ARCTIC OCEAN 1607

Arctic Ocean exploration has been a mystery to early explorers and geographers. Often this region would be marked as unexplored or partially explored or just assumed a lake surrounded by islands. The area has been labelled as "Oceanus Septentrionalis", which in Latin would be translated as 'Northern Ocean'. Most of the exploration of the Arctic Ocean and North Pole would start in the 19th century but this post shall discuss about how maps (around this region) were imagined before that time.

On 16th century maps, North Pole (or simply, Pole) is written in Latin as Nortvs Polvs. One has to note that the letter 'U' was not in printed use till the mid-18th century on French maps and hence most Latin and French maps pre-18th century used the letter 'V' instead. So it's technically 'Nortus Polus' and it would be surrounded by chunks of islands such as Groenland (Greenland), Island (Iceland), Groclant, t'Nieulant and Nova Zembla (Novaya Zemlya, Russia), and since much of the North America was yet to be discovered by the Europeans, 'Americae Pars' would denote as 'part of America'.

We know about Greenland, Novaya Zemlya and Iceland. But throughout history there are certain places that never actually existed but one would find a lot in old maps. Groclant is one such example. Some believe it was mistaken to be Baffin Island, others say it could be mispronunciation to Greenland (although Greenland already existed). Another interesting label was to put California near a place called 'Bargu' just below the Arctic Circle (as Circulus Articus). Even more interesting is the existence of a Belgian Desert near Mongolia. None of the reasons can be justified except for the ones that a lot of assumptions, errors and approximations were made on old maps before the 18th century innovations.

Before everything around this was labelled as Arctic Ocean, water bodies such as Oceanus Septentrionalis (Northern Ocean), Oceanus Scythicus (Scythian Ocean), El Straito de Anian (Strait of Anian), Petzorke Mare (Petzorke Sea), Myrmanskoi Mare (Murmansk Sea) etc. None of these water bodies exist presently and we find water bodies such as Beaufort Sea, Greenland Sea, Barents Sea, Kara Sea, Laptev Sea, East Siberian Sea etc. surrounding the Arctic Ocean.

18th century maps improved and one could see the islands around today's North Pole disappeared. Even though Canadian borders were yet undefined, Arctic was shown surrounded by Russia, Spitzberg (Spitsbergen, part of Svalbard, Norway), Greenland and fragments of North America. An interesting feature in older maps was if an area was undiscovered or less navigated or poorly explored, the boundaries weren't shown. Similar trend would continue till early 19th century and it wasn't till late 1800s when a correct, more authentic and proper demarcation was incorporated. And with the discovery of today's North Pole (the exact location) in 1909, more improved maps were made.

The map here is a representation of a 1607 version of Arctic Ocean by early Flemish geographers.