Arctic Atlantis
The race to find an elusive northern continent consumed explorers for a quarter of a century.
The race to find an elusive continent in the Far North consumed explorers for a quarter of a century.
“THE POSSIBILITY IS THERE; AN ISOLATED ISLAND continent, an Arctic Atlantis.” It was October 1903, and American explorer Robert Edwin Peary was speaking at the National Geographic Society’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. According to ancient Greek lore, the great island of Atlantis was lost when it sank beneath the ocean. Now Peary proclaimed that a new Atlantis might await discovery in the Far North, and he urged his audience to “think of writing upon that land some name to endure indelibly.”
The year before, Peary had returned from an unsuccessful attempt to reach the North Pole from Ellesmere Island. He was desperate to try again and ready to grasp at any theory that would make his chances of success appear rosier to potential sponsors. If there was land between Ellesmere and the pole, finding it would bring glory to the discoverer and to his country. For Peary, it was perhaps even more important that sledging north would be far easier on land than on the pack ice, with its immense pressure ridges and leads of open water.
Peary likely knew that Dr. Rollin A. Harris — a member of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey who specialized in the study of tides — had come to believe there was a large unknown land mass in the Beaufort Sea region, extending west towards Siberia and north to the pole. Having concluded from the reports of various explorers that ocean currents were diverted away from the Beaufort Sea, Harris believed the cause must be extensive new land. (The currents do circle around this area, a phenomenon now called the Beaufort Gyre, but Harris had some important details wrong.) Harris further argued that if there was no land in the polar basin the differences between high and low tides on the north coasts of Alaska and eastern Siberia would be much greater. These claims were first published in the June 1904 issue of National Geographic.
Harris’s theory was promptly criticized by the geomorphologist James W. Spencer, who pointed out that during the Norwegian Fram expedition of 1893–96 Fridtjof Nansen had proved that the Arctic Ocean was extremely deep on the European side of the North Pole. Spencer quite reasonably thought the depth was likely similar in the other hemisphere. The ocean floor around land (except islands of volcanic origin) becomes progressively more shallow closer to shore. The existence of an unknown continent in the Arctic was, accordingly, highly improbable.
A few months after Spencer’s criticism appeared, Peary set off on a new polar quest. When he returned in 1906 after another failure, Peary claimed to have actually glimpsed part of the “Arctic Atlantis” from the northwest coast of Ellesmere Island. He named it Crocker Land, after one of his wealthy supporters, George Crocker. Whether he had been deceived by an optical illusion or had simply fabricated the sighting is unclear. It is certainly possible that Peary, deeply chagrined over his repeated failures to reach the pole and believing that the new continent must exist, wanted to burnish his reputation with a major discovery. Or he might have seen it as a way to help drum up money for yet another expedition. The only indisputable fact is that Crocker Land did not really exist.
Both the president of Britain’s Royal Geographical Society (RGS), Sir Clements Markham, and Nansen expressed their disbelief regarding any new land beyond the limits of the North American and Siberian continental shelves. Nansen’s criticism, in a talk delivered to the RGS in 1907, was detailed and scathing. He contended, rightly, that the Beaufort Sea currents were created by the prevailing winds, and he observed that, if the Arctic Ocean really matched Harris’s speculations about it, it “would very soon run dry in the middle.”
Nansen’s prestige in the worlds of polar exploration and science was immense. Yet, astonishingly, his opinion was disregarded by most of his colleagues. Instead, both explorers and popular writers were quick to take up Harris’s theory, resurrecting old Indigenous tales and sailors’ reports of lands north of Alaska. For example, Harris’s publications encouraged a belief in the existence of “Keenan Land,” supposedly sighted by Captain John Keenan of the whaler
Stamboul in the 1870s.
Explorers were fired by the hope of finding the last major land mass on earth and thus, in Peary’s words, writing their names on the map “to endure indelibly.” The process involved some of the most foolhardy acts and inglorious squabbles in northern history. Between 1905 and 1928 numerous expeditions by sledge, ship, and airplane searched for the northern Atlantis, some of them involving serious loss of life and others barely avoiding disaster.
Many writers have emphasized the role of illusion in Arctic exploration history. Historian Glyn Williams, for example, called his book about the search for the Northwest Passage
Voyages of Delusion. But at least there really is a Northwest Passage, even if it proved far harder to navigate than geographers once hoped. The Arctic continent, by contrast, was wholly illusory, yet belief in it shaped the course of northern exploration in the early twentieth century.
The first to set out on the quest was the Englishman Alfred Harrison in 1905. Harrison, who was wealthy but not so rich that he could pay for a ship and crew, travelled down the Mackenzie River to Herschel Island off the Yukon coast. He hoped to buy supplies from the American whalers who congregated at Herschel, and he expected that one of the whaling ships would take him to Banks Island. From there, Harrison planned to sledge over the sea ice to the new continent.
At Herschel Island, Harrison found that the whalers had been frozen in by an unusually early winter and were short of supplies. Undaunted, he took up his abode with the
Inuit, learning their language and hunting skills. The next summer, however, the whalers’ supply ship did not arrive. After another winter of living on the land, Harrison went back to England.
In 1906 he was followed by a Dane, Ejnar Mikkelsen, who partnered with an American, Ernest de Koven Leffingwell. The pair had modest funds donated by geographical societies and several wealthy individuals; in addition, they received advice and a small financial contribution from Harris. They bought a schooner, the Duchess of Bedford, with which they intended to establish a base on Banks Island. However, the exceptionally bad ice conditions forced them to stop far short of this goal, at Flaxman Island off the Alaska coast.
In March 1907 the two men set out northward across the Beaufort Sea ice. They passed the limit of the continental shelf and took soundings, proving that the depth was too great for land to exist anywhere nearby. The disappointed explorers kept hoping against hope to see “land looming up beyond the farthest pressure-ridge on the horizon,” but they knew their soundings were “crushing evidence” against Harris’s theory.
In 1908–9 Peary made his last, and supposedly successful, attempt on the pole. Whether he actually reached 90° north latitude is a matter of dispute, but he at least travelled much farther toward it than he had previously managed. Like Mikkelsen and Leffingwell, Peary took soundings that showed a depth incompatible with the existence of land.
These observations ought to have put an end to all belief in an Arctic continent. However, Harris’s convictions were not easily shaken. He merely adjusted the boundaries of the supposed land, moving them away from Alaska and the pole and extending them slightly to include the reported position of Crocker Land. Peary, too, still insisted that Crocker Land was real. He encouraged a new expedition to map it, led by his former subordinates George Borup and Donald Baxter MacMillan. The Crocker Land Expedition was originally supposed to depart in 1912, but Borup was killed in a canoeing accident, forcing a delay until 1913.
This unexpected tragedy allowed Vilhjalmur Stefansson to organize a rival attempt. Stefansson had indirectly been involved with the earlier searches for the continent. In 1906 he was a graduate student and teaching assistant in anthropology at Harvard University. He was not much liked by his professors, and when he was caught selling exam questions to undergraduates they considered expelling him. In
the end, they foisted him off on Mikkelsen and Leffingwell, who had written to ask about young ethnologists who might be interested in joining them. “We were very glad to get rid of him,” Stefansson’s supervisor, Roland Dixon, later recounted.
Stefansson travelled down the Mackenzie, expecting to meet the others at Herschel Island. Since the Duchess of Bedford had stopped at Flaxman Island, and he had no resources of his own, he had no alternative but to follow Harrison’s example during the winter of 1906–7, which he spent partly at Harrison’s camp. When Stefansson left the Arctic the next summer, he was determined to return.
At this time, Stefansson’s ambitions were inspired by stories he had heard from a whaler, Christian “Charlie” Klengenberg. Klengenberg had spent the winter of 1905–6 on Victoria Island, where he met the Inuinnait or Copper Inuit, who had had no recorded contact with Europeans since the 1850s. Stefansson persuaded the American Museum of Natural History to sponsor an expedition to study these people. The new venture lasted from 1908 to 1912 and resulted in a blaze of publicity created by Stefansson’s claim that the Inuinnait (whom he dubbed the Blond Eskimos) might be descended from the medieval Norse colonists in Greenland.
Stefansson’s initial plan for his next expedition was to return to Victoria Island, but he was soon caught up in the renewed frenzy about the Arctic continent. His new plan was copied from Mikkelsen and Leffingwell. He would buy a ship, make a base on Banks Island or Prince Patrick Island, then sledge west over the sea ice. As his ideas grew more ambitious, Stefansson became dissatisfied with
the amount of money offered by his backers, the American Museum of Natural History and the National Geographic Society. He had developed contacts in Ottawa and Toronto, culminating in a meeting early in 1913 with the prime minister of Canada, Robert Borden.
Perceptively, Stefansson focused on sovereignty over the new land. If the continent was where Harris predicted, much of it would lie directly north of the Canadian mainland. Stefansson told Borden that, if his Arctic mission was funded exclusively by backers in the United States, the explorer would have no choice but to raise the American flag on new territory. However, if he also had support from Canada, he would not raise any flag, leaving the final ownership to be settled by diplomats. Borden promptly agreed to pay all expenses, and the venture was renamed the Canadian Arctic Expedition (CAE). Decades later, Stefansson joked that his strategy had been a kind of blackmail.
The Victoria Island initiative was taken up by Diamond Jenness, an ethnologist on the CAE team. He lived among the Inuinnait, and his documentation of their lives ultimately made his scientific reputation. To captain his ship, the Karluk, Stefansson hired Robert Abram “Bob” Bartlett, a devoted follower of Peary. Bartlett was unhappy with the Karluk, an old whaler far inferior to Peary’s Roosevelt. But he was just as passionate as Stefansson about finding the continent. “I would love to land on Crocker Land,” he declared, adding: “Hope to God she stays afloat long enough to get near it.”
In 1913 ice conditions on the north coast of Alaska were even worse than in 1905 and 1906. After Bartlett recklessly forced his way into the pack, the current carried the Karluk west. For about two weeks, the ship stayed near Harrison Bay, where Stefansson, Jenness, and a few others went ashore. Stefansson always claimed that he thought the Karluk was safely frozen in for the winter, and this was likely true. But instead the ship continued on toward Wrangel Island, north of Siberia, where it sank in January 1914. Eleven men died before rescue came.
Before the expedition’s first year was over, many members of the CAE condemned Stefansson as an egomaniac and a terrible organizer. However, he was no coward, and he was incredibly tenacious in pursuit of his goals. He set out across the ice from Alaska to Banks Island in the spring of 1914. In 1915 he sledged from Cape Prince Alfred on the island’s northwest coast towards the supposed continent. Again, soundings proved that there could be no new land nearby.
By this time, MacMillan had already tried to reach Crocker Land, with no result. MacMillan reported that he, like Peary, once thought he saw it far in the distance. But after eight days of travelling over the sea ice he found only a “chaos of pressure ridges” and realized he was “in pursuit of a will-o’-the wisp, ever receding, ever changing, ever beckoning.” Peary admitted that he must have been deceived
by a mirage in 1906, but he stubbornly told reporters that “both physical indications and theory still pointed to the existence of land somewhere in that region.”
Stefansson also refused to give up the quest. From two of the Karluk survivors, John Hadley and William Laird McKinlay, he learned that as the men on Wrangel Island waited for rescue, they had seen land to the north. McKinlay even provided a sketch of it. From this evidence, Stefansson concluded that the continent lay closer to Siberia than to the Canadian archipelago.
In 1921, Stefansson, determined to secure Wrangel Island as a base from which to search for the mysterious continent, sent four men — three Americans and a Canadian — and an Indigenous woman from Alaska to take possession. Two of the men were veterans of the CAE, but the other two were naive youngsters, barely out of their teens. Over the next few years, Stefansson pleaded first in Ottawa, then in London, and finally in Washington for some government to back him. In 1923 a relief ship reached the island, only to find that one man was dead and the other three had left for Siberia. They were never seen again. Only the woman, Ada Blackjack, and the expedition’s pet cat survived.
The belief in an Arctic continent also survived this bizarre and tragic episode. Nearly twenty years after Harris first published his theory, much solid evidence had been accumulated against it, while the indications that the land might indeed exist were far more shadowy. But since the First World War it had been plain that aviation would transform world geopolitics. During his Wrangel Island crusade, Stefansson insisted that Wrangel would someday be a major refuelling point on trans-Arctic air routes, with immense commercial and military value. In 1926 a Soviet colony was established there, crushing Stefansson’s last hopes. But the idea of a northern Atlantis remained, and if it existed its strategic potential could be vast. Some enthusiasts even suggested that it might be warmed by hot springs, making it habitable despite the latitude.
The Canadian government, Stefansson’s one-time backer in the quest for the continent, had wavered at first on Wrangel Island; but even before the sad outcome was known most federal bureaucrats were opposed to Stefansson’s expansionist Arctic visions. The government’s former chief geographer, James White, who became ever more influential regarding Arctic policy after 1922, was convinced that there was no continent. Yet the possibility of a foreign power taking over part of the Arctic Archipelago and establishing air bases there was a clear concern. As one civil servant noted, the growth of aviation meant that “this country cannot afford to have an alien country in occupation” north of the mainland. Canada accordingly focused on demonstrating ownership of its islands through patrols by land and sea.
Elsewhere, the obsession with the northern Atlantis intensified. The great Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had long been intrigued both by the airplane’s potential and by the possibility of a new continent. In 1918 he set out to drift across the Arctic Ocean in the ship Maud, but repeated attempts to get into the main trans-polar current failed. In 1923 Amundsen abandoned the Maud and took to the air, planning to
fly over the Beaufort Sea. Later that year, Bob Bartlett (who, though a Newfoundlander by birth, had become an American citizen) and others promoted a flight in the same region by the United States Navy’s new dirigible, USS Shenandoah.
The route over the pole, Bartlett proclaimed, was “the aerial Panama Canal of the future,” and Washington must control it by claiming the continent.
Both these attempts were cancelled, and Amundsen’s frenzied efforts to launch another airborne expedition reduced him to bankruptcy. However, he gained fresh resources when he teamed up with a wealthy young American, Lincoln Ellsworth, who passionately believed in the northern Atlantis. A 1925 flight by the two men resulted in near disaster. After a forced landing on the ice, they were barely able to get back in the air. That same year, Donald MacMillan made one more attempt to find the continent, in partnership with aviator Richard Evelyn Byrd. MacMillan and Byrd intended to establish bases on Ellesmere and Axel Heiberg islands. Luckily for Canada, their planes managed only a few short flights from a base in Greenland.
In 1926 Canadian sovereignty efforts increased with a patrol to Axel Heiberg Island and the establishment of a post on the Bache Peninsula, Ellesmere Island — at the time, the most northerly government station in the world. It seemed that these moves had come none too soon, since 1926 was a busy year for continent seeking. As one Canadian newspaper remarked, explorers were hoping to reach new land with almost every means of transport except bicycles. Most of the plans fell through, including an aerial attempt by one of Stefansson’s proteges, George Hubert Wilkins (formerly the CAE’s photographer). Amundsen, though, finally succeeded in making a spectacular polar flight.
He and Ellsworth decided to use a dirigible for their next effort, and they obtained one at a low cost from Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. With the airship, rechristened Norge, came its handsome young designer and pilot, Umberto Nobile. In the press, Amundsen enthused about how “thrilling” it would be to “drop from the sky for the first time upon a land shut in by ice.” The Norge’s journey began in Svalbard (located roughly halfway between Norway and the pole) and ended in Alaska. As Ellsworth sadly wrote, “We kept watch always for new land, but there was always the same ice under us.”
Moreover, Amundsen had to share the glory of the first trans-polar flight with Nobile, who after all had piloted the dirigible. Amundsen disdainfully referred to Nobile as a hireling; Nobile retorted that Amundsen had merely been his passenger. The undignified disputes over who had truly been in command embittered Amundsen’s final years.
Wilkins, meanwhile, argued that there might still be land somewhere far from the Norge’s route. In 1928 he, too, made a successful trans-Arctic flight, this time from Alaska to Svalbard. Instead of passing over the pole, Wilkins investigated the supposed position of Crocker Land. He had arranged to let his sponsor, the American Geographical Society, know the result via a coded telegram. On April 21, 1928, the message arrived in New York: “No foxes seen.” At last, it was beyond dispute that the northern Atlantis was an illusion.