Yes there was!

Several European powers chartered expeditions north of Russia in search of a northeast passage to China and the indies. Probably the most famous (or infamous) was the doomed voyage of Dutch explorers Willem Barentsz and Jacob van Heemskerk, which foundered on the island of Nova Zemlya in the Russian Arctic and forced the crew to spend these frozen winter of 1598 in an emergency shelter constructed from their own ship. The story is dramatized in the Dutch film Nova Zembla.

Probably the most famous hunter of the northeast passage is better known for his exploits in the west. Before sailing for the new world, Henry Hudson (you know husband from the Hudson Bay and Hudson River) sailed twice on the early 1600s in search of a northeast passage around Scandinavia and Russia. Why bother when the Vova Zemlya disaster had just proven the idea impractical? In the run up to Hudson’s voyages, English high society became obsessed with a pseudoscientific theory that the cold Arctic did not actually reach all the way to the pole, and that north of the Arctic ice there was a warm tropical zone that could be reached with the right equipment. Needless to say, this did not pan out, but interesting the warm Arctic theory had a brief second life toward the end of the century as the premise for Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World, an early work of utopian science fiction and one of the first important English novels written by a woman.

Source: Russel Shorto’s The Island at the Center of the World, Steven Greenblatt’s Marvelous Possessions