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Plenty of polar expeditions ended in disaster, but the USS Polaris is a strange one. Launched in 1871, it was the first mission to the North Pole to be
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It’s August, 1818, and two British naval ships are dodging icebergs in Baffin Bay on their mission to find the Northwest Passage. John Ross, commanding the HMS
Isabella, and William Parry in the HMS
Alexander are farther north along the western Greenland coast than any previous explorers. They assume this land of glaciers and stark mountains is uninhabited.
But they’re wrong.
They spy several figures running on a hill near shore. Ross assumes they’re shipwrecked sailors in need of rescue, and he steers the
Isabella to get closer. But they turn out to be Native people, a community of Inughuit living farther north than Europeans believed was physically possible.
January 13, 2021
Hundreds perhaps thousands of people took part in the international race to explore the Arctic and claim the North Pole. Here s a collection of some of the most important and influential figures discussed in Mental Floss s new podcast,
1. Arnaq // Inuit // ?-1577
Arnaq was the name assigned to an Inuit woman from Baffin Island in Nunavut, Canada, who was taken captive by Martin Frobisher in 1577, along with Kalicho and her infant son called Nutaaq.
Arnaq means “woman” or “female” in Inuktitut.
2. William Baffin // English // c. 1584-1622
Baffin was a navigator and ship s pilot who searched for the elusive Northwest Passage. His namesakes are Baffin Island (now part of Nunavut, Canada) and Baffin Bay, which separates the island from Greenland. He found Lancaster Sound, the entrance to the Northwest Passage, but believed ice would always make it impassable. Baffin also sailed within 800 nautical miles of the geographic North Pole, the northernmost point