Everything about The British Arctic Expedition totally explained
The
British Arctic Expedition of
1875-
1876, led by Sir
George Strong Nares, was sent by the British Admiralty to attempt to reach the
North Pole via
Smith Sound. Two ships,
HMS Alert and
HMS Discovery (captained by
Henry Stephenson), sailed from
Portsmouth on
May 29, 1875. Although the expedition failed to reach the North Pole, the coasts of
Greenland and
Ellesmere Island were extensively explored and large amounts of scientific data were collected.
On this expedition, Nares became the first explorer to take his ships all the way north through the channel between
Greenland and
Ellesmere Island (now named
Nares Strait in his honor) to the
Lincoln Sea. Up to this time, it had been a popular theory that this route would lead to the supposed
Open Polar Sea, an ice-free region surrounding the pole, but Nares found only a wasteland of ice. A sledging party under
Albert Hastings Markham set a new record farthest north of 83° 20', but overall the expedition was a near-disaster. The men suffered badly from
scurvy and were hampered by inappropriate clothing and equipment. Realizing that his men couldn't survive another winter in the ice, Nares hastily retreated southward with both his ships in the summer of 1876.
However, Navy personnel and topographers, among them Thomas Mitchell, did succeed in documenting, by photograph, the Northern indigenous peoples and landscapes of what would become
Canada's
Northwest Territories and, later,
Nunavut.
The expedition included
Petty Officer Adam Ayles, after whom both the
Ayles Ice Shelf and
Mount Ayles are named.
Archives are held at Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge
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