Donald Trump’s jumbled rationales for claiming Greenland, which include an odd invocation of Manifest Destiny, are unprecedented. But the adversarial Arctic competition his quest has stoked echoes a century of northern exploration and imperial reckonings that began 200 years ago. That history shows us that conflict and failure are inevitable when nations vie for Arctic influence. It also suggests that Arctic competition offers opportunity: to gather new knowledge about the natural world, and to examine possible solutions to our ecological crisis.
Consider the story of the Rurik, the first ship to seek a “Northwest Passage” through the Arctic, from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean. In 1815, the wealthy Russian Count Nikolai Rumiantsev became determined to discover this route, and attain the bragging rights that would come with it. Many powerful trading nations, including England, France, and Spain, had been interested in finding the passage. Rumiantsev hoped that Russia might get there first, and establish itself as an empire committed to exploration, science, and international commerce.
Rumiantsev commissioned Erik Malm of Finland to build the Rurik, a small ship of Finnish fir, and outfitted it with the best gadgets science had to offer. He hired a motley crew with varied expertise that was difficult to find in his native country: a French naturalist, a Ukrainian artist, an Estonian physician and naturalist, and a Baltic German captain, Otto von Kotzebue. Kadu, an Indigenous navigator from the Caroline Islands, joined the expedition once it reached the central Pacific. The ship sailed under a Russian flag, but only its sailors were truly Russian. Rumiantsev desired European expertise, especially in the field of natural history.
The Rurik departed from St. Petersburg in summer 1815, rounded Cape Horn, and began a long northern traverse of the Pacific, crossing into the Chukchi Sea above the Bering Strait in July 1816. The expedition discovered a massive bay on the American side of the sea, and the captain placed his name on it: Kotzebue Sound. Members of the Iñupiat community met with Kotzebue, and one informed the captain that a long river nearby ran north to a large body of water—possibly the long-sought passage, Kotzebue thought. Mindful that winter was coming, Kotzebue decided to pause the search and return the next summer.
The Rurik sailed south, allowing the two naturalists and the artist to conduct extensive studies in Alta California, the Hawaiian Islands, and the Marshall Islands. The naturalists added to their extensive collections of flora and fauna, while the artist sketched Indigenous people and their material cultures. Their private journals also offered assessments of the impacts, or lack thereof, of colonialism in each location. Captain Kotzebue wrote more about the Marshall Islands than any other place because he imagined himself their first European discoverer.
Refreshed and energized with new experiences, the expedition headed north for a second season of Arctic discovery in summer 1817. This time the mission was doomed before it even began. A violent storm below the Aleutian Islands nearly tore the small ship apart; Kotzebue was thrown against the ship’s railing and suffered a severe chest wound. When the Rurik finally advanced on the Bering Strait, the crew discovered a solid wall of ice as far as the eye could see. Kotzebue, breathing painfully and coughing up blood, decided to turn the ship around. The Rurik arrived back in St. Petersburg in September 1818, having failed to find the Northwest Passage.
The expedition had ended in an untimely way, but competitors, who had followed the Rurik’s progress in the news, still felt threatened by it. Some commenters in the European maritime community sharply criticized Kotzebue’s decision to abort. The “abrupt abandonment” of the mission “was hardly justified,” sniffed John Barrow, Britain’s second secretary to the admiralty—and the world’s leading advocate for Arctic exploration. Barrow believed that the Arctic region held Earth’s remaining geographic and scientific mysteries—and much as Rumiantsev hoped exploring the region would boost Russian prestige, Barrow believed British discoveries would solidify his own nation’s exploratory supremacy. He was stung by the speed with which Rumiantsev had assembled his expedition. Barrow understood from news reports that the Rurik had returned to St. Petersburg with many significant findings, and he knew the Russian state planned new polar expeditions (in fact, one to each pole!). Barrow also feared that the U.S. would join the fray: newspapers in the young and enterprising nation reported on the Rurik’s successful return and especially promoted the naturalists’ discovery of an Alaskan glacier containing a partially revealed form of an ancient mammoth. The carcass, complete with massive tusks, rotted in the summer sun.
Barrow acted quickly, gaining admiralty sponsorship for a series of Arctic voyages. The names of these British voyagers are better known than Kotzebue: John Ross, William Edward Parry, and John Franklin of the HMS Terror, among others. Bold explorers, they made minor geographic discoveries for the British Empire, but they too failed to sail from the Atlantic to the Pacific above North America. No one would succeed until Norway’s Roald Amundsen, in 1905.
The Rurik crew learned from the Indigenous groups they encountered throughout their voyage. | 1827 illustration by Louis Choris. Credit: Internet Archive
The failures that preceded Amundsen’s journey were not solely disappointments—the Rurik included. The Rurik’s naturalists, artists, and captain published their Arctic findings for decades to come, both in learned circles and to the public. Their observations led them to announce the discovery of metagenesis—the process by which certain species change their basic structure from one generation to the next—and new explanations of how species operated, similar to Darwin’s theory of natural selection. They also documented permafrost above the Bering Strait, catalogued new Indigenous languages, described varieties of North Pacific whales, and produced an atlas-like compendium that reordered the entire animal kingdom. These findings individually contributed to what would soon become distinct scientific fields, including evolutionary biology and linguistics. Collectively, they reveal an age in which natural history encompassed a plethora of investigations, only limited by the naturalist’s curiosity and resolve.
Some of this natural history knowledge—which came to be considered “European” scientific advancement—came from the Indigenous groups the Rurik encountered. Native people served as local guides, informants, and teachers for those traveling scientists who returned to Europe with new insights about the natural world. Knowledge exchange could work both ways. Kadu, the navigator from the Caroline Islands, returned home with vast new knowledge about the ocean to share with his community—alongside a belief that Europeans posed danger.
Whether or not Trump makes good on his promise to take Greenland, his threats and the fear they have inspired seem likely to spark more discovery. We have already seen China sending military and civilian research vessels into the Arctic, likely with new commercial routes for cargo vessels in mind. Scandinavian countries are showing a fresh interest in the region’s ability to teach us about climate change. And Russia is claiming the Arctic as home turf. This entire region remains a forbidding and treacherous environment, and yet it merits careful exploration by climate scientists in particular. Its environment may reveal not only unknown triggers of climate change but also circumstances that may forestall global warming. Whatever else Arctic competition brings, we should anticipate many failures along the way. That is how exploration works.
David Igler is professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, and author of the new book All Species of Knowledge: A Voyage of Discovery, Failure, and Natural History in the Pacific Ocean.
Primary editor: Sarah Rothbard | Secondary editor: Eryn Brown
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