William Scoresby, Junior: Encyclopedia Arctica 15: Biographies

William Scoresby, Junior (1789-1857), English whaler and arctic explorer, was born at Cropton, near Whitby, Yorkshire, the son of William Scoresby, also a Greenland whaler. Young Scoresby had a taste of whaling when he sailed with his father in the Resolution in 1800 but returned to school until, in 1803, he joined his father's ship as an apprentice and gradually worked his way up to chief officer. In 1806 the Resolution reached the record latitude of 81° 30′ N., longitude 19° E. in an unusually good ice year in the Greenland Sea. Scoresby left the sea for about a year to attend classes at the University of Edinburgh when he was seventeen and again when he was twenty, and he had another inter– lude from whaling when he was with Nelson's fleet at Copenhagen and helped to sail to England the captured Danish ships. Meanwhile his scientific interests were growing, due in part to the influence of Sir Joseph Banks whom he met about this time and several of his Edinburgh professors.

In 1811 Scoresby became captain of his father's Resolution . Then, in com– mand of the Esk and later the Fame , he made successful whaling voyages on all of which he continued his scientific observations. He had hoped to be given command of the expedition sent out by the British Government to Spitsbergen in 1818 under D. Buchan and J. Franklin in the Dorothea and the Trent , but a mer– chant sailor was not to be considered in the running, however expert and dis– tinguished he might be. In 1820 Scoresby published his Account of the Arctic Regions and Northern Whale Fishing (2 vol.).

A glimpse of the East Greenland coast from the Baffin in 1819 made him long to explore and he was able to fulfil his hope in 1820. There had been several favorable seasons and in that year some twenty to thirty whalers, in– cluding the Fame with W. Scoresby, Senior, and the Baffin with W. Scoresby, Junior, were off the coast. On June 8th, in latitude 74° 6′ N., land was sighted from the Baffin . It probably was Little Pendulum Island but Scoresby thought it was the shore seen in 1654 by Gael Hamke and named it for him. From here Scoresby charted the coast wouthward to Cape Barclay, 60 miles south of Scoresby Sound; the second was named by the younger Scoresby in honor of his father, who sailed 60 miles up the fjord. He believed that, except for a whaler or two, no one had previously sailed along this coast.

He landed at Cape Swainson and some other places and while he saw no Eskimos he found several traces of them. He thought that, possibly in fear of the strangers, they were hiding. At Cape Swainson he saw two shallow excavations bordered by stones, a stone fireplace, and some fine wood ashes. He believed that the fireplace must have been used that summer, since winter winds or spring flooding would have carried away the ashes. Ryder, however, who in 1891-92 found similar ashes far up Scoresby Sound, believed that they may have lain undisturbed for many years. There certainly was no Eskimo living in Scoresby Sound at the time of Ryder's visit. In 1823, only three years later than Scoresby's visit, D. C. Clavering saw Eskimos on the east coast and it may be noted that in 1820 a whaler, in latitude 73° N., found near the coast a recently killed walrus with two bone harpoons. Scoresby also found traces of inhabitants at Traill Island, where he landed at Cape Moorsom. The old Norse colonies in Greenland were generally supposed to have been on the west side, as is the universal belief today, but a few authorities played with the idea of some

EA-Biography. Rudmose Brown: William Scoresby, Jr.

settlement having been made on the east. Did they still exist? Scoresby was as anxious to settle this matter as to explain their disappearance. Some of the signs of past dwellings and some of the relics of inhabitants he thought might be due to European influence, but he was by no means certain.

Scoresby's survey on this coast, though good, was not final. Some of his capes to the north of Davy Sound were sighted from a considerable distance and his landfalls were sometimes, according to J. M. Wordie, not capes but mountains to which his names have now been transferred. Scoresby certainly materially altered the map of this part of East Greenland and gave the first account of its salient features. His mistake was a belief that some of the long inlets continued through to the west coast. Although he made some twenty whaling voyages to the Greenland Sea, which he insisted was a more lucrative and safer whaling area than Baffin Bay, it was only in 1822 that he landed on the coast of ^ East ^ Greenland.

Scoresby made several landings on Spitsbergen but did little exploration in that land. In 1809 he was on Prince Charles Foreland and found abandoned Russian huts. In 1818 he landed on the north of Cross Bay (Krossfjorden) and climbed Kapp Mitra (Collins) from which he describes vividly the wide view.

He noticed that the temperature of the sea adjoining the east coast of Greenland fell with depth while on the east of the Greenland Sea toward Spits– bergen it universally rose. This phenomenon he attributed, quite rightly, to a northward-flowing warmer stream of water of superior specific gravity sinking below the surface layers. He also had ideas about the formation of icebergs and took pains to calculate the weight of an unusually large one. "Greenland Polar Ice." Wernevian Sec. Memoir 1818 .

Discolored sea water interested him andhe examined it under a microscope.

EA-Biography. Rudmose Brown: William Scoresby, Jr.

Brown-colored sea water, he found, was due to the "remains of animalcules" but yellow-green water was of more interest since it contained "myriads of animalcules moving at a great rate in a transparent substance of a lemon yellow colour." He calculated that in a single drop of water there were 25,000 animal– cules. It is now known that this yellow-green color of arctic seas is entirely due to diatoms. Many small crustaceans feed on these diatoms.

Before he reached middle age Scoresby showed leanings toward the Church. He tried always to hold a service on board every Sunday, morning and evening, and he was strongly of the belief that a service preliminary to the "fishing" furthered the success of the whaling. Also he never whaled on Sundays; "I could relate several instances in which, after our refraining to fish on the Sabbath, while others were thus successfully employed, our subsequent labours succeeded under circumstances so striking that there was not, I believe, a man in the ship who did not consider it the effect of the Divine Blessing." See his Sabbaths in the Arctic Regions 1850. In 1823 Scoresby left the sea and went into Queens College, Cambridge, with the purpose of entering the Church. He was ordained in 1825 and given the curacy of Bessingby, near Bridlington, in the East Riding of Yorkshire, which he held until 1837 when he became vicar of Bradford, York– shire. He health failing, he retired from active work in 1847 and went to live at Torquay where he occupied himself in writing a life of " My Father (1851). He also published in 1850 his views on the lost Franklin Expedition, a Considera– tion on measures for the Discovery and relief of our absent adventurers in the Arctic Regions . As a passanger in a steamship to Australia and back he made his last sea voyage. Scoresby was married three times. He was elected an F.R.S. in 1824, and a corresponding member of the Institute of France in 1827. He died at Torquay in 1857. His Life by his nephew, R. E. Scoresby-Jackson, was published in 1861. In addition to his Account of the Arctic Regions , 1820, Scoresby pub– lished Journal of a Voyage to the Northern Whale Fishery ' 1823.

See also J. M. Werdie's "The Cambridge Expedition to East Greenland in 1926." Geog. J ., 1927, Vol. 70, pp. 225-265. An Account of a Voyage to Spitsbergen by J. Laing relates a voyage of the Resolution with Scoresby. The William Scoresby a vessel of 360 tons is the fishery and whaling research vessel of the Falkland Islands Government which was named in honor of Scoresby.

R. N. Rudmose Brown