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HMS Terror, pictured here in an 1838 painting by William Henry Smyth, was stranded in an ice pack west of Baffin Island and stranded on ice for 118 days during an Arctic voyage, one of many casualties in the search for a way surrounded. the universe. (Royal Greenwich Museum)
The search for the Northwest Passage fundamentally shaped the history of Newfoundland, where John Cabot landed in 1497 in search of a northwest sea route to Asia.
Although European sailors provided themselves with the latest maritime technologies, from agile caravans to magnetic compasses, their belief in the existence of the Northwest Passage was based on something less modern: 1,800-year-old theoretical geography.
With only ancient philosophy and the Bible as evidence, Europeans were convinced that there must be a navigable, ice-free Northwest Passage, and their quest to find it would last centuries and cost hundreds life.
Symmetrical world
When Europeans first set sail into unknown waters, they had to rely on theory, rather than experience, to guide them.
Although the Vikings had reached the island of Newfoundland about 500 years earlier, detailed information about this territory outside of Greenland had not spread to other Europeans. Meanwhile, Marco Polo’s account of his travels in Asia had done little to clarify how those lands could be reached by sailing west from Europe.
With little to do, would-be explorers followed the freshest ideas of what lay on the other side of the horizon. These predictions were based on sources that, by our modern standards, were far from scientific: ancient philosophy and Christian theology.
Albi’s eighth-century Mappa Mundi shows a symmetrical idealization of the world as it was known to medieval people. The map is centered on the Mediterranean, with the Middle East at the top, Europe on the left, and North Africa on the right. (Mediathèque d’Albi-Centre Pierre-Amalric)
One of the few ancient texts relating to geography to survive in Western Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire was Plato’s text Timaeus.
According to the Timaeus, a divine creator designed our universe following mathematical principles of balance and proportion. The fact that the earth is a sphere — “the most perfect form of all forms,” ”the form in which all other forms contain itself” — is evidence of its physical impotence.
The Old Testament seemed to support Plato’s views. The Book of Isaiah describes creation as an act of precise calculation by a god who “weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance,” who “measured the waters in the palm of his hand, measured the heavens with a span, and counted the dust of the earth in measure.”
If the world was created in divine balance, so went medieval and Renaissance thinking, it stood to reason that its oceans and continents had to be laid out symmetrically and in proportion to each other.
When 15th-century explorers brought knowledge of the Americas back to Europe, it confirmed what most geographers already believed: that the Afro-Eurasian continent must have a counterpart of equal size on the other side of the world.
The top half of this 1489 world map from the Venetian edition of John of Eschenden’s Summa astrologiae judicialis shows Eurasia and Africa separated by the Ocean Current from a southern continent that is thought to be the same size. (Biblioteca Universidad de Sevilla.)
In 1487, the Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope (the southernmost point of Africa) to reach the Indian Ocean, and, in 1520, his compatriot Ferdinand Magellan sailed a strait through southern South America to the Pacific Ocean.
Under the prevailing theory of symmetrical geography, these voyages proved the existence of south-west and north-east passages. If sea routes were open to the south of the world’s continents, sea routes must also be open to the north.
The wizard who trained England’s explorers
Sixteenth century English explorers received a thorough education in the principles of theoretical geography before they set sail, delivered by none other than the famous alderman John Dee.
As an advisor to Elizabeth I, Dee’s astrological predictions, communications with angels, and mystical writings earned him the nickname “the Queen’s conjurer,” and he instructed the leaders of every English expedition into northern waters in the second half of the sixteenth century, Martin in mix. Frobisher, Humphrey Gilbert, and John Davis.
With the tenets of ancient philosophy and Christian Kabbalism, he taught them the theory of symmetrical geography and used philosophical reasoning to defend the Northwest passage.
John Dee experiments before the English court in an oil painting by Henry Gillard Glindoni. (Welcome Collection)
As strange as it may be that a sorcerer had such an influence on English language exploration, Dee’s influence represents the fine line between magic and science at the time. Although he may have been interested in mysticism, Dee was above all a mathematician.
He used his mathematical talents not only to cast horoscopes and practice numerology but also to make astronomical observations, study Euclidean geometry, and develop new navigational instruments.
What we now think of as the natural sciences, from the fourth century BC to the 19th century, was classified as “natural philosophy” and is considered a branch of philosophy that wrote a great deal, one more way of trying to understand the world. better by observation and reason.
The symmetrical universe theory continued to drive Canadian Arctic exploration up until Franklin’s doomed expedition of 1845-48. His two ships, the Terror and the Erebuslocked in the impenetrable ice for three years, causing all 129 crew members to die of scurvy, starvation and exposure.
The title page of John Dee’s 1577 book on the art of navigation incorporates esoteric symbols, including the sun, moon, stars and a bright tetragrammaton, as a symbol of divine approval of British imperialism under Queen Elizabeth I. (Royal Greenwich Museum)
Ultimately, the Northwest Passage was only discovered with a plume in 1853 by Richard McClure and crew HMS Investigatorwho was searching for Franklin’s lost expedition.
They sailed through the Strait of Magellan in South America to the Pacific Ocean and into the Arctic Ocean from the west. Then when the An investigator caught in the pack ice and forced to abandon it, they continued east with a sled and were rescued by another British ship.
This second lifeboat also eventually had to be abandoned after becoming locked in the ice, and everyone on board had to walk south to safety.
Although they had found the Northwest Passage, they had disproved the theory of symmetric geography, because, unlike its southern counterpart, the Northwest Passage did not turn out to be reliably ice-free.
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