r/AgeofExploration

The English – and later the British – spent hundreds of years trying to locate and then navigate through the almost mythical North-West Passage. Several large-scale expeditions, including those of Martin Frobisher, Henry Hudson and John Franklin, came up against an all-too familiar obstacle – the immovable ice.

In the end, Amundsen succeeded by taking a path that few of the English had considered – he spent time learning the habits and skills of the Inuit, who had survived in the harsh Arctic climate for many hundreds of years. The Norwegian survived two winters in the frozen north, with plenty of assistance from the Netsilik Inuit.

Amundsen would later use those same skills to beat the British to the South Pole, too.

Image: Painting of HMS Terror in the Arctic Regions, by William Smyth, 1837.

You can read a brief history of the search for the North-West Passage here.

Frobisher originally took Kalicho as a hostage after five Englishmen who had disappeared in the same area the previous winter. The English also took an unrelated Inuit woman and her infant, who they named Arnaq and Nutaaq.

When an attempt to exchange the three Inuit for the missing Englishmen failed, they were taken back to England.

The Inuit became minor celebrities after landing at the port of Bristol. Portraits of Kalicho and Arnaq were presented to Queen Elizabeth I and hung in Hampton Court Palace.

Frobisher hoped to train Kalicho as an interpreter to help on later voyages. Unfortunately, Kalicho passed away in Bristol on 8 November 1577. A postmortem suggested that the Inuit man had died due to complications of a rib injury, likely sustained in his capture at Baffin Bay.

The image above was drawn by John White, who later helped to establish the English colony of Roanoke in North America.

EDIT: When I say 'picked up', I should have written 'kidnapped' or at least 'captured', given that Kalicho was taken from his homeland and spirited away in violent circumstances.

Pemmican is dried meat pounded into powder, combined with rendered fat in equal proportions by weight, and pressed into bars with dried berries. That is the entire recipe. Three ingredients. No refrigeration. No cooking required to eat it. A shelf life measured in months to years under the right conditions. One pound of pemmican delivers approximately 3,000 to 3,500 calories, a full day of sustenance for an active adult, in a package you can carry in your coat pocket.

The Cree, Lakota, Blackfeet and dozens of other Plains nations had been making it for generations before the fur trade era, and when European explorers and traders encountered it they immediately understood what they were looking at. The Hudson's Bay Company built an entire industrial supply chain around it. Robert Falcon Scott took it to Antarctica. Ernest Shackleton's men ate it on the ice after the Endurance was crushed.

William Clark wrote in his journal near what is now Great Falls Montana in 1805: the Hunters killed 3 buffaloe, the most of all the meat I had dried for to make Pemitigon. The spelling is characteristically Clark, creative and phonetic, but the reference is unambiguous. The Corps of Discovery made pemmican from bison on the trail and first encountered it as a prepared food at the formal feast hosted by the Lakota Sioux early in the journey.

The journals of Lewis and Clark, edited by Gary Moulton and published by the University of Nebraska Press, are the most thoroughly documented food record in American exploration history and pemmican appears in them as a staple of survival rather than a curiosity. These men were eating nine pounds of fresh meat per man per day on good days and boiling candles to eat on bad ones. When they made pemmican they were thinking about the bad days.

The elephant became something of a celebrity during his stay in Rome – the image above shows a depiction of Hanno drawn by the artist Raphael, while he also had several encounters with the Medici.

When Hanno died in 1516, the pope was said to be besides himself with grief.

Full story on Age of Exploration Patreon page (free access): https://www.patreon.com/posts/present-fit-for-157548241

The colony in the Strait of Magellan, however, was a disaster. The settlers were unable to plant food in the southern reaches of South America, and soon begin to starve. When the English privateer Thomas Cavendish arrived at the site in 1587, three years after its foundation, there were only 30 people left from the original party of 300. He renamed it Port Famine.

Sarmiento, on the other hand, was captured by Walter Raleigh near the Azores and imprisoned in England. When he finally made it back to Spain four years on, the colony was no more.

The coin was located using a 16th-century map of the settlement found in the Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France in Paris. It was in the exact spot that had been described by Sarmiento de Gamboa and marked on the map.

You can read an interview with the historian Soledad González Díaz, one of the leaders of the investigations, here.

Image: Foundation coin found at Port Famine. Credit: Richard Bezzaza

Victims of the mutiny included the captain, Jan Blom, and Jørgen Iversen Dyppel, who had governed the colony for 18 years and was travelling back there to help restore order after a period of unrest.

The ship was carrying around 100 convicts, who were to settle in the Caribbean. However, both the convicts and crew members were upset with their treatment on the voyage and rose up against the officers. Captain Blom was shot, while most of the rest of the officers were simply thrown overboard.

Danish researchers are now investigating the wreck of the ship, which lies close to Gothenberg in the Swedish Peninsula.

You can more about the research efforts and the mutiny here

Image: A depiction of the conspiracy by Christian Bogø printed in the magazine Vikingen in 1924

Researchers from the University of Waterloo in Canada have compared DNA samples from skeletons found in the Arctic with known descendants of Franklin expedition crew members. Matches to four of the bodies have been found, including that of Harry Peglar, a petty officer who left a wallet full of personal documents.

Full story: https://theageofexploration.com/genetic-mapping-unmasks-four-victims-of-the-ill-fated-franklin-voyage/

Image: Excavating one of the skeletons found in the Arctic, University of Waterloo