HUDSON AND THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE.

A short time ago the newspapers announced that a feat which for four hundred years stout ships and bold crews have been attempting had been accomplished by a little Norwegian vessel of forty tons and seven men.

Long ago, the news would have thrilled the harbors of England and Holland with joy and keen expectancy. Coming in the twentieth century, it has created little sensation. Perhaps, of all those who read the announcement, only the few to whom "the Northwest Passage" was a name full of history and heroism and romance realized what an interesting achievement had been made. For the practical value of the discovery had long since been discounted, and no "merchant adventurer" of the present day would have sunk half his fortune in equipping an expedition to solve the riddle that puzzled the brains of the men of long ago.

For the search for the Northwest Passage was from the first a business affair. It was a mercantile question. The whole inquiry arose out of a trade competition between the northern and southern seafaring nations.

This was the situation: Spain and Portugal had been first in the field, as regards over-sea discovery; they had found the way to the treasure house of Asia, and the unspoiled riches of the New World. The Portuguese held the monopoly of maritime trade with India—the Venetians had long governed the overland route, and grown wealthy thereby—and the Spaniards looked upon South America as their private property.

Of the two, the Spanish settlements on the American coasts with the mines behind them drew the eyes of the adventurer, who secured his prizes at the sword's point, but Asia was the more tempting to the trader. The former dreamed of the sack of opulent cities; the latter dreamed of bustling wharves, and barter, and English ships coming home laden with spices and silks, the peaceful spoils of the market place and the tropical forest and the shark-haunted seas.

How to reach India "by a quick route, without crossing the sea paths of the Portuguese and the Spaniards," this, in a word, was the origin of the long and arduous search for the Northwest Passage.

It was the general belief that America was an island, but the size and shape of it was still only imperfectly known. That there was a water way round the southern end of the great continent had been proved by Magellan, who, in his voyage round the world, had passed through the straits that bear his name. The question now was, did a similar waterway exist at the northern end?

They believed that America tapered to a point northward, as it did southward. They little realized how the northern continent spread itself out into the cold Arctic seas, and with what a network of islands and ice floes it ended.

And so they sent out ships to search for a water way through those inhospitable seas, and the first to go was an Englishman, Martin Frobisher.

Greatly did he dare. We in these days of perfectly appointed ships, built of steel and driven by steam, can appreciate the hardihood of this hero and his crews, setting forth in two tiny craft of twenty-five and twenty tons burden, respectively, to solve the riddle of the northern seas! They sailed away—Queen Elizabeth herself waving them adieu from the windows of her palace at Greenwich—on June 12th, 1576, and a month later they were off the coast of Greenland.

Then came stormy weather. A pinnace with her crew of four was sunk, and Frobisher found himself alone—one ship among the never-ending ice. For his consort had gone home, discouraged by the forbidding outlook.

But almost immediately after this disappointment there came a gleam of hope. He beheld what appeared to be a passageway trending westward. It seems that this is still called Frobisher Bay. As he sailed through he thought that he had Asia on one side and America on the other. It was but a happy delusion. The projecting corner of Asia was far away; he was only abreast of what has since been named Baffin's Land.

Frobisher's second voyage, made in 1577, was rather a gold quest than a journey of discovery. A lump of stone (probably iron pyrites) had been brought home by one of the sailors as a souvenir of the first voyage. The particles of gold in it fired the fancies of some Londoners with the idea that Eldorado might perhaps, after all, be among the northern ice.

So Frobisher's ships went out again, and brought home something like 200 tons of the black stone. A third time they made the voyage, no less than fifteen ships taking part in the expedition, the object of which was to establish a sort of settlement for the working of the supposed "gold mine." But nothing came of the attempt. Bewildering fogs and perilous storms and threatening icebergs beset the puny fleet; sickness followed hard upon the exposure and privations long endured by the poor fellows who manned it, and at last the scheme was abandoned.

Yet in this disappointing third voyage Frobisher had unknowingly come very near the discovery which originally he had in view! For, in the words of the writer before quoted, "the truth was that Frobisher's foremost ships had got farther to the south than was realized, and unwittingly he had discovered what is now known as Hudson's Strait—the sea gate of that very Northwest Passage on which his waking and sleeping thoughts so long had brooded."

He had been carried some sixty leagues up the strait, but as he knew nothing as to whither it led he reaped no advantage.

Several years went by without another attempt being made to solve the problem, of the Northwest Passage, but at last, in the summer of 1585, some English merchants planned a fresh expedition.

Two ships were fitted out—one the Sunshine, of London, fifty tons; the other the Moonshine, of Dartmouth, thirty-five tons. The command was intrusted to a young Devonshire sailor, Captain John Davis, whose name is familiar to all schoolboys who have drawn maps of the northern parts of North America.

Though the records of the voyage abound with incidents relating to the various encounters that Davis' men had with spouting whales and basking seals, uncouth Eskimos, and Polar bears, the actual achievements of this expedition were not great. The ships traversed part of what is now called Davis Strait, and went some way up Cumberland Gulf, but by the end of September they were back in Dartmouth.

Davis set forth again, next summer, with three ships and a pinnace. The latter and one of the ships were dispatched up the east coast of Greenland, while the commander, with the two other vessels, sailed northwest. He got as far as Hudson Strait and farther. And in a third voyage he reached a headland not far from Upernavik. The hardihood and pluck displayed in these attempts to penetrate the ice-encumbered seas were splendid, but the results did not throw much light on the question of how to get northwest by sea to the Indies.

Soon after this the kindred question of a Northeast Passage forced itself upon the seafaring people of Holland, and the city of Amsterdam fitted out four ships, and sent them forth under William Barents, in the June of 1594. The story of this and subsequent expeditions cannot, however, be told here, though it is full of heroism and strange adventures.

It was the idea of a Northeast route which first laid hold of Henry Hudson, the intrepid Englishman whose name figures so prominently on the map of North America. Like Barents, he made his way to Nova Zembla, but, baffled by the seemingly insuperable difficulties to the eastward, he turned westward in his third voyage, and again when he set forth on his fourth and last voyage.

Some of his men were evidently less stout of heart than their commander, and when there began to be real prospects of being caught in the ice, the spirit of mutiny got the upper hand. On June 21st, 1610, with a cowardice that was happily in strange contrast to the usual behavior of English crews, it was decided to get rid of the captain. Next morning he and his little son, a loyal-hearted sailor (the ship's carpenter), and half a dozen sick and helpless members of the crew, were put over the ship's side into one of the boats, and left to their fate.

The years went by. Other expeditions were fitted out and sent northward, but the old reasons for finding out the Northwest Passage were fast disappearing. The Portuguese monopoly of the sea-borne trade with India and the supremacy of Spain on the ocean highways were things of the past. The ships of other nations had no longer to skulk past these aforetime kings of the sea.

Arctic exploration went on, but the idea of reaching the North Pole was beginning to take the place of the idea of "making" the Northwest Passage. That old problem, however, was in prospect of being solved by the attempts made to solve the former. So that by the year 1853 Collinson was able to sail so far that he came within fifty-seven miles—a mere pin prick on the map—of accomplishing the Northwest Passage.

Finally, in 1906, the Passage, which, like a mountain tunnel, had been worked at from both ends, was penetrated from one opening to the other by the little Gjöa, a Norwegian sloop of forty tons, which sailed from Christiania on June 1st, 1903.

She was under the command of Captain Roald Amundsen, of that city, and his right-hand man was Lieutenant Godfred Hansen, of the Danish navy; the crew numbered seven. She had not been built with a view to Arctic work, so that before she went north into the realm of the ice king she had to be fortified somewhat. An ice sheathing of two-inch oak planks added greatly to her resisting power, and her petroleum motor of 13 horse power enabled her, when she put to sea, to attain a traveling speed of three knots in smooth water. But the Gjöa trusted chiefly, like the stout little barks of other days, to the skillful handling of her sails.

The winters of 1903 and 1904 were spent in harbor on the shores of King William's Land. Only the premature closing in of the ice prevented the little vessel from achieving the Passage in 1905.