Go North, Young Man

In this episode, we’ll dive into the first real attempts to conquer the North Pole in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. As explorers pushed farther into uncharted territory, they encountered dangerous icebergs, Arctic mirages, Indigenous communities, and extreme hardship. British explorers like William Edward Parry, John Ross, and John Franklin didn’t have any idea what they were getting into—and paid the price. The learning curve for explorers who wanted to go north would be steep. But that definitely didn’t prevent people from trying.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
The Quest for the North Pole is a production of
I Heart Radio and mental Floss. It's June and high
above the Arctic Circle. British naval officer William Edward Perry
and more than twenty men are trudging over the ice
from Svalbard to the North Pole. They're hoping to be

(00:25):
the first men to reach ninety degrees north, but it's
not looking good. No Arctic explorer is more experienced than Perry.
He's already led three voyages to the Arctic and sailed
farther through the Northwest Passage than anyone. He's prepared to
face any threat, from extreme cold, to open water to
polar bear attacks. But now Perry is beginning to doubt

(00:48):
his chances. His crew was hauling their equipment and food
on heavy sledges through soft snow. They have to take
time consuming detours when their way is blocked by giant
piles of The slushy terrain is soaking the men up
to their waists. They'd be fainting with cold if they
could actually feel their legs. They struggle to keep pace

(01:10):
with their goal of thirteen and a half miles per day,
otherwise they'll run out of food on their return journey,
but something is against them. In six hours they managed
just one and a quarter miles, and after dinner they
go only two and a half more, according to their
navigational reading. In four days they march a grand total
of eight miles. Perry's men are exhausted, their food is dwindling,

(01:35):
and their exertions are not getting them any closer to
the pole. Only a handful of people had ever been
as far north as Perry and his crew. Whalers in
the area and made sure to leave before the autumn
ice closed in, so no one really knew what to
expect day to day and season to season. One thing
they did know was that the ice, the weather, and

(01:56):
the temperature were often unpredictable. The incurve for explorers who
wanted to go north would be steep, but that definitely
didn't prevent people from trying. In this episode, we'll dive
into the first real attempts to conquer the North Pole
by land or by sea, and we'll analyze what went

(02:16):
so extremely wrong. From Mental Floss and I Heart Radio,
this is the Quest for the North Pole. I'm your host,
Cat Long, science editor at Mental Floss, and this is
episode two, Go North young man. A decade before Perry's expedition,

(02:49):
a wailing captain named William Scoresby Jr. Who happens to
be my four times great uncle, noticed a sudden change
in the Arctic ice. The vast ice feels that he
had observed over the past fourteen years as a whaler,
and Spalbard had disappeared. He had never seen such a
dramatic change in the polar region. He wrote about the

(03:09):
ICE's disappearance to Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society,
Britain's leading scientific organization. Banks have been the naturalist on
Captain Cook's voyage in seventeen sixty eight and elected President
of the Royal Society in seventeen seventy eight. He ruled
like a benevolent dictator and had directed the British government's
scientific priorities for nearly forty two years. Scoresby told him

(03:35):
that thousands of square miles of ocean between Spalbard and
the east coast of Greenland was perfectly void of ice,
which is usually covered by it. He figured that something
had forced all of the ice south, where it melted
in warmer waters. He also suggested that now would be
the perfect time for the government to launch an expedition
to find the Northwest Passage. As a quick side note,

(03:58):
some scientists today think this observation was a consequence of
the huge volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia a
few years earlier, but in the nineteenth century they didn't
know that. Back to the Passage. As we learned in
our first episode, the Northwest Passage was a long sought
waterway from Europe to Asia over the top of North America.

(04:21):
Explorers like Martin Frobisher and Henry Hudson had searched for
it back in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century,
but little progress had been made since, mainly because of
all the ice in their way, but also because a
lot of people died. They had old charts and some
information from earlier expeditions. That's Russell Potter, a historian of

(04:42):
polar exploration at Rhode Island College, an author of most
recently Finding Franklin, the Untold Story of a one and
sixty five year search. We're going back here to Martin
Frobisher in the late fifteen hundreds. But there's been a
kind of a low in activity in terms of anything
sponsored by the government that area. If you were an
explorer in the early nineteenth century and wanted the government

(05:05):
to sponsor your voyage, you had to impress Banks, the
gatekeeper first. The Royal Society didn't actually fund exploration, but
Banks had to give your proposal the green light before
the government would even look at it. Scoresby was in luck.
Banks could not resist the idea that the Northwest Passage
might finally be discovered, and the idea made its way

(05:26):
to Sir John Barrow, the second Secretary to the Admiralty,
that's the government agency that ran the Royal Navy. If
Banks approved an expedition, he could usually convince Barrow and
the Admiralty to organize and pay for it. Unlike today,
there was no National Geographic Society or Explorers Club to
sponsor expeditions. Aside from a few wealthy benefactors with Arctic fever,

(05:49):
the Admiralty was the only organization that launched voyages purely
for discovery. Barrow, like Banks, was obsessed with exploration because
it spread Britain's empire ever farther across the globe. Barah
realized that a program of polar exploration could be a
boon for the nation. Having one Napoleonic wars, there were

(06:09):
certainly a whole lot of ships and a whole lot
of men available to do something else with The Royal
Navy was downsizing. Half a million soldiers and seamen were
let go, and dozens of naval ships were taken out
of service, but career naval officers couldn't simply be dismissed.
According to historian Elaine Murphy, by the time the navy

(06:31):
had been trimmed to twenty three thousand men, one in
five was an officer, and nine out of ten of
them had nothing to do. And I think that's why
a teen eighteen turns out to be a kind of
of a pivotal point. You have the capacity, it seems
that it's something you could do that would advance UH
knowledge as well as national interests. And the reports from

(06:51):
the whalers, particularly Willa and Scores me of course, where
that the ice was more open than it had been
in some time in that area, and so from his evations,
seemed like this might be the best opportunity to revisit
these long unvisited land. Barrow was also an enthusiastic believer
in the theory of an open Polar sea, which we

(07:13):
talked about in our first episode. This theory proposed, for
various reasons, that there was a huge ice free Arctic
sea surrounding the North Pole. Scoresby, however, totally disagreed with
the open Polar c theory. Over a dozen years, he
had seen for himself that sea ice blanketed the Polar
region with the exception of the year eighteen seventeen, and

(07:37):
even if a Northwest Passage could be found in the Arctic,
he believed the unpredictable ice and weather conditions from season
to season would make it commercially unworkable. Nevertheless, he fervently
hoped that his letter would lead Barrow to appoint him
as a commander of a voyage to the Arctic and
maybe even to find the Northwest passage. His motive wasn't

(07:57):
glory or fame. He wanted to imp prove geographical knowledge
and he also hoped to find new whaling grounds to
boost the British economy. He had years of experience in
the ice, he was an excellent navigator, and he originated
the whole idea of jump starting the search. Clearly he
had the credentials, but there was one problem. He was

(08:18):
not a Royal Navy officer, and Barrow refused to consider
anyone but a Royal Navy officer for the job. Because
so many were out of work Following the end of
the Napoleonic Wars, Barrow went ahead with planning an expedition,
an objective he always claimed peculiarly British without scores by.
The expedition would explore two possible routes, one across the

(08:41):
top of Canada and the other across the North Pole.
For the Canadian approach, two naval ships, the HMS Isabella
and the HMS Alexander, would proceed across the North Atlantic
and search for an opening to the west over Canada
towards the Bearing Strait. Some of this territory had been
charted by Robisher and Baffin more than two years before,

(09:03):
and much was still unknown. Barrow appointed a tough and
fearless Scottish commander, John Ross as captain of the Isabella,
and William Edward Perry, then a twenty seven year old lieutenant,
as his second in command of the Alexander. The North
Pole approach involved two more ships, the HMS Dorothea and
the HMS Trent. This pair would head due north from

(09:26):
Spitzbergen to the North Pole, following the track laid by
Constantine Phipps nearly fifty years earlier on the first true
expedition to the North Pole. All of these expeditions generally
had two ships, with the idea that if one were
damaged or traps in the ice, you get on the
other ship and that would be escaped vehicle. I suppose, uh,
And so that's pretty much what they did. The flagship

(09:48):
door THEA was commanded by Royal Navy Lieutenant David Buchan,
a Scottish officer who had spent most of his naval
career around Newfoundland. Not much is known about Buchan because
he commanded only one Arctic voyage, this one, and was
lost at sea on a voyage from India to England
in eight He also never published a book or memoir
about the voyage because he felt it didn't accomplish enough

(10:11):
to interest anyone. The Trent was commanded by an up
and coming Lieutenant John Franklin, and we know much more
about him. Franklin was a thirty two year old rising
star in the Royal Navy. He had seen action in
the Battle of Trafalgar and had circumnavigated Australia. The North
Pole voyage would be his first time commanding a ship.

(10:33):
Were people conscious of the dangers and the conditions involved. Well, yeah,
although you know, partly because they hadn't been up there
in such a long time, they had a number of
rather peculiar ideas about what to expect. They didn't really
understand the extent of permanent polar c ice at that time.
They didn't understand what what affected the persistence of icebergs

(10:56):
or other hazards along the way. They didn't have any
specially prepared ships, although I think the general idea was
that if they were very strongly built, that would be
a good thing. And of course some people continue to
believe that if you could get through the initial ice
barrier as they called it, there would be warmer water
farther along the way, closer to the Pole, which of
course wasn't true, but no one had been up there

(11:18):
to test that hypothesis. You might say. Barrow instructed Captain
Dukin to sail along the western coast of Spitzberg and
as far as possible in open sea, then force his
way through the pack ice without stopping. The Admiralty had
told Bucan incorrectly that the sea north of Pittsburg and
was reportedly free of ice as far north as Parallel,

(11:41):
just four hundred statute miles from the North Pole. Well,
of course, one great way to discover the North is
just to head directly north. Uh And in fact they
were in some ways Henry Hudson had tied this a
long time ago, and they were in some ways following
in his footsteps. You might say, I think that the
fallback position was Spittsburgh Get in part because they could

(12:01):
expect possible assistance, or if their ships were found to
be unfit to continue, they could find some passage home.
But no one really knew how long it would take
or how difficult it would be. None of the officers
in charge had ever been to the Arctic before, though
they did take experienced whaling masters as ice navigators, and

(12:23):
no expedition had spent the winter locked in ice, darkness
and extreme sub zero temperatures since William Barns was forced
to in. But the Admiralty had a typically rosy outlook.
If you can reach the poll, he was to head
for bearing straight and complete the passage, or if that

(12:45):
was impossible. He should sail for home via Baffin Bay.
If they were lucky, they'd meet up with the Isabella
and Alexander there or north of Alaska. It sounded great
on paper. Let's take a break here, we'll be right back.

(13:17):
The four ships on the Admiralties Arctic Voyage left the
River Thames in April eight eighteen. John Ross and the Isabella,
William Edward Parry and the Alexander, David Buchan and the
Dorothea and John Franklin in the Trent all sailed north
to the Shetland Islands and then parted ways. The Isabella
and Alexander turned west, and the Dorothea and the Trent

(13:39):
set their compasses on Phipps's route. The ladder ships ran
into an extensive barrier of sea ice at the northwestern
corner of Spitzbergen and struggled to force their way through.
Chunks of ice came loose from the floes and congealed
around them. At one point they were trapped for three weeks,

(14:00):
frozen in place and unable to break up the eyes
around them to sail free. They even tried placing anchor
lines in the ice and reeling in the lines to
move the ship forward. After days of exhausting work, they
realized a southerly current was taking them backward anyway. Bucan
and Franklin hadn't made it any farther than Phipps had

(14:20):
almost fifty years earlier, and they were in trouble. Ocean
currents and the winds were piling hundreds of tons of
ice against the sides of the Dorothea and Trent, squeezing
their hulls almost to the breaking point. Frederick William Beechey,
a lieutenant on the Trent, said the ship was so
twisted that the doors of all the cabins flew open,

(14:42):
and the panels of some started in the frames. With
her false stern posts moved three inches, and her timbers
cracked to a most serious extent. Toward the end of summer,
a gigantic storm nearly wrecked the ships. Unable to sail
away from the encroaching coast, Bucans heared the Dorothea into
the pack ice, while tremendous waves forced the Trent broadside

(15:04):
against the edge of the ice field. The vessels staggered
under the shock, and for a moment seemed to recoil
Beachy wrote, another wave curled under its hull and hurled
it onto the ice. It was so bad that, according
to Sir John Franklin, who was the second in command there,
the bell on his ship was ringing as it almost

(15:25):
turned horizontal in this thrashing water and ice. Those ships
were rather significantly damaged. When the storm finally passed, they
limped into Harbor and Spitzberg, and where they made repairs.
Buchan and Franklin were forced to return to England, having
gotten no farther than previous explorers, wrote the naval officer

(15:46):
and historian Albert Hastings Markham. The expedition examined about the
same extent of the pack edge as did Phipps in
seventeen seventy three, and found the ice equally as impenetrable
as he did, but England was in the grip of
Arctic fever. Their escape from the storm made Buchan and
Franklin instant heroes. There's quite a popular painting of this

(16:08):
that was done in London the year after, showing the
arrival of the ships at Pittsburgh, and then showing all
of the wildlife and all of the activity up there.
The glorious, although unsuccessful, endeavor was painted on this giant
cannabis and displayed in Lester Square. Franklin even posed for
his appearance in it, and then avoided less To Square

(16:29):
because he was afraid someone would recognize him from the panorama,
so it became kind of famous, even though like some
others of Franklin's later exploits, it wasn't really a success
as such. Meanwhile, Ross and Parry in the Isabella and
Alexander had sailed up the western coast of Greenland searching
for an opening in the Baffin Bay pack ice. They

(16:50):
reached a large bay between the seventy five and seventy
six parallels, which Ross named Melville Bay. The crews also
encountered a group of a New Wheat that had never
had contact with Europeans the expeditions. In New Wheat interpreter,
a green Lander named John Sacus, was able to communicate
with them, and the two groups spent several days learning
about each other's lifestyles and customs. Ross noticed that the

(17:14):
in New Wheat had knives with metal tips and asked
where they came from, because metal is scarce in the Arctic.
The New Wheat said they chipped small pieces from a
black mountain some distance away. Ross concluded that they were
talking about an iron bearing meteorite. Ross later wrote it
was in several large masses, of which one in particular,

(17:35):
which was harder than the rest, was a part of
the mountain. The others were in large pieces above ground.
They cut it off with a hard stone and then
beat it flat into pieces of the size of a sixpence.
Ross didn't have time to visit the site, but will
definitely hear more about these meteorites in later episodes. The

(17:55):
Isabella and Alexander battled their way across the ice pack
from Baffin Bay to the eastern coast of Canada. They
proceeded south along the shoreline, over territory that William Baffin
had explored two hundred years earlier. Eventually they came to
Lancaster Sound, which Baffin had seen so full of ice
that he believed the channel would always be impassable, But

(18:16):
now it was open water. Ross and Perry sailed ahead
thirty miles in fog, stopped their progress. When the fog
lifted for a few minutes, Ross clearly saw a chain
of mountains at the foot of the channel. He had
two officers take their bearings and enter them into the
ship's log. He named the apparent land mass Croaker's Mountains,

(18:38):
after John Barrow's boss, the first Secretary of the Admiralty. Then,
with their path seemingly blocked and autumn approaching, Ross ordered
their convoy to turn around. When they got home, Ross
was in for a rude surprise. Harry and a scientist
on the voyage noted that they didn't observe the mountains,
undercutting Ross's authority. The Arrow was incensed that Ross had

(19:01):
failed to fully explore Lancaster Sound. He rediscovered Baton Spay.
He got farther north than anyone had gotten before. But
I think his problem was that he didn't have enough
risk and enough danger. John Barrow of the Admiralty famously
mocked it as a pleasure cruise because there wasn't enough danger.
There wasn't enough hazard. He didn't risk losing his life,

(19:23):
and so I think even though that was successful, it
didn't necessarily play well with the public. But it did
have one good consequence. So as he was skirting the
edge of Batman Day, he came to the entrance to
Lancaster Sound, which actually does turn out to be the
key entrance to any northwest passage, that might be. The
controversy over that, when it came back to the Admiralty,

(19:46):
ended up spurring a second expedition under Parry, because Perry
doubted Ross's beliefs that these mountains existed, and indeed they didn't.
They had been a fata morgana, a mirage resulting from
the Sun's rays p saying through atmospheric layers of different temperatures.
I always wonder what would happen if Ross had just

(20:07):
continued sailing. The whole nineteenth century would have been different,
That's right, we would just skipped the whole thing. It
would be just cruise on through and come out the
other side and return to universal praise. But I do
think there is that funny thing. It's a feature of
all of these Arctic expeditions that the undertaking and hazard

(20:28):
and the suffering of difficulties, loss of life or whatever
is actually, in a weird way of kind of a plus.
If you really risk something as you go up there
that plays well back at home in Britain at least,
And if you simply sail around and don't risk anything
or discover anything, new than that. Even though you might

(20:50):
achieve some scientific goal or another, that's not going to
play well back home. Right, So these tales of danger
and survive, eival and courage, we're very romantic where the
capital are. And so did it spark a lot of
interest in the media. Did the public interest encourage the
Admiralty to send out more expeditions? Well, yes, I think so,

(21:13):
and I think I think it is also important that
this happened at a time of increasing literacy, of wider
circulation of newspapers and magazines, the sort of the beginnings
of a kind of a mass culture out there, and
that culture was interested in partly just because it's sold newspapers,
I suppose, but but it was interested that kind of
dramatic story. So in addition to the press accounts, you

(21:36):
get paintings, you get woodcuts, you get artists, renditions. Everyone
is exceedingly curious to learn more about these things. And
everyone comes back, of course from their expedition and publishes
a large folio volume with beautifully and grave pictures showing
the strange and wondrous beauties and hazards of this land.
So it is a kind of it's it's kind of

(21:56):
the first exploration effort for Britain. It has a kind
of a pr component where all of the books are
published by the same publisher. They all come out after
the expedition. People line up to get them. An inexpensive
smaller version is soon produced, and that actually does fuel
public interests. You know, the Admiralty was doing this voluntarily.

(22:18):
There wasn't some external imperative, and they weren't really competing
initially with any other country, but they were competing for
public attention with other things, so they really had to
just had to be their their start performance for the
people back home. It's amazing to think of exploration as
a performance, but I guess that does make sense. It's true.

(22:41):
So the admirals he sent many more expeditions towards the
Canadian archipelago to search ever westward. It did not attack
the North Pool again until We'll be right back. Between

(23:12):
eighteen eighteen and eighteen seven, Britain's Arctic campaign ramped up.
Perry revisited the search for the Northwest Passage on three
more expeditions to different areas of Canada. At one time
he was able to sail farther west through Lancaster Sound
than anyone before or since, and earned a five thousand
pound prize from the British government. John Franklin also went

(23:35):
to the Canadian Arctic and charted vast stretches of territory
over two land expeditions. One trip went so disastrously wrong
that Franklin and his team of British sailors and Canadian
voyageurs almost starved to death. This is how Franklin became
known as the man who ate his boots. He actually
ate his leather boots when there was literally nothing else

(23:56):
on the menu. The expedition was eventually rest keewed by
the indigenous yellow Knife people. Their years in the Arctic
wilderness burnished Perry's and Franklin's reputations as fearless romantic heroes.
They were the most respected members of the informal club
of Arctic Men at the Admiralty. That's why when Franklin

(24:17):
and Perry started thinking about another trip to the North Pole,
Barrow was all in. By eighty six, it was clear
that ice would block any ship that tried to sail
to the North Pole. Franklin suggested going by ship on
the same route as he'd done in eighteen eighteen and
then walking the rest of the way over the sea ice. Barrow,
who preferred Perry over Franklin for the job of Commander,

(24:40):
made sure that Perry got a copy of Franklin's plan.
Perry quickly made a formal proposal to the Admiralty, which
was personally backed by Barrow and the Royal Society, though
the powers that be would never admit it. Much of
Perry's proposal was based on a plan suggested by William
Scoresby back in eighteen fifteen. In a scientific paper presented

(25:02):
in Edinburgh, Scoresby said a journey over ice from Spitzberg
into the North Pole could be possible. The key was
bringing only a minimum of personnel and supplies, transporting the
gear on light sledges pulled by reindeer dogs, and hiring
native people to drive them. Scoresby recommended lightweight sledges that
could double as boats for crossing open water. Most importantly,

(25:26):
Scoresby said an expedition to the North Pole should not
start any later than late April or early May, when
the ice was relatively flat and still frozen solid. Any
later than that in the higher summer temperatures would melt
ice and make travel extremely difficult. However, while Perry adopted
Scoresby's route from Spitzberg into the Pole over sea ice,

(25:48):
he ignored his advice for how to travel from the
lightweight sledges to the optimum season for departure, and that
was a shame. Scoresby had sixty thousand miles of experience
traveling through the ice and had been farther north than
any European explorer. In eighteen o six, as a first
mate on his father's whaling ship, Scoresby sailed to eighty

(26:10):
one degrees thirty minutes north, within five hundred nautical miles
of the North Pole. The record still stood when Perry
began planning his expedition. Perry brought the exact opposite of
what scores We suggested. He had two boats that weighed
fifteen hundred pounds each when they were empty. Fourteen crew

(26:31):
members were to drag each boat on two heavy oak
and iron sledges, fully loaded with food, equipment, and every
conceivable spare part. Each boat weighed an incredible three thousand,
five hundred seventy three and one quarter pounds. That meant
each man, not dogs a reindeer, had to pull more

(26:51):
than two hundred and fifty pounds over hundreds of miles
of ice and snow, and in what might have been
Perry's biggest mistake, he began way too late in a year.
In the ship h M. S Hecla, Perry and the
crew departed London in March and sailed due north for Spitzbergen.
Bad weather and ice delayed the start of the overland

(27:13):
journey until June one, almost two months later than Scoresby
had recommended, and Perry discovered that summer temperatures had made
his root rough and treacherous. Boats are good for Britain,
but Britain and boats go together. Land maybe not so much. Yeah,
I mean it was an interesting um kind of overland

(27:35):
by sea type of hybrid. Yes, and I think you
know it has happened a century or so later with
scott and the South using ponies. The idea of having
reindeered raw sleds and things. Are all these bizarre ideas
of how to actually travel over the ice, none of
which included, of course, traveling the Innuiquay, which would have

(27:56):
worked perfectly fine if they had had dog teams and
people who knew how to drive them. Perry discovered the
heavy rain melted the surface of the ice and created
knee deep pools. Oceanic currents broke up the ice fields
and piled the floes on top of one another in
huge mounds. When the sun shone, the rays bounced off
the reflective ice and caused snowblindness among Perry's men. Dragging

(28:20):
the heavy sledges over the slushy surface and hummocks was impossible,
yet the ponding water was too shallow to launch the boats.
With every step they took, the men felt shards of
ice poking like needles through their sodden boots. Perry calculated
that they would need to travel about thirteen miles a
day to stay on schedule, an ambitious goal in ideal

(28:41):
Arctic conditions, but totally impractical in the current situation. On
one occasion, the crew spent two hours marching and dragging
the sledges. Perry wrote a distance not exceeding one and
fifty yards, about the length of a football field, including
the end zones. Their slow pace was probably not helped
by rations of just one and a quarter pounds of

(29:03):
food per day. To understand how that made a big
difference in the expedition's chance of success, let's take a
quick detour into Arctic sledge. In cuisine, Perry's men were
eating mainly pemmican and ship's biscuit, too portable and high
calorie foods. Pemmican, from a Cree word meaning manufactured grease,
is a combination of roughly equal portions of animal fat

(29:26):
and dried pulverized meat. The ingredients were melted together and
then fashioned into bricks, which stayed edible for years without
needing refrigeration. Cree people in North America made pemmican with bison, moose,
or deer meat and fat, along with berries for flavor
and nutrients. Hudson Bay Company traders learned to take pemmican

(29:47):
on their long River journeys, and the Royal Navy picked
it up from the traders, though they substituted beef for
the bison and moose. Perry's pemmican had been manufactured in London,
according to a recipe by doctor John Ocock Holmes, a
surgeon who had worked for the Hudson Bay Company in
Canada for several years. Ship's biscuits, also called hardtack, are

(30:09):
rock hard baked crackers made of flour and water. They
last longer than bread or other kinds of carbohydrates on
long sea voyages, but sailors had to dunk them in
tea or soup before they could be eaten. Stories abound
of sailors breaking their teeth on unsoftened biscuits. The biscuit
on Perry's North Pole expedition came from Francis Lehman, a

(30:30):
well known bakery that supplied the Admiralty. According to the
Oxford Handbook of Expedition and Wilderness Medicine, a one hundred
and sixty five pound man hauling a sledge might need
more than ten thousand calories per day to maintain body weight.
The caloric content of pemmican is not easy to discern,

(30:51):
but a two thousand four study found that one hundred
grounds or about three and a half ounces, of pemmican
made from a South Dakota indigenous recipe had two hundred
and eleven calories. The naval historian Janet McDonald, in her
book Feeding Nelson's Navy, wrote that one hundred grams of
biscuit equaled four hundred and thirty six calories. Stay with

(31:12):
me here. Remember that each of Perry's men was getting
only a pound and a quarter of food each day.
That's just twenty ounces. According to Perry's narrative, the daily
rations included ten ounces of biscuit and nine of pemmican.
When we do the math, ten ounces of biscuit is
one thousand, two hundred and thirty six calories and nine

(31:33):
ounces of pemmican is five hundred and thirty eight calories.
So each of Perry's men was consuming just one thousand,
seven hundred and seventy four calories, plus what they got
from an ounce of sweetened cocoa powder per day and
some rum that is nowhere near the ten thousand calories
they should have been getting. By the middle of July,

(31:56):
Perry began to notice that they were not making any
progress despite their constant labor. On July, their position was
less than five miles north of where they were three
days before. A brief respite on hard level ice netted
them only four miles after traveling for ten on July.

(32:16):
On July, Perry obtained a reading of their location by
the sun. They were at eighty two degrees forty minutes north,
about four hundred and forty nautical miles from the pole,
now an awful realization broke over the group. Perry realized
that they had actually lost ground. The ice field on
which they stood was drifting south. In fact, they were

(32:39):
three miles south of where they had been four days earlier,
despite having struggled forward each day, and the trouble was
their sort of contrived method didn't make enough progress. The
ice drifted south faster than they could go north the
way they had things set up. So I think it
could be an early example of the way in which

(32:59):
these sort of British sense of self assurance and ignoring
the solutions offered by other cultures is evidence in the
failure of that particular expedition. The southward drift put any
hopes of reaching the North Pole out of the question.
Now Perry and the crew had to survive their return journey.

(33:19):
The highest point they had reached was eighty two degrees
forty five minutes north on July, only one hundred and
seventy two miles from where their ship Hecla lay at anchor.
They had actually covered five hundred and eighty miles of
ice in open water. Perry managed to venture seventy five
nautical miles beyond Scoresby's six record and claimed a new

(33:41):
farthest north. But as a historian Pierre Berton wrote in
his book The Arctic Grail, had he taken Scoresby's advice,
he would have certainly achieved more. Britain's first two North
Pole voyages of the nineteenth century both ended without achieving
their goals. You can and Ekland's voyage of non discovery

(34:01):
in eighteen eighteen can be chalked up to the leader's
ignorance of the Arctic conditions. Their only guidance had come
from Phipps's account from fifty years before, and whalers like
scoresby By, Though the Admiralties should have known better, its
officers had spent almost a decade exploring and charting the
polar regions. Just as importantly, they had observed a new

(34:23):
eek clothing, food, and shelter that was perfectly adapted to
Arctic conditions. Scoresby had recommended in eighteen fifteen that traveling
lightly more or less in the way of northern people's
was the only way to go, but the Admiralty would
have never entertained that idea. When you're talking about these
Brittish sixplorers. They believed in Britain. They had this enormously

(34:48):
elevated idea of the courage and bravery and accomplishment of
British people. That's Edward J. Larson Pulitzer Prize, an historian,
an author of To the Edges of the Earth, the
Race for the Three Polls, and the climax of the
Age of Exploration. They could not conceive of any native

(35:13):
people being better at doing anything than British people. There
was the same way they were the British explorers and
the British colonial leaders were in India, or that they
were in Africa. So I think it was a combination
of their ethnic racial biases against these native peoples, which

(35:36):
the British lived was true throughout the British imperial Empire,
and at the same time a tremendously expansive and a
few of their own people and their own powers and
what they could do, and so will you combine the two,
They just would think they do a much better job
of it, and the British could figure out better foods

(35:59):
and better package shoots and package equipment. Perry's return journey
to England in the fall of seven was much easier
than the one toward the poll they were able to
kill seals and reindeer to replenish their meager diets and
regain their strength, but the Admiralty and the public were
disappointed that he failed to reach his goal. Perry must

(36:22):
have felt abashed, but he told the people in charge
that he could not think of anything that he would
have done differently. Now Scoresby got the last word. In
a published rebuttal, he pointed out the obvious fact that
Perry did the opposite of what Scoresby's experience in the
Arctic had recommended. After the disappointment of being passed over

(36:43):
for leading an expedition in eighteen eighteen, Scoresby felt vindicated,
but still hopeful, writing whatever probability there at any time
was of reaching the poll by a journey over the
ice remains little, if at all, diminished by the late
experiment of Captain and Perry. The Admiralty again paused its

(37:03):
investigation of the North Pole and refocused on the peculiarly
British enterprise of finding the Northwest Passage in Canada. In
Barrow sent John Franklin, who was now a commander and
a knight, to make one more stabbed the passage through
Lancaster Sound. No expense was spared to make the Franklin
Expedition successful. Two strong ships were stuffed with the latest

(37:27):
technology and comforts, including three years worth of food, lavish libraries,
and a pet monkey named Jacko. The most experienced and
skilled Arctic Hans were on board to ensure that they
would emerge triumphant in the Bearing Strait, but then they
seemed to disappear. They did not emerge on schedule. The

(37:48):
British government launched more than a dozen expeditions to search
for the missing men. Along with them, American explorers and
Hudson Bay Company traders combed the Arctic for a trace
of Franklin for more than a gate. They searched literally
everywhere except the one spot where evidence of their catastrophe
was eventually found. In eighteen fifty nine. Searchers found a

(38:11):
written note that explained that Franklin had died on June eleven.
Several officers and men had also died, and the survivors
had abandoned ship. To this day, no one is sure
what turned the best prepared Arctic expedition in history into
a disaster, but one mystery was solved. The dozens of

(38:32):
expeditions didn't find Franklin, but actually did find the Northwest Passage.
The puzzle pieces were filling in the primary goal of
Arctic exploration shifted once again from the passage to the poll,
and this time British explorers had competition. The Quest for

(39:05):
the North Pole is hosted by Me cat Long. This
episode was researched and written by Me, with fact checking
by Austin Thompson. The executive producers are Aaron McCarthy and
Tyler Klang. The supervising producer is Dylan Fagan. The show
is edited by Dylan Fagan. For transcripts, a glossary, and
to learn more about this episode, visit Mental flaws dot

(39:25):
com slash podcast. The Quest for the North Pole is
a production of I Heart Radio and Mental Flaws. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, check out the I
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

(39:54):
For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the I
heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.