Written by Kat Jivkova
On December 14, 1852, members of the American Geographical and Statistical Society (AGSS) gathered in New York to meet a true “Arctic celebrity”: Elisha Kent Kane. Having recently returned from his Arctic travels, Kane eagerly recounted his observations of the polar region and introduced his audience to the possibility of an Open Polar Sea. He claimed that surrounding the North Pole was an ice-free body of water, “the Polynya, or Iceless Sea”, which could establish new possibilities for sea travel between Europe and the Pacific. His request to lead an expedition toward the Open Polar Sea was received with much enthusiasm by the then-president of AGSS, George Bancroft, who praised the “scientific and excellent gentleman” for the proposed project. Known as the second Grinnell expedition, Kane and his team set forth towards Greenland in their ship, Advance, in the following year and subsequently reported observations of open water.
Kane was one of many Arctic celebrities who embarked on polar expeditions with the hopes of defeating the impenetrable ice, which allegedly encircled the northern regions, and sailing on through the temperate sea. Just seven years later, one of Kane’s acquaintances, Isaac Israel Hayes, embarked on his own mission to justify the existence of a Polar Sea, while another American officer, George De Long, tragically died in 1881 during his search of open water across the Bering Strait toward the North Pole. These are just three of the numerous examples of expeditions that took place in the nineteenth century under what historians have described as “wishful thinking”. Rather than ridiculing these explorers, or dismissing their beliefs as “fatal chimera”, I explore several ways in which the Open Polar Sea theory was rationalised and, therefore, may have been viewed as a reasonable phenomenon. I further argue that a network of arctic explorers, theoretical geographers, and “enlightened savants” all contributed to the popularisation of the Open Polar Sea theory, all in very different manners.
So, why did so many explorers believe in the theory in the first place? There are several interesting points that seemingly justified the existence of an Open Polar Sea according to theorists: (1) it was believed that ice could only form along coastal regions, and since there was no land near the North Pole, there could be no ice; (2) observations of wind direction pointed to reduced barometric pressure toward the Pole, indicating the presence of water; (3) an abundance of animal life in the Arctic suggested that the region was a hospitable place for them; and (4) the sun’s rays, alongside the heat from ocean currents seemingly had the ability to maintain an open sea. These arguments, combined with the written reports of open water made by numerous explorers, the argument for the existence of an Open Polar Sea was viable.
The Open Polar Sea theory came into fruition well before Kane’s celebrity status as an Arctic explorer, beginning in the sixteenth century. Indeed, various medieval navigators tested the Polar Sea’s navigability, driven by mercantilist pursuits. Christopher Columbus, for example, sailed three miles north of Iceland in 1467 and did not come across any ice. English merchant Robert Thorne explored this idea further by actively recommending that the English explore the idea of a northeast passage to the Pacific. A century later, the British government sent an expedition to the North Pole, led by Captain Constantine Phipps, which was blocked by ice sea. The Dutch followed suit, though all of their northern voyages similarly ended with encounters of ice. By the nineteenth century, these “ice encounters” were interpreted as being parts of an annulus, or ring, that surrounded the Open Polar Sea. Most expeditions ended discursively, with no explorers attaining any definitive results on the existence of open water. Due to this problem, London-based cartographer and theoretical geographer, August Petermann, utilised physical geography to describe the ways in which the Arctic region should be properly navigated. He argued, for instance, that only by sailing between Spitzbergen and Novaya Zemlya could expeditions avoid barriers of ice and finally reach passage into the central Arctic basin. Notably, theorists like Petermann were criticised for their “armchair” scientific expertise, which was backed by contemporary knowledge rather than personal experience of the Arctic regions. To counteract these criticisms, theoretical geographers used “collective observation” in their studies, meaning that they often called upon the observations of Arctic explorers to further inform their analyses. Similarly, explorers themselves used theory to substantiate their own expeditions. In Hayes’ expedition account published in 1867, he readily accepts “the deductions of many learned physicists that the sea about the North Pole cannot be frozen”. In this respect, the fieldworker, or Arctic celebrity, was intrinsically linked to the “armchair” theorist.
Aside from theorists and explorers, enlightened savants in the form of writers also played a role in the dissemination of Open Polar Sea theory. Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island describes an island which resided close to the Pole, surrounded by an open sea. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein begins with a sailor seeking passage “through the seas which surround the pole”, and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Sylvia’s Lovers recounts the lives of whaling men who sailed the arctic seas. All of these examples fall under the subgenre of nineteenth-century polar fiction, which further fuelled Western ambition to explore the Arctic regions. Interestingly, the British expeditions of the next hundred years actually mirrored an expedition described by Arthur Conan Doyle in The Captain of the Pole-Star during which a medical student sails northward toward the Arctic. Therefore, the fictional accounts of an Open Polar Sea, and a more general “Arctic craze” during the nineteenth century, reflected European yearnings of real polar adventure. The Open Polar Sea crossed the line; from mythical tale to scientific theory. Even after its scientific proof, the theory harboured romantic undertones which can only be understood in the wider context of the nineteenth century. Hayes’ account of his expedition describes the mystic sea he hopes to see as a “great wilderness of glittering peaks, possessing a stern, quiet sublimity that is wonderfully imposing”. Thus, the explorers of the period were just as much infatuated with the Arctic as the writers, in spite of their scientific allegiances.
After numerous failures to find the Open Polar Sea, the theory was conclusively disproved by the end of the nineteenth century. However, it still remains an impressive story of the ways in which the Arctic captured the Western imagination; first through fiction, and later through science. To the writers of the time, the Open Polar Sea was viewed as a magical, secret world, or heavenly abode. To scientists, under the influence of Humboldtian principle, it was a unifying entity which proved that all nature was interconnected. Contrary to the assumptions of various historians, the theory of an Open Polar Sea was not outrageous, especially when one takes into account the numerous firsthand accounts of open water, and the theoretical justifications. Rather than measuring this theory against modern scientific standards, I implore historians to re-examine the Open Polar Sea as a network of numerous agents, some writers, and others scientists, who collaborated on the dissemination of a very impressive hypothesis. I end with an unfortunate note: scientists predict that the diminishing Arctic sea ice, as a result of global warming, may very well re-introduce discussions of open water in the region in future years. It seems that we have come in a full circle, with the Arctic being regularly discussed by geographers, but this time for more harrowing reasons.
Bibliography
Carter, Christopher. “‘The Sea Fryseth Not’; Science and the Open Polar Sea in the Nineteenth Century.” Earth sciences history 32, no. 2 (2013): 235–251.
Hayes, Isaac Israel. The Open Polar Sea: A Narrative of a Voyage of Discovery towards the North Pole, in the Schooner United States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Kaalund, Nanna Katrine Lüders, and John Woitkowitz. “‘Ancient Lore with Modern Appliances’: Networks, Expertise, and the Making of the Open Polar Sea, 1851–1853.” The British journal for the history of science 54, no. 3 (2021): 277–299.
Martin, Constance. “William Scoresby, Jr. (1789-1857) and the Open Polar Sea: Myth and Reality.” Arctic 41, no. 1 (1988): 39–47.
Schulz, Kathryn. “Literature’s Arctic Obsession.” The New Yorker. [Online]. [Accessed on 17 January 2024].
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/24/literatures-arctic-obsession
Wright, John K. “The Open Polar Sea.” Geographical review 43, no. 3 (1953): 338–365.
Featured Image Credit: Silas Bent, English: Map Showing the Supposed Open Polar Sea, 1872, 1872, http://www.photolib.noaa.gov/htmls/libr0567.htm, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Openpolar.jpg.
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