stefansson-wrangel-09-25-003-003

3 names, but [[Great Britain]] was honored beyond them all in [[Hudson, Henry, -1611|Hudson]], [[Davis, John, 1550?-1605|Davis]], [[Cook, James, 1728-1779|Cook]], Peary [[Parry, William Edward, Sir, 1790-1855|Parry]] and many others. The search continued hopeful, and for three centuries the [[Arctic regions|Arctic]] was in men's minds a potential highway to the East. But 75 years ago that period of thought came to a full stop ? with the colossal tragedy of Sir [[Franklin, John, 1786-1847|John Franklin]]. Begin Copying No expedition ever sailed with higher hopes or equipment more sumptuously and carefully provided. Yet no one ever returned from the voyage and the story is known only from the tiniest fragments of documents and from the scattered bones of a few of those who died. The white and fearful wilderness which the Greeks had assigned to the northern portion of their flat world had been banished from men's minds for three centuries in favor of by a potentially navigable ocean joining [[Europe]] to the coveted East. But the [[Franklin, John, 1786-1847|Franklin]] tragedy gave the lifeless northern wastes of the ancients their second innings. The world was still round, but at the "top" of it men now pictured to themselves an impassably frozen and desert ocean which no longer connected but instead separated [[Europe]] and from China. Commercial endeavors have their roots in a firm optimism. Men hope for success, they hope for profit, and that general frame of mind colors everything they see. The old Norse sagas tell that the discov- erers of [[Greenland]] in 987 named the country so "thinking that colonists would all the more desire to go there if the land had a fair name”. When Eric the Red went among his Scandinavian countrymen in search of colon- ists he certainly told them no tales of hardship and terror for he in- duced twenty-five ships to follow him towards [[Greenland]] in 990, each loaded with men, women, children, dogs, cattle, horses, sheep, chi poultry and household goods. They built up on the west coast of [[Greenland]] what we would now call a "dairy industry". Vatican documents show that the Popes of the middle ages knew that [[Greenland]] exported butter, cheese and wool to [[Europe]], and that they the dignitaries of the church were thankful for the contributions which the Greenlanders