Boats built for the ice
The Arctic Ocean is mostly covered by sea ice for much of the year, and its margins are fringed by cold, stormy seas. Sailing there demands different skills and vessels from those used in warmer waters. The region’s maritime history begins not with European explorers but with Indigenous peoples, who developed light, effective craft long before the first European ship appeared.
Inuit and Arctic peoples’ boats
Two vessel types stand out. The kayak is a narrow, decked, one- or two-person craft made of a wooden or bone frame covered with sealskin, used for hunting seals, whales and caribou crossing water. The umiak, a larger open skin boat, carried families, goods and hunting crews and could be paddled or, in some regions, sailed. Both reflect the same principle of skin-over-frame construction. Related traditions existed among Aleut, Yupik and Chukchi peoples, and the Inuit descended from the Thule culture, which spread eastward across the Arctic from Alaska during roughly the centuries around 1000 to 1300 CE.
Hunters also used sleds and ice-edge techniques, but boats were essential for open-water hunting. The Inuit kayak origins lie in this hunting tradition, and later recreational kayaks are adaptations of what were originally working tools.
Norse and early European voyages
Norse settlers occupied parts of Greenland from the late tenth century, and they sailed to hunting grounds further north, trading walrus ivory and other products with Europe. Their settlements declined over the following centuries, for reasons that are debated, and had disappeared by the end of the fifteenth century or soon after.
From the sixteenth century, European merchants and navigators hoped to find a sea route north of Europe or America to Asia. Martin Frobisher made voyages to Baffin Island in the 1570s, and John Davis explored the strait now bearing his name in the 1580s. Henry Hudson sailed into what became Hudson Bay in 1610, where his crew mutinied and set him adrift. The Dutch navigator Willem Barents reached Novaya Zemlya in the 1590s, where his crew overwintered in a hut built from driftwood and ship’s timber after their vessel was trapped in ice; Barents died during the return journey in 1597.
Whalers in the ice
Commercial whaling drew far more ships to the Arctic than exploration did. Basque whalers had hunted in the North Atlantic earlier, and from the early seventeenth century Dutch, English and other crews worked the waters around Spitsbergen. Whaling vessels of the later periods, particularly in the nineteenth century, sailed from ports such as Dundee and Peterhead in Scotland and from New England towns, pushing into the ice in search of bowhead and other whales.
Crews learned practical lessons about ice. Ships were reinforced with extra timbers and iron sheathing at the bow, and lookouts watched from a crow’s nest for leads, the channels that open in the pack. Being beset, or locked in ice, was a constant danger, and some vessels were crushed. These whaling vessels show many adaptations to ice, and Arctic whalers like William Scoresby of Whitby contributed observations of ice and currents that fed into science.
The Franklin expedition and the passage
In the nineteenth century the British Admiralty sent naval expeditions to find a route through the Canadian Arctic. The best-known is Sir John Franklin’s 1845 expedition with HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, which was lost with all hands after becoming trapped in ice near King William Island. Searches over the following decade mapped much of the Arctic coast. The wrecks were located in 2014 and 2016 by Canadian teams, working with Inuit knowledge and oral history. The long search for the Northwest Passage is a subject in itself, but the Franklin case shows how difficult Arctic ice navigation was for vessels of the period.
The first crew to complete the passage by ship was led by Roald Amundsen in the small sloop Gjoa between 1903 and 1906. A small, shallow-draught boat suited narrow coastal channels better than a large naval ship.
Polar expedition ships
Expedition ships needed strength. The Norwegian-built Fram, designed for Fridtjof Nansen, had a rounded hull so that pressure from ice would squeeze it upward rather than crush it, and it drifted with the pack ice between 1893 and 1896. The Fram drift expedition proved the concept. The Swedish explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskiold sailed the Vega along the Siberian coast in 1878 to 1880, achieving the first complete transit of the Northeast Passage.
By the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, steam engines made it easier to push into ice. Specially designed icebreaker ships, first built in Russia and Finland, eventually allowed year-round traffic on some routes. Soviet and Russian operators later developed the Northern Sea Route along the Siberian coast, and nuclear-powered icebreakers have been used there since the 1950s.
A changing region
Today the Arctic is warming faster than most regions, and summer sea ice has declined, affecting shipping and the lives of coastal communities. Historians should be careful about drawing neat lessons, but the long record shows that navigating the ice has always depended on local knowledge, sturdy construction and patience.