THE POLAR GARDEN - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 71

along the shore to a vast distance & returned again eastward without difficulty, but without
finding any whales! 5
Figure 6.2. The air of authority evident in William Scoresby's portrait, combined with his extensive know-
ledge of the polar regions, should have made him an obvious choice to lead the British Arctic expeditions
of 1818. But Barrow snubbed him because he was a commercial whaler and not a navy man. In his ab-
sence, the Ross and Buchan expeditions floundered. (William Scoresby, Account of the Arctic Regions [Ed-
inburgh, 1820]; © Bridgeman Art Library.)
On his return to England in August, Captain Scoresby, eager to justify himself in the eyes of
his disappointed investors, published a short account of the circumstances of the poor whal-
ing season in a Liverpool newspaper.
As we have seen, news of Arctic sea-ice loss reached the vigilant eye of Sir Joseph Banks,
who had built his extraordinary career in the public promotion of British science on looking
always to the next frontier. If Scoresby's reports were true, an ice-free Greenland sea was cer-
tainly a major development in the world of science, one the British nation should be quick
to exploit. Banks dashed of a letter to Scoresby—whom he knew already as one of his many
hundreds of correspondents on scientific subjects—asking for more “particulars.” Even in this
initial letter, Banks showed himself eager to theorize a synoptic connection between the melt-
ing of the polar ice cap and “the frosty springs and chilly summers we have been subject to”
in 1816 and 1817. 6 Scoresby's tale dovetailed tantalizingly in Banks's mind with numerous
reports of icebergs seen floating unnaturally far south in the Atlantic. A mile-long iceberg
had been sighted of the Grand Banks while ghostly convoys of ice drifted past the coasts
of Ireland and New York, and even, it was said, into the tropical Bahamas. 7 The miserable
“Year without a Summer,” so fresh in the memory, might be explained (Banks conjectured)
by massive chunks of polar ice now drifting southward, cooling air temperatures along the
way. Of greater national importance, of course, were the implications of an ice-free Arctic for
a northwest passage to Asia.
Scoresby's reply to Banks's excited speculations was satisfyingly direct: “I found about
2000 square leagues [61,000 km 2 ] of the surface of the Greenland sea, between the parallels
of 74° and 80° north, perfectly void of ice, which is usually covered with it…. Had I been so
fortunate as to have had the command of an expedition for discovery, instead of fishing, I
have little doubt but that the mystery attached to the existence of a north west passage might