Taissumani, July 29

Elisha Kent Kane.

KENN HARPER

In the spring of 1854 Kane’s shipmates, William Morton and the Greenlander Hans Hendrik, left the ship to sled north on a reconnaissance of the northern coastline of Kane Basin and the channel leading northward from it.

When they returned Morton described a vast area of open water that he had discovered from a rocky promontory. Morton was subsequently dubbed “the discoverer of the Open Polar Sea.”

Kane wrote, “They were on the shores of a channel, so open that a frigate, or a fleet of frigates, might have sailed up it. The ice, already broken and decayed, formed a sort of horse-shoe-shaped beach, against which the waves broke in surf. As they travelled north, this channel expanded into an iceless area; ‘for four or five small pieces’ – lumps – were all that could be seen over the entire surface of its white-capped waters. Viewed from the cliffs, and taking thirty-six miles as the mean radius open to reliable survey, this sea had a justly-estimated extent of more than four thousand square miles.”

A few pages later, Kane was even more effusive: “It must have been an imposing sight, as he [Morton] stood at this termination of his journey, looking out upon the great waste of waters before him. Not a ‘speck of ice,’ to use his own words, could be seen. There, from a height of four hundred and eighty feet, which commanded a horizon of almost forty miles, his ears were gladdened with the novel music of dashing waves; and a surf, breaking in among the rocks at his feet, stayed his further progress.”

Kane was ecstatic at Morton’s discovery and thought that he had “led an expedition whose results will be remembered for all time.”

But Morton had been deceived. An Open Polar Sea did not exist. Perhaps that year there was some early open water north of Kane Basin. But probably he had been the victim of an Arctic mirage — Arctic light reflecting off a snow-covered seascape — and a large dash of wishful thinking.

Kane returned to the United States in 1855, firm in his knowledge that he had discovered the Open Polar Sea – for as commander he usurped the credit for Morton’s and Hendrik’s “discovery.” Two years later, still confident in this assumption, he was dead.

In 1860 Isaac Israel Hayes, who had been surgeon on Kane’s expedition, returned to the High Arctic in search of the Open Polar Sea and the North Pole. He didn’t find either but he too returned south convinced of the existence of the Open Polar Sea. In 1867 he published a book with that title. Members of Hall’s later Polaris expedition described Hayes’s discoveries as “quite imaginary.”

Geographers tried to explain how the Arctic Ocean could remain ice-free. Kane had surmised that a deep Atlantic current kept the sea free from ice. Peterman thought a current running from the Pacific through Bering Strait was responsible. Silas Bent, a naval officer, postulated a branch of the Gulf Stream running north from the Atlantic and the Kuru-Siwo current bringing warm water from the Pacific.

But the American Polaris expedition led by Hall and the British Discovery expedition led by Nares dashed all of these theories. For, beyond the barriers of ice, there lay, not an open sea, but more barriers of ice. Sled trips to the north found nothing but more ice, ancient multi-year floes pushed up into outlandish shapes by the force of still more ice, almost impenetrable ice as far as the eye could see.

With the failure of the Nares expedition, Britain abandoned belief in an Open Polar Sea and lost interest in Arctic exploration altogether. American hope help out longer, but the tragic end to De Long’s Jeanette expedition finally put an end to America’s hopes too.

The idea of an Open Polar Sea had another home, but this one was rooted firmly, and perhaps more appropriately, in fiction. Ironically, its two best-known fictional portrayals are at either end of the nineteenth century popularity of the idea. In 1818, the year that John Barrow dispatched Buchan and Ross northward, Mary Shelley published Frankenstein, in which Captain Walton defended the idea of an Open Polar Sea. In 1875, the year that Nares’s Discovery left England for the High Arctic, Jules Verne published The English at the North Pole. In that book a volcano at the pole spewed red-hot lava into the Arctic Ocean. Both of these fictions were as credible as the reports of Kane and Morton. Within a few years of Nares’s return to England, belief in an Open Polar Sea was dead.

Taissumani recounts a specific event of historic interest. Kenn Harper is a historian, writer and linguist who lives in Iqaluit. Feedback? Send your comments and questions to kennharper@hotmail.com.