In the following pages, beginning in a time before the sagas, the notion of a road to Cathay, a Northwest Passage, emerges. The quest for such a corridor, a path to wealth that had to be followed through a perilous landscape, gathers the dreams of several ages. Rooted in this search is one of the oldest of all human yearnings—finding the material fortune that lies beyond human struggle, and the peace that lies on the other side of hope.

  I should emphasize two points. Few original documents point up the unadorned character, the undisguised sensibilities, of the participants in these dramas. And the most common simile of comparison for these journeys—the exploits of astronauts—falls short. The astronaut is suitably dressed for his work, professionally trained, assiduously looked after en route, and nationally regarded. He possesses superb tools of navigation and observation. The people who first came into the Arctic had no photograph of the far shore before they left. They sailed in crude ships with cruder tools of navigation, and with maps that had no foundation or geographic authority. They shipwrecked so often that it is difficult to find records of their deaths, because shipwreck and death were unremarkable at the time. They received, for the most part, no support—popular or financial. They suffered brutally and fatally from the weather and from scurvy, starvation, Eskimo hostility, and thirst. Their courage and determination in some instances were so extreme as to seem eerie and peculiar rather than heroic. Visions of achievement drove them on. In the worst moments they were held together by regard for each other, by invincible bearing, or by stern naval discipline. Whether one finds such resourceful courage among a group of young monks on a spiritual voyage in a carraugh, or among worldly sailors with John Davis in the sixteenth century, or in William Parry’s snug winter quarters on Melville Island in 1819–20, it is a sterling human quality.

  In the journals and histories I read of these journeys I was drawn on by a sharp leaning in the human spirit: pure desire—the complexities of human passion and cupidity. Someone, for example, had to pay for these trips; and whoever paid was looking for a way to be paid back. Rarely was the goal anything as selfless as an increase in mankind’s geographical knowledge. An arctic voyage in quest of unknown riches, or of a new passage to known riches, could mean tangible wealth for investors, and it could mean fame and social position for a captain or pilot. For a common seaman the reward might only mean some slip of the exotic, or a chance at the riches himself—at the very least a good story, probably something astounding. Enough, certainly, to sign on.

  As I read, I tried to imagine the singular hunger for such things, how desire alone might convey a group of people into those fearsome seas. The achievement of one’s desires may reveal what one considers moral; but it also reveals the aspiration and tack of an individual life, and the tenor of an age. In this light, one can better understand failures of nerve in the Arctic, such as Bering’s in the Chukchi Sea in 1728—he simply did not have Peter the Great’s burning desire to define eastern Russia. And one can better understand figures in arctic exploration so obsessed with their own achievement that they found it irksome to acknowledge the Eskimos, unnamed companions, and indefatigable dogs who helped them.

  Arctic history became for me, then, a legacy of desire—the desire of individual men to achieve their goals. But it was also the legacy of a kind of desire that transcends heroics and which was privately known to many—the desire for a safe and honorable passage through the world.

  As I walked the beach I stopped now and then to pick over something on the storm-hardened shore—bits of whale vertebrae, waterlogged feathers, the odd but ubiquitous piece of plastic, a strict reminder against romance.

  The narratives I carried in my head that afternoon fascinated me, but not for what they recorded of geographic accomplishment or for how they might be used in support of one side or another of a controversy, such as whether Frederick Cook or Robert Peary got to the Pole first. They held the mind because of what they said about human endeavor. Behind the polite and abstemious journal entries of British naval officers, behind the self-conscious prose of dashing explorers, were the lives of courageous, bewildered, and dreaming people. Some reports suggest that heroic passage took place for many just offstage. They make clear that others struggled mightily to find some meaning in what they were doing in those regions, for the very act of exploration seemed to them at times completely mad. They wanted to feel that what they were doing was necessary, if not for themselves then for the nation, for mankind.

  The literature of arctic exploration is frequently offered as a record of resolute will before the menacing fortifications of the landscape. It is more profitable I think to disregard this notion—that the land is an adversary bent on human defeat, that the people who came and went were heroes or failures in this. It is better to contemplate the record of human longing to achieve something significant, to be free of some of the grim weight of life. That weight was ignorance, poverty of spirit, indolence, and the threat of anonymity and destitution. This harsh landscape became the focus of a desire to separate oneself from those things and to overcome them. In these arctic narratives, then, are the threads of dreams that serve us all.

  Apsley Cherry-Garrard, a companion of Robert Scott, said that exploration was the physical expression of an intellectual passion. His remark was made in an age when royal societies and governments underwrote most expeditions, out of a Victorian sense of duty, curiosity, and orthodoxy. More exploration, by far, was instigated, and more geographical knowledge gained, with the underwriting of men of commerce, war, and religion, who went out for commercial gain or for national or religious conquest. Still, Cherry-Garrard’s observation, concise and idealistic, is worth remembering. It points up the relationship between toil and belief, and alludes to the hope of reward that is so much a part of a decision to enter the unknown. It might at first seem to be no visionary Elizabethan merchant’s slogan; nor serve to explain the voyages of Irish monks in search of Terra Repromissionis Sanctorum, the blessed landscape where one stepped over that dark abyss that separated what was profane from what was holy. But, in a sense, Cherry-Garrard’s summation describes all arctic travel—the intellectual passion is whatever anyone imagined would be there for him.

  Desire for material wealth, for spiritual or emotional ecstasy, for recognition—strains of all three are found in nearly every arctic expedition. From the beginning, however, the promise of financial reward proved the most enduring. Nansen, writing in 1911, regarded all arctic exploration as simply evidence of the power of the unknown over the human mind. “Nowhere else,” he wrote, “have we won our way more slowly, nowhere else has every new step caused so much trouble, so many privations and sufferings, and certainly nowhere have the resulting discoveries promised fewer material advantages.”

  Leaving aside the Irish peregrinatores and the Norse for the moment, it became clear fairly quickly to early European explorers that beyond furs in the subarctic and fisheries at the arctic periphery, the land held no tangible wealth. Carrier’s famous remark about southern Labrador came to stand for a general condemnation of the whole region: it looked like “the land God gave to Cain.” “Praeter solitudinem nihil video,” wrote one early explorer—“I saw nothing but solitude.” And yet, fatal shipwreck after shipwreck, bankruptcy after bankruptcy, the expeditions continued, strung out on the thinnest hopes, with the most sanguine expectations. Men of character continued to sail to their death for men of greed. And unscrupulous promoters and aggrandizing individuals of every stripe continued to manipulate and take advantage of whatever new was learned.

  One looks in vain for a rational explanation for this dedication—the exploration of the Arctic made as little sense as Pizarro’s march in search of El Dorado, or Coronado’s surreal wandering over the trackless llanos of the Southwest. There was at least gold and silver to be had in the Spanish conquest, high-grade ore in record time. Hiking down the empty beach at Pingok, my head full of the volumes of Hakluyt, the scholarly deliberations of Samuel Eliot Morison, the personal narratives of John Davis, of William Parry, I arrived always at the same, disquieting place: the history of Western exploration in the New World in every quarter is a confrontation with an image of distant wealth. Gold, furs, timber, whales, the Elysian Fields, the control of trade routes to the Orient—it all had to be verified, acquired, processed, allocated, and defended. And these far-flung enterprises had to be profitable, or be made to seem profitable, or be financed until they were. The task was wild, extraordinary. And it was complicated by the fact that people were living in North America when we arrived. Their title to the wealth had to be extinguished.

  The most philosophically troubling issue of our incursion in the New World, I think, grows out of our definition of wealth—the methods for its acquisition and our perception of what sorts of riches can actually be owned and transferred. A fresh landscape brings out awe, desire, and apprehension in us. But one like North America, undeveloped, also encourages a vague feeling that we can either augment or waste our lives in such places, depending on what we do. Our colloquy with the original inhabitants, of course, is unfinished. And we are still asking ourselves: What is worth acquiring here?

  In the following narratives, it is not solely the desire of some men for different sorts of wealth that becomes clear but the suspicion that North America offered more than material wealth. It offered wealth that could not be owned, like the clarity of the air and the sight of 300,000 snow geese feeding undisturbed on the Great Plain of the Koukdjuak. One cannot change the historical fact that the air is no longer clear in some places and that geese no longer feed in such numbers along the Koukdjuak, while the silver mines in the great mountain of Potosí are entering their fifth century of production in an atmosphere of urban despair and destitution. And that the native people have been abused.

  Our anxieties about these things are honest and deeply perplexing. Our difficulty lies in part, I think, with our insistence on defining completely the terms of our encounter with new-found wealth. We do not like to be countermanded in our categories by having something define itself. We seem vaguely uneasy, too, with the notion that a flock of snow geese rising like a snowstorm over Baffin Island is as valuable or more to mankind than the silver, tin, and copper being dug out of the Bolivian Andes at Potosí. These are not modern misgivings; they date in North America from the time of Columbus and John Cabot.

  What every culture must eventually decide, actively debate and decide, is what of all that surrounds it, tangible and intangible, it will dismantle and turn into material wealth. And what of its cultural wealth, from the tradition of finding peace in the vision of an undisturbed hillside to a knowledge of how to finance a corporate merger, it will fight to preserve.

  Walking down the long beach at Pingok that day I understood something else about our encounter with North America, which I did not at first have words for. It had to do with tolerance. It seemed clear to me that we need tolerance in our lives for the worth of different sorts of perception, of which the contrasting Umwelten of the animals on the island are a reminder. And we need a tolerance for the unmanipulated and unpossessed landscape. But what I came to see, too, was that we need to understand the relationship between tolerance and different sorts of wealth, how a tolerance for the unconverted things of the earth is intertwined with the substance of a truly rich life.

  When Pytheas sailed from Marseilles through the Gates of Hercules (the Strait of Gibraltar) and turned north in search of tin and amber, he was likely not the first. Carthaginians probably preceded him. His journals and maps are lost. Roman historians, jealous of his success, later disparaged his accomplishment, which was probably the circumnavigation of Britain and the discovery of the Orkneys. He sailed as far as the north coast of Norway or perhaps as far as Iceland—both have been suggested as his Thule.1 Pytheas’ journey (330–325 B.C.) commonly serves as a starting point for a history of arctic exploration, but this is history from a Mediterranean point of view. People ancestral to the Celts of northern Europe and to the Norse no doubt plied the same waters Pytheas sailed, at the same time.

  The Mediterranean view of the Arctic, down to the time of the Elizabethan mariners, was shaped by two somewhat contradictory thoughts. The Arctic represented both threat and salvation. In the classical mind—which means in most learned European minds in the Middle Ages—invasion and destruction came from the North, at the hands of roving warrior peoples, from vaguely known Cimmerians about 800 B.C., to the Teutonic tribes that fought the Romans, to the Norse and Saxons of later centuries. The North was a region of fierce, fabulous people like the Amazons and the Cynocephali, or dog-headed people. Of barbaric Sythians whose lands bordered the bleak prospect of the Northern Ocean. One might go there for tin or amber, or for horses and furs, but these lands “under the pivot of the stars” were held by “hasty and evil-tempered folk” who had “the nature of bears.” They ate raw meat and fat, and the eggs of “fen fowl” (plovers, gulls, and geese), and were as curious and dangerous as nightmares.

  The Northern Ocean itself was a place of whirlpools (Chaos and Maelstrom) and rip tides. (Mediterranean sailors did not discover tides until they left that inland sea.) The Hyperborean Sea, wrote a sixth-century monk, “was one known only to Him who created it.” Oceanus innavigabilis and Oceanus caligans vel rigens, it said on the maps. Unnavigable. A hardened ocean shrouded in darkness. Beyond this, however, beyond Boreas, Caecias, Argestes, Thrascis, and the other northern winds, on the other side of the Rhipaean Mountains, “terrible with snow,” was a land more graceful and sweet, less troubled and more fecund than any anyone had ever known. The pastures were so excellent that “if the cattle were allowed to graze more than a small part of the day, they burst in pieces.” The sound of moving water was as the music of a string quartet. Vines bore fruit twelve times a year. Wheat headed not in grains but in loaves. People lived in perfect peace, “far from the evils of tyranny and war.” Their place of worship was within clouds of wheeling swans.

  The Land of the Hyperboreans, which lay beyond all the malevolence symbolized by the barbarians, was in its different guises, including the various Isles of the Blessed in the Western Ocean and the “Wineland” of the Norse, one of the most powerful projections of the Western imagination. These same ideas of a land where “no enemy pursues” (the Elysian Fields, the Hesperides, Avalon, El Dorado, and Irish Brasil) were inseparably a part of early arctic exploration.2

  The Irish imramha, or sea sagas, recount the voyages of monks searching for the Isles of the Blessed and, as it happened, for bleak outposts in the “desert of the Ocean” suitable for contemplation. The most widely known of these was written down sometime in the ninth or tenth century, the Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis, the story of the seven-year voyage of the abbot Saint Brendan, in a carraugh with seventeen monks. Brendan was born about A.D. 489 in County Kerry and was abbot at Clonfert in East Galway when he left on his journey (or a series of journeys).

  Their craft, the carraugh, was a long, narrow, open but seaworthy boat consisting of a wickerlike basket frame covered with oak-tanned oxhide caulked with tallow. Brendan and his monks sailed with wine and cold food, used oars and a single stepped mast to convey themselves, slept on a mattress of heather, and dropped a stone anchor in bays where they explored. Their journey is a wondrous epic, filled with ecstatic visions and astounding events. They met strangers with gestures of courtesy and used their healing arts among them. They took little note of the hazards they faced. The themes are of compassion, wonder, and respect (as distinct from the themes of property, lineage, bloodshed, and banishment that distinguish the later, Icelandic sagas).

  Reading loosely, it is possible to imagine that Brendan reached the Faroes and Iceland, and perhaps saw the towering volcanic peak of Beerenberg on the eastern end of Jan Mayen Island. At one point the monks saw an iceberg that took three days of hard rowing to reach. Transfixed by its beauty, Brendan suggested they row through a hole in it, which in the evening light seemed “like the eye of God.”

  These impeccable, generous, innocent, attentive men were, one must think, the perfect travelers.

  In the fifth and sixth centuries Ireland was the center of high culture in Europe. Its tribal monasteries were refugia for intellectual thought and spiritual practice. Under pressure from Rome to bring their tradition into line with Christian orthodoxy and pressed as well by barbaric Vikings, these monks, like fierce Essenes, moved north and west to the Faroes and to Iceland, where they built their cells and monasteries on promontories and plains facing the Western Ocean. Tradition, but scant reliable record, holds that they moved on to Greenland ahead of the Norse, and thence to Labrador, Newfoundland, and the Saint Lawrence River Valley.

  The Norse who came in their tracks, the second European culture after the Celts to enter the Arctic, are often cast as plunderers and wastrels, but the characterization is inaccurate. Many of the Norse who came to Iceland—the country was discovered in 860, according to the sagas, by Gardar Svavarsson, a Swedish-born Dane—were fleeing the tyrannic reign of Harald Haarfager or the rebellion of local inhabitants in Norse-occupied Ireland, Scotland, and Normandy. They were farmers and fishermen, not sea raiders. They began arriving in Iceland sometime after 870. Greenland, which may have been discovered by a Norwegian named Gunnbjörn Ulfsson, was made famous by Eirik Raude, made an outcast in Iceland in 982 for twice taking human life without reason. His banishment lasted three years, during which time “Eric the Red” stayed in present-day Julianehåb District in Greenland, on Eriks Fiord.3

  In 986 Eric again sailed for Greenland from Iceland with twenty-five ships, of which fourteen, with about 500 people, arrived at Eriks Fiord. The settlers built houses of stone and turf, with turf roofs over driftwood frames. They raised a small breed of cattle, sheep, and goats, hunted seals and walrus, and caught fish. The community at Eriks Fiord, called the Eastern Settlement, and another 175 miles farther up the coast called the Western Settlement, came near to thriving during periods in the eleventh and twelfth centuries when there was some regular trade with northern Europe—walrus ivory, gyrfalcons, polar bear hides, and sealskins for iron, grain, manufactured implements, and simple machinery. It was a self-governing free state but, because of its tenuous economy, never politically stable. In 1261 it came under Norwegian rule. The trade on which it depended, strictly regulated by a Norwegian charter, withered for a variety of reasons—the rise of the Hanseatic League, the shift of the Norwegian capital to Copenhagen in 1397, and financial collapse in Bergen, the Norwegian city from which ships for the Greenland trade sailed. The two colonies in Greenland were soon forgotten. Without trade to sustain them, a subsistence economy never being their forte, the remnant Norse population died out or intermarried with their Eskimo neighbors. Some last few may have been abducted by English slave traders in the sixteenth century.4