C Brown's List: European exploration & colonization

• When Denmark planted a Danish flag two years ago on tiny Hans Island, which  lies between Canada and Danish-controlled Greenland, the Canadian government  scrambled ministers northwards to pose in the snow.  

  And when a Russian expedition planted a flag on the sea bed at the North Pole  last August, the Canadian government derided the act as a stunt more at home in  the Middle Ages; but then promptly ordered more bases, ships and patrols for the  Arctic.

• Throughout the night, and all day today, we've been steaming south through  the McClintock Channel.  

  The where? Well, this channel, one of hundreds twisting between the islands  of the Canadian Arctic, proved to be a kind of missing link in the quest to  discover the Northwest Passage.  

  And like almost every channel, sound, headland, and island in this vast and  wintery landscape, it carries the names of the great British Imperial explorers  and their sponsors.  

  Ross, Parry, Franklin, Melville, Barrow and long lists of royalty dot the  map. There's even a Boothia Peninsular, an early example of product placement,  being named after the wealthy distiller of Booth's gin who funded an expedition.   

  So to today's ice-flecked, wind-blasted Arctic feature, the McClintock  Channel.  

  Horror discovery  

  In the mid 19th Century, Francis McClintock became famous for successfully  discovering the first evidence of a terrible failure - the ill-fated Franklin  expedition of 1845 which set off with great fanfare and then vanished.  

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  All mod cons: It is easy to forget just how easy it is today       <!-- S IMED -->  The Franklin mystery   <!-- E IMED -->

  <!-- E IBOX -->In  search of him, McClintock had landed on the then little-explored King William  Island to our south.  

  Enduring the ghastly hardship of hauling sledges over the ice, he and his  crew stumbled on a rotting wooden dinghy containing two skeletons.  

  This horrific sight confirmed what the country had long dreaded hearing -  that Sir John Franklin and his 100 men had all perished in one of the most  disastrous ventures the Empire had ever launched.  

  McClintock himself suffered terribly from scurvy.

• As far back as the 1500s, there were dreams in Europe of finding a shortcut  to the riches of Asia, a swift connection between the Atlantic and the Pacific.  

  Parliament offered a vast reward to the first man to make it through. The  Admiralty sent repeated missions to force a route through the ice. Over the  centuries, some of the great names of British imperial discovery ventured into  this forbidding land, and many never made it back out.

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