European Exploration of the Arctic: From Pytheas to Whaling

European exploration of the Arctic Ocean dates to the fourth century BCE when a Greek individual by the name of Pytheas’s sailed beyond the British Isles to a place called Thule, which has been identified as either the Faroe Islands, Norway, Iceland, or Greenland. It is with Pytheas’s account and the Greek author who subsequently recorded his travels that we first encounter two important features of the Arctic: drift ice and midnight sun. Thule remained on European maps until the 1500s and became one of the borders of the known world. The inhabitants of Thule were repeatedly extolled as either giants who resided beyond the North Wind, the superhuman Hyperboreans, or demonized as pygmies.

Beyond such early speculations, the Arctic also became the target for Viking expansion. Leaving their original Scandinavian homeland in the eighth century CE, the Vikings were motivated by a mix of lack of resources, demographic pressure, and a search for more profitable trade routes. Although the initial wave of expansion hit their European neighbors, by the ninth century the Vikings expanded into the Northern Atlantic and from there into the Arctic Ocean.

They arrived in Iceland about 870 CE and proceeded to Greenland about a century later. A now well-documented settlement in Vinland (Newfoundland, in today’s Canada) emerged around 1000 CE, but was short-lived. Favorable currents and a temporary warming period assisted the Viking voyages into the Arctic region. When the Little Ice Age brought the warming period to an end, problems ensued for the Viking settlers of Greenland. Competition with the Skraling (proto-Inuit groups) as well as crop failures triggered by the cooling period resulted in the abandonment of settlements on this, the Earth’s largest island, by about 1450 CE.

The Vikings may have been the first Europeans to have sighted the Svalbard Archipelago, but the historical credit for locating these islands has gone to the Dutchman Willem Barentz, who chanced upon them in 1596. His term for this Arctic archipelago, Spitzbergen (“jagged mountains”), remained in use until the islands became part of Norway following the 1920s. The name Spitzbergen remained in place for the largest island of the archipelago. Following Barentz’s discovery, the Dutch used the islands as a major whaling station. They were soon followed by Danish, British, French, and later northern German whalers, who copied their craft from Basque officers following them to the region.

The Dutch ultimately managed to outcompete their fellow Europeans and developed Svalbard into a major base for their Arctic whaling operations. Once the bays of the archipelago were depleted of whales, the Dutch were among the first to develop pelagic (open ocean) whaling techniques. Whale carcasses were initially lashed alongside a whaling ship. From there, large strips of blubber were cut and hauled on the ship. Once on deck, the blubber was cut up and placed in casks to be transported to the stations on Svalbard. Pushing the pelagic whaling frontier deeper into the Arctic Ocean also required new ship construction. In an attempt to secure the whaling ships against the dangers of sea ice, shipbuilders focused on double hulls as well as reinforced bows and rudders.