Arctic Medal 1875-76

Named from

£4500.00

 

- Sir George Strong Nares.

- The British Arctic Expedition of 1875-1876.

- HMS Alert.

- HMS Discovery.

- The Pandora Expeditions.

 

Sir George Strong Nares - Vice-Admiral Sir George Strong Nares KCB FRS (24 April 1831-15 January 1915) was a British naval officer and Arctic explorer. He commanded the first ship to pass through the Suez Canal, the Challenger Expedition and the British Arctic Expedition.

 

He was highly thought of as a leader and scientific explorer. In later life he worked for the Board of Trade and as Acting Conservator of the River Mersey, and died in 1915 aged 83.

 

This information was taken from ‘Wikipedia’. The original article and details of the authors can be found here. It is reproduced on this web-site under the ‘creative commons’ licence which can be found here.

 

The British Arctic Expedition of 1875 - 1876 - The British Arctic Expedition of 1875-1876, led by Sir George Strong Nares, was sent by the British Admiralty to attempt to reach the North Pole via Smith Sound.

 

Two ships, HMS Alert and HMS Discovery (captained by Henry Frederick Stephenson), sailed from Portsmouth on 29 May 1875. Although the expedition failed to reach the North Pole, the coasts of Greenland and Ellesmere Island were extensively explored and large amounts of scientific data were collected.

 

On this expedition, Nares became the first explorer to take his ships all the way north through the channel between Greenland and Ellesmere Island (now named Nares Strait in his honour) to the Lincoln Sea. Up to this time, it had been a popular theory that this route would lead to the supposed Open Polar Sea, an ice-free region surrounding the pole, but Nares found only a wasteland of ice.

 

A sledging party under Commander Albert Hastings Markham set a new record Farthest North of 83° 20' 26"N, but overall the expedition was a near-disaster. The men suffered badly from scurvy and were hampered by inappropriate clothing and equipment. Nares wintered at Fort Conger during the winter of 1875.

 

Realising that his men could not survive another winter in the ice, Nares hastily retreated southward with both his ships in the summer of 1876.

 

However, naval personnel and topographers, among them Thomas Mitchell, did succeed in documenting, by photograph, the Northern indigenous peoples and landscapes of what would become Canada's Northwest Territories and, later, Nunavut.

 

The expedition included Petty Officer Adam Ayles, after whom both the Ayles Ice Shelf and Mount Ayles are named. Other features named after the expedition include the Markham Ice Shelf, Nares Strait and Alert, Nunavut, the most northerly permanently inhabited place on earth.

 

Pelham Aldrich was a lieutenant on the expedition and commanded the Western Sledge Party to Ellesmere Island, where Cape Aldrich was named in his honour. Archives are held at Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge.

 

This information was taken from ‘Wikipedia’. The original article and details of the authors can be found here. It is reproduced on this web-site under the ‘creative commons’ licence which can be found here.

 

HMS Alert - HMS Alert was a 17-gun wooden screw sloop of the Cruizer class of the Royal Navy, launched in 1856 and broken up in 1894. She was the eleventh ship of the Royal Navy to bear the name (or a variant of it), and was noted for her Arctic exploration work; in 1876 she reached a record latitude of 82° North.

 

Alert briefly served with the United States Navy, and ended her career with the Canadian Marine Service as a lighthouse tender and buoy ship.

 

This information was taken from ‘Wikipedia’. The original article and details of the authors can be found here. It is reproduced on this web-site under the ‘creative commons’ licence which can be found here.

 

HMS Discovery - HMS Discovery was a wooden screw storeship, formerly the whaling ship Bloodhound. She was purchased in 1874 for the British Arctic Expedition of 1875 - 1876 and was sold in 1902.

 

This information was taken from ‘Wikipedia’. The original article and details of the authors can be found here. It is reproduced on this web-site under the ‘creative commons’ licence which can be found here.

 

The Pandora Expeditions - In 1874 Allen Young purchased the superseded British Royal Navy gun-vessel Pandora in order to make a final search for the missing written records of the Franklin expedition, with additional funding from Lady Franklin.

 

The expedition sailed from Southampton late in June 1875, but heavy ice in Peel Sound prevented the vessel from reaching the search area, and the expedition returned unsuccessful. By this time Lady Franklin had died. In 1876 Allen Young took the Pandora on a second voyage to the Arctic with stores to relieve the British Arctic Expedition. Young was knighted in recognition of his services.

 

Sir Allen Young planned another expedition in Pandora in 1878, but was induced by a sponsor James Gordon Bennett, Jr. to sell the vessel to him. She was renamed Jeannette for a United States Arctic expedition, and subsequently wrecked with heavy loss of life.

 

This information was taken from ‘Wikipedia’. The original article and details of the authors can be found here. It is reproduced on this web-site under the ‘creative commons’ licence which can be found here.

 

End of database.