A history of the Arctic nature, exploration and exploitation

352 Pages·2012·2.424 MB·English

by  John McCannon

a histor\ of the arctic

A HISTORY OF THE
ARCTIC
NATURE, EXPLORATION AND EXPLOITATION
JOHN MCCANNON
reaktion books
With love to Pam and Miranda
Published by
Reaktion Books Ltd
33Great Sutton Street
London ec1v 0dx, uk
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2012
Copyright © John McCannon 2012
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior
permission of the publishers.
Printed and bound by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
McCannon, John, 1967–
A history of the Arctic: nature, exploration and exploitation.
1. Arctic regions –History.
2. Arctic regions –Discovery and exploration –History.
3. Arctic regions –Climate.
4. Arctic regions –Environmental conditions.
5. Geopolitics –Arctic regions.
I. Title
998-dc23
isbn978 1 78023 018 4
Contents
1
Origins: Introduction and
Environmental Overview 7
2
Encounters: Prehistory and Early History
to 1500 ce 27
3
Incursions: 1500 to 1800 77
4
Crusades: 1800 to 1914 125
5
Subjugations: 1914 to 1945 193
6
Contaminations: 1945 to 1991 236
7
Extinctions? 1991 to the Present 279
references 309
bibliography 319
acknowledgements 329
photo acknowledgements 331
index 333
Circumpolar view of the Arctic.
1
Origins: Introduction and
Environmental Overview
In July 1895, after months of allowing his research vessel, the Fram,
to drift through the pack ice of the Arctic Ocean, Fridtjof Nansen
of Norway caught sight of land for the first time in almost two years.
Finally, he exclaimed, ‘we again see something rising above that never-
ending white line on the horizon yonder – a white line which for count-
less ages has stretched over this lonely sea, and which for millennia to
come shall stretch in the same way.’ For the crew of the Fram, to be
where the human eye could once more perceive topographical difference
was to recover the human sense of passing time, an experience Nansen
likened to starting ‘a new life’. ‘For the ice’, by contrast, every moment
was, and ever would be, ‘the same’.1
Throughout recorded history, wilderness in many forms has
served to symbolize elemental vastness and permanence. The forest
primeval. The earth-rooted mountain. Boundless steppes and limitless
seas. That said, perhaps no landscape has stood out in the modern
mind as so quintessentially timeless as the Arctic. In the Western
imagination, the polar world has featured as a realm of crystalline
purity, as a grey kingdom of frozen death, and in other guises besides,
but is most often seen as eternal and unchanging. Nansen described
it further as ‘so awfully still, with the silence that shall one day reign,
when the earth again becomes desolate and empty’ – making him merely
one of dozens who essentialize the Arctic, even if just for poetic effect,
as an ageless expanse marked solely by the inexorable encroachment
of glaciers upon the land, the mesmerizing shimmer of the aurora
borealis, and endless cycles of migration leading polar bears, reindeer
and whales in never-varying circles over the earth and through the
ocean depths.2
7
a history of the arctic
The North American Arctic and Greenland.
But the Arctic, of course, does change. Like all places, it moves
through time, shaped by natural forces and human agency alike. Also,
to those who live there or pay it close attention, it presents more faces than
it is commonly thought to have. The American explorer Elisha Kent
Kane cleaved to the standard view in his Grinnell expedition diaries,
declaring the Arctic ‘a landscape such as Milton or Dante might imagine:
inorganic, desolate, mysterious . . . unfinished by the hand of its Creator’
– whereas the Canadian naturalist Farley Mowat insists that ‘the Arctic
is not only the ice-covered cap of the world’ or ‘the absolute cold of the
pole’, but also ‘two million square miles of rolling plains that, during the
heat of midsummer, are thronged with life and brilliant with the colors
of countless plants in full bloom’.3
The purpose of this book is to portray these many visages and to
trace the Arctic’s passage through time as fully as possible. Both tasks
necessitate the weaving together of many narratives, for ‘Arctic history’
encompasses not just the oft-repeated chronicle of polar exploration,
but processes of national development, economic organization and
resource mobilization. It is the still-undervalued tale of the peoples
indigenous to the Arctic and their frequently painful interactions
with Euro-American outsiders and colonizers. It is bound up with the
histories of science, technology, diplomacy and war. It demands
an appreciation of the environment’s climatological and zoological
8