on the ideas of a well-known Navy officer, Silas Bent. Captain Bent had occupied much of his life sailing the Pacific, where he had undertaken extensive hydrographic surveys for the U.S. Navy. Bent, who had sailed with Matthew Perry on the commodore’s historic voyage to Japan in 1852, was particularly intrigued by a massive current known as the Kuro Siwo, a kind of Pacific analogue to the Atlantic Ocean’s Gulf Stream.
Although the Kuro Siwo had been well known among Japanese, Korean, and Chinese fishermen for centuries, it had not been formally studied until Bent turned his sharp eye on its murky vastness. The Kuro Siwo (Japanese for “Black Current”) swept up from tropical waters, brushing past Formosa and Japan, before heading out into the open Pacific. Like the Gulf Stream, it was a warm current and, thus, a kind of conveyor belt for nutrients, plankton, krill, and other food sources consumed by the marine mammals of the North Pacific. Out in the open ocean, the current could be seen as a clear line of demarcation; it had a distinctive blue-black color, deep and dark, that sailors found vaguely spooky. The current moved inexorably northward, a temperate river in a cold sea—aiming, it seemed, for the Bering Strait.
Precisely where the Kuro Siwo went was the subject of much speculation among scientists, but Bent had his own ideas. He felt certain that it flowed through the Bering Strait, burrowed under the Arctic ice, and worked its way to the Open Polar Sea. On the Atlantic side, Bent thought the Gulf Stream did much the same thing, sweeping past Norway and far to the northeast. (In fact, the Gulf Stream is potent enough to render the Russian port of Murmansk ice-free year-round.) Bent believed that the Gulf Stream continued north and eventually burrowed under the Arctic pack.
The confluence of these two mighty oceanic currents, Bent argued, was what kept the Open Polar Sea warm and ice-free. As Bent saw it, the Kuro Siwo and the Gulf Stream reflected a graceful planetary symmetry; they were dual strands of a massive distribution system that transferred heat from the tropics to the northern regions, from the Torrid Zones to the Frigid Zones. The earth, Bent reasoned, was like a rarefied organism, with its own exquisitely designed circulatory system.
Wrote Bent: “There is a circulation in the air; there is a circulation in the bodies of all animals; there is a circulation in the oceans—all of which are governed by laws, immutably fixed, and which in all their modifications and conditions they rigidly observe and obey. The sea, the atmosphere and the sun, are to the earth what the blood, the lungs, and the heart are to the animal economy. There is an equilibrium in all nature.” The Kuro Siwo and Gulf Stream, Bent argued, pumped and flowed northward “like blood from the heart of the animal system, to carry their life-giving warmth and nourishment along their path to the earth’s extremities.”
Taken together, the Kuro Siwo and the Gulf Stream packed enough thermal wallop, the Putnam’s article suggested, to “abolish the climate” of certain parts of the Arctic: “Armed in their tropical birthplace with the potential energy of the sun’s heat, they, and they alone, can pierce the polar ice and carve routes to the Pole itself.” Bent suggested an interesting idea: If his theory was right, an explorer could best rely on a thermometer instead of a compass to reach the apex of the world.
SILAS BENT’S IDEAS were largely predicated, in turn, on the work of the eminent American oceanographer, astronomer, and meteorologist Matthew Fontaine Maury of the U.S. Naval Observatory. Maury, who was sometimes called the Pathfinder of the Seas, had spearheaded comprehensive studies of ocean winds and curren
ts, compiling huge amounts of data, which he assembled into copiously detailed charts that are still studied to this day.
Maury, along with superintendent Alexander Dallas Bache of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, was one of the stalwart American proponents of the Open Polar Sea. Maury’s belief in it was largely based on anecdotal evidence: driftwood from Siberian rivers that had washed up on the shores of Greenland. Whalers high in the Arctic who had reported seeing huge numbers of birds migrating north, in autumn, over great stretches of ice pack. Russian explorers who had noted the existence of polynyas, large open-water areas in the ice cap, far to the north of the Siberian coast. (Between May and July, Maury noted, a sizable expanse of open water often formed at the extreme north end of Baffin Bay—off Greenland’s west coast. It was first described in the early 1600s and had come to be known among whalers as, simply, the North Water.)
In his masterwork, The Physical Geography of the Sea, Maury wrote about a right whale that had been caught near the Bering Strait. Embedded in the whale’s flesh was an old harpoon bearing the stamp of a vessel that operated only near Greenland. This wounded whale had thus somehow made its way from the North Atlantic to the North Pacific. How was this possible?
“It is known that these whales can not travel under the ice for such a great distance,” Maury correctly observed. Nor had it swum clear around Cape Horn and then made its way up the Pacific to the Bering Strait. “The tropical regions of the ocean,” he pointed out, “are to the right whale as a sea of fire, through which he can not pass, and into which he never enters.” As far as Maury was concerned, this whale’s capture near Bering Strait constituted “irrefragable proof that there is, at times at least, open water communication through the Arctic Sea from one side of the continent to the other.”
Maury’s near obsession with the Open Polar Sea was intimately connected to his interest in another important oceanic phenomenon, one he’d spent much of his career studying: the Gulf Stream. Far better than anybody then alive, Maury understood the current’s breadth, velocity, power, and thermal properties. When he talked about it, this master of charts and minutiae could be quite poetic. “There is a river in the ocean,” Maury wrote in The Physical Geography of the Sea. “The Gulf of Mexico is its fountain, and its mouth is in the Arctic Sea. There is in the world no other such majestic flow of waters. Its current is more rapid than the Mississippi or the Amazon, and its volume is more than a thousand times greater. Its waters, as far out as the Carolina coasts, are of an indigo blue. They are so distinctly marked, that their line of junction, with the common sea-water, may be traced by the eye.”
Silas Bent believed that his Kuro Siwo was every bit as powerful as Maury’s Gulf Stream. “In volume, velocity, and dimensions, they are almost identical,” the Putnam’s article noted. Their salinity, temperature, and larger climatic influence were comparable. If anything, Bent surmised, the Kuro Siwo was more potent, since the Pacific was a considerably larger ocean than the Atlantic. For this reason, he thought that the next big push for the pole should come from the direction of the Bering Strait—an angle of attack that had never been tried before.
THE THEORIES OF Silas Bent and Matthew Fontaine Maury, while buttressed by the science of their day, tapped into wellsprings of myth, fable, and belief. Variations of the Open Polar Sea idea had existed since prehistoric times. The notion of a safe, warm place at the roof of the globe—an oasis in a desert of ice, a polar utopia—seems to have been deeply embedded in the human psyche.
The Vikings spoke of a place at the world’s northern rim, sometimes called Ultima Thule, where the oceans emptied into a vast hole that recharged all the springs and rivers on the earth. The Greeks believed in a realm called Hyperborea that lay far to the north. A place of eternal spring where the sun never set, Hyperborea was said to be bordered by the mighty River Okeanos and the Riphean Mountains, where lived the griffins—formidable beasts that were half lion and half eagle. The notion that Saint Nicholas—a.k.a. Kris Kringle or Santa Claus—lives at the North Pole seems to have a much more recent vintage. The earliest known reference to Saint Nick’s polar residence comes from a Thomas Nast cartoon in an 1866 issue of Harper’s Weekly—the artist captioned a collection of his Yuletide engravings “Santa Claussville, N.P.” Still, the larger idea behind Nast’s conceit—of a warm, jolly, beneficent place at the apex of the world where people might live—had ancient roots, and it spoke to America’s consuming fascination with the North Pole throughout the 1800s.
A number of early scientists imagined that the poles must have giant vortices or vents from which large amounts of thermal or electromagnetic energy escaped. Newton postulated that the planet was a spheroid flattened at the poles—which, if true, meant that polar lands and seas were closer to the earth’s warm inner core and therefore could be quite temperate. Eighteenth-century British astronomer Edmond Halley, famous for calculating the orbit of the comet that bears his name, believed that the earth was hollow, suffused with luminous gases, and inhabited by animals and even a race of humans. Halley thought the planet’s crust was so thin at the poles that it emitted plumes of radiant gases far into the atmosphere—this was his explanation for the aurora borealis.
Much of the theorizing about an ice-free polar sea was fueled by a practical desire: If a clear route could be found over the pole, the commercial implications would be enormous. For centuries, the British and the Dutch had been particularly keen on finding a northern passage to Asia that would allow them better to compete against the Spanish and Portuguese, who had all but monopolized the southern sea routes around Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope. Consequently, finding an ice-free northern passage became a holy grail in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. William Barents and Henry Hudson, among other prominent explorers, became big believers in variations of the Open Polar Sea concept, although in their far-flung travels they never found compelling evidence for its existence.
One of the earliest and most dogged theoretical champions of the Open Polar Sea was an eighteenth-century lawyer and naturalist from England named Daines Barrington. Barrington’s evidence was dubious at best—it seems to have consisted mainly of a tall tale from the 1600s, spun in a tavern in Amsterdam, in which a Dutch whaler claimed to have once sailed to the North Pole and back on a “free and open Sea” in “fine warm Weather, such as was at Amsterdam in the Summer time.” As far as Barrington was concerned, this was proof positive that the Arctic was ice-free and navigable at least part of the year, and he tirelessly agitated for his government to mount an expedition to the North Pole.
OVER THE NEXT century and a half, Barrington’s cause was taken up by a long procession of rogues, explorers, scientists, pseudoscientists, and outright kooks. In the 1820s, a colorful crank from Ohio named John Cleves Symmes Jr. toured the United States, arguing that there were large holes at the North and South Poles that connected to networks of probably inhabited subterranean cavities. Scientists scoffed, but his “holes at the poles” concept, encapsulated in his best-selling book Symmes’ Theory of the Concentric Spheres, struck a chord with large audiences and eventually helped influence Congress, in 1836, to appropriate $300,000 for an ambitious voyage toward the South Pole.
Two years later, Edgar Allan Poe, apparently influenced by Symmes’s hollow-earth theories, published a strange and fantastical novel called The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. In Poe’s narrative, the eponymous main character sails to unexplored Antarctic regions and passes through an ice barrier only to emerge in a warm polar sea, where he encounters an island inhabited by a lost race of humans.
Still, throughout the nineteenth century, most of the action and most of the literature pertaining to the Open Polar Sea remained fixed on the Arctic. The theory’s most indefatigable proponent was Sir John Barrow, the longtime second secretary of the British Admiralty. Throughout the first half of the 1800s, Barrow sent numerous expeditions into the waters around Greenland and Baffin Island to prove the Open Polar Sea’s existence
, or at least to find some seasonally ice-free route—a Northwest Passage—over the top of Canada that would lead to the Pacific.
The largest and most famous of the voyages promoted by Barrow was the Franklin expedition of 1845. Captain John Franklin and his crew set sail from England in two absurdly well-provisioned vessels, the Terror and the Erebus. After making stops along the coast of Greenland, Franklin and his men—129, all told—ventured into the unknown. They were never heard from again. Although numerous search expeditions were launched in the late 1840s and early 1850s, the mystery of what happened to Franklin remained unsolved, and it endured as an international cause célèbre for decades. One of the leading ideas was that Franklin and his men were still sailing around in the Open Polar Sea—unable to find a way out.
In 1853, a swashbuckling American explorer named Elisha Kent Kane launched an expedition with the dual purpose of rescuing Franklin and finding the Open Polar Sea. The following year, while pushing along the northwest coast of Greenland, members of Kane’s party came upon what appeared to be open ocean. In fact, it was only a small, seasonal gap in the ice pack, but Kane felt sure his team had made an epic discovery.
“Seals were sporting and waterfowl feeding in this open sea,” he later wrote. “Its waves came rolling in, and dashing with measured tread, like the majestic billows of [an] old ocean, against the shore. Solitude, the cold and boundless expanse, and the mysterious heavings of its green waters, lent their charm to the scene.” Kane said that laying eyes on the Open Polar Sea “was well calculated to arouse emotions of the highest order … I do not believe there was a man among us who did not long for the means of entering upon its bright and lonely waters.” Maps later published on the basis of the Kane expedition’s reports depicted an “OPEN SEA” labeled in unequivocal bold letters, stretching across the pole.