Two very different oceans
The Arctic is an ocean surrounded by land, while the Antarctic is a continent surrounded by ocean. That difference shaped almost every voyage into the ice. Arctic expeditions were mostly searching for a sea route, hunting whales and seals, or trying to reach the far north. Antarctic voyages came later and were mostly about finding the coast, charting it and, from the late nineteenth century, trying to cross it or reach the pole.
In both regions the ship was far more than transport. It was a base, a home, a laboratory and often the only shelter for hundreds of miles. When it was lost, the crew’s situation changed completely.
The early Arctic searches
European voyages into northern waters began in earnest in the sixteenth century, driven by the hope of a short route to Asia. English captains such as Martin Frobisher and John Davis pushed into the waters west of Greenland in the 1570s and 1580s, and Henry Hudson explored the bay that now carries his name in 1610 and 1611. The story of those attempts is told in the article on the Northwest Passage.
The Dutch navigator Willem Barents led expeditions in the 1590s towards the north-east. On his last voyage his ship was trapped in ice off Novaya Zemlya, and the crew spent the winter of 1596 to 1597 ashore in a hut built from driftwood and ship’s timbers. Barents died during the retreat in open boats the following summer, but many of the crew survived. It was an early lesson that a ship might have to be abandoned and that small boats mattered as much as the large vessel.
Whaling and sealing ships also did a great deal to open the Arctic, even if their captains kept few scientific records. Their skills in Arctic ice navigation were later borrowed by naval expeditions, which often hired experienced whaling masters and bought whaling-built hulls.
Naval expeditions of the nineteenth century
After the Napoleonic wars the Royal Navy sent a series of expeditions into the Canadian Arctic. William Edward Parry took Hecla and Griper to Melville Island in 1819 and 1820, wintering in the ice with a crew kept busy by lessons, plays and routine. Hecla was a converted bomb vessel, a type built heavily to withstand the recoil of mortars, and such hulls were strengthened further with extra timbers.
The most famous naval loss was Sir John Franklin’s expedition of 1845, with HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. Neither ship returned, and all of the roughly 129 men died. The many search expeditions that followed charted large parts of the Arctic archipelago. Both wrecks were eventually located by Canadian teams, Erebus in 2014 and Terror in 2016.
In the same period steam power arrived. A steam engine let a ship push through leads in the pack when sail alone would have been stuck, though early engines used a great deal of coal, which limited range. The wider steamship era changed polar work as it changed everything else at sea.
Ships built for the ice
By the late nineteenth century, expedition leaders were beginning to think about the hull itself. Fridtjof Nansen’s Fram, launched in 1892, had a deeply rounded underwater shape so that pressure from ice would squeeze the ship upward rather than crush it. Her three-year drift across the Arctic Ocean proved the idea and is described in its own article on the Fram drift expedition.
In 1878 and 1879, Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld sailed the Vega along the Siberian coast and into the Pacific, completing the route that is now called the Northeast Passage. The Russian steamer Yermak, completed in 1898, was an early example of a ship designed to break ice rather than simply endure it, a theme developed in the history of icebreaker ships.
The Antarctic and the heroic age
The Antarctic was reached much later. James Cook crossed the Antarctic Circle in January 1773 aboard Resolution but never sighted the continent. The first confirmed sightings came in about 1820, with Russian, British and American ships all in the region around that time. In 1839 to 1843, James Clark Ross took Erebus and Terror deep into what is now the Ross Sea.
The period from about 1895 to the First World War is often called the heroic age of Antarctic exploration. The Belgica, under Adrien de Gerlache, became trapped in the pack in 1898 and was the first expedition to survive a winter south of the Antarctic Circle. Robert Falcon Scott led the Discovery expedition of 1901 to 1904 and then the Terra Nova expedition of 1910 to 1913, in which he and his party died on the return from the pole. Roald Amundsen used the Fram to reach the Bay of Whales and reached the pole in December 1911. Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance was crushed in the Weddell Sea in 1915, a story covered in the article on the Endurance expedition.
Crews, health and routine
Polar crews were small, usually a few dozen men, and relied on careful planning of food and fuel. Shipboard provisions had to last for years if the ship was frozen in, and the fear of scurvy at sea shaped menus, with fresh meat from seals and penguins often used in later expeditions. Clothing, dogs and sledges mattered as much as the vessel once parties left the ship.
Winter in the ice meant months of darkness and enforced idleness. Officers organised lectures, newspapers, exercise and scientific observations to keep morale up. Many ships carried instruments for recording temperature, tides, magnetism and weather, and polar logs became valuable scientific records.
Why the ships matter
Almost every polar vessel was a compromise. Thick oak or greenheart sheathing, internal bracing, rounded or sloping hulls and rudders that could be lifted clear of ice all improved the odds, but none guaranteed safety. Many ships were lost, and their loss is often the central event of the expedition story.
Later generations replaced wood with steel and sail with powerful engines, then with nuclear reactors in the Soviet era. The modern polar ship, whether an icebreaker or a research vessel, owes its basic logic to the lessons learned by those earlier crews: that ice moves, that supplies are finite, and that the ship is the expedition’s lifeline.