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known as the Northwest and Northeast passages. Many countries gave to that
search a list of dauntless names, but Great Britain was honored beyond them all
in Hudson, Davis, Cook, Parry, McClintockand a galaxy of lesser polar stars. The
search continued gopefully and for three centuries the Arctic was in men's minds
a potential highway to the East. But seventy-five years ago that period of thought
came to a full stop with the colossal tragedy of Sir John Franklin. 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 centures in favor of a potentially navigable ocean joining, on a round
world, Europe to the coveted East. But the 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 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 discoverers of Greenland
in 987983named the country so "thinking that colonists would all the more desire to go there if the land had a fair name." Then Eric the Hed went among his
Scandinavian countrymen in search of colonists he certainly told them no tales
of hardship and terror, for he induced twenty-five ships to follow him from Icelandtowards
Greenland in 986, each loaded with men, women, children, dogs, cattle, horses,
sheep, poultry and household goods. They established there
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
some of the ships were wrecked and some were driven back by
storms, but fourteen got throuhg and that autumn about
700 colonists landed on the west coast of Greenland.