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The 'Northwest Passage' is a sea route through the Arctic Ocean along the northern coast of North America via the waterways amidst the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.^[1][2] The various islands of the archipelago are separated from one another and the Canadian mainland by a series of Arctic waterways collectively known as the 'Northwest Passages' or 'Northwestern Passages'.^[3]
Sought by explorers for centuries as a possible trade route, it was first navigated by Roald Amundsen in 1903-6. The Arctic pack ice prevents regular marine shipping throughout the year, but climate change due to global warming in modern times is reducing the pack ice and may eventually make the waterways more navigable. This and the contested sovereignty claims over the waters may complicate future shipping through the region: the Canadian government considers the Northwestern Passages part of the Canadian Internal Waters,^[4] but various countries maintain they are an international strait or transit passage, allowing free and unencumbered passage.^[5][6]

Contents

Overview

First attempts

Sir John Franklin expedition

McClure expedition

Explorations by John Rae

Amundsen expedition

Later expeditions

International waters dispute

Effects of global warming

See also

References

External links

Overview

Between the end of the 15th century and the 20th century, Colonial Powers from Eurasia dispatched explorers in an attempt to discover a commercial sea route north and west around North America. The British called the hypothetical route the ''Northwest Passage''. The desire to establish such a route motivated much of the European exploration of both coasts of North America. When it became apparent that there was no route through the heart of the continent, attention turned to the possibility of a passage through northern waters. These led to a number of expeditions to the Arctic, most notably the attempt by Sir John Franklin. In 1906, Roald Amundsen first successfully completed a path from Greenland to Alaska in the Gjøa. Since that date, a number of ice-fortified ships have made the journey.
From west to east the Northwest Passage runs through the Bering Strait (separating Russia and Alaska), Chukchi Sea, Beaufort Sea and then through several waterways that go through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. There are five to seven different routes through the archipelago, including the McClure Strait, Dease Strait and the Prince of Wales Strait, but not all of them are suitable for larger ships.^[5][8] The passage then goes through Baffin Bay and the Davis Strait into the Atlantic Ocean.
There has been speculation that with the advent of global warming the passage may become clear enough of ice to permit safe commercial shipping for at least part of the year. On August 21, 2007 the Northwest Passage became open to ships without the need of an icebreaker. According to Nalan Koc of the Norwegian Polar Institute this is the first time since they began keeping records in 1972.^[9]

First attempts

In 1539, Hernán Cortés commissioned Francisco de Ulloa to sail along the peninsula of Baja California in search of the ''Strait of Anián''. The first of several British expeditions was launched in 1576 by Martin Frobisher, who took three trips to what is now the Canadian Arctic in order to find the passage. Frobisher Bay, which he discovered, is named after him. As part of another hunt, in July 1583 Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who had written a treatise on the discovery of the passage and was a backer of Frobisher's, claimed the territory of Newfoundland for the English crown. On August 8, 1585 the English explorer John Davis for the first time entered Cumberland Sound, Baffin Island.
As well as Arctic expeditions the major rivers on the east coast were also explored in case they could lead to a transcontinental passage. Jacques Cartier explorations of the Saint Lawrence River were initiated with some hope of finding a way through the continent. In 1609 Henry Hudson sailed up what is now called the Hudson River in search of the passage; he later explored the Arctic and Hudson Bay.
In 1762, the English trading ship ''Octavius'' supposedly hazarded the passage, but became trapped in sea ice. In 1775, the whaler ''Herald'' found the Octavius drifting near Greenland with the bodies of her crew frozen below decks. Thus the ''Octavius'' may have earned the distinction of being the first Western sailing ship to make the passage, although the fact that it took 13 years and occurred after the crew was dead somewhat tarnishes this achievement. (The veracity of the ''Octavius'' story is questionable.)
In 1791-1795, the Vancouver Expedition surveyed in detail all the passages from the Northwest Coast and confirmed that there was no such passage south of the Bering Strait.^[10]
In the first half of the 19th century, some parts of the Northwest Passage were explored separately by a number of expeditions, including those by John Ross, William Edward Parry, James Clark Ross; and overland expeditions led by John Franklin, George Back, Peter Warren Dease, Thomas Simpson, and John Rae. Sir Robert McClure was credited with the discovery of the Northwest Passage in 1851 when he looked across McClure Strait from Banks Island and viewed Melville Island. However, this strait was not navigable to ships at that time, and the only usable route, linking the entrances of Lancaster Strait and Dolphin and Union Strait was discovered by John Rae in 1854.
Although most Northwest Passage expeditions originated in Europe or on the east coast of North America and sought to traverse the Passage in the westbound direction, some progress was made in exploration of its western end as well. Semyon Dezhnev was the first European to reach Alaska and discover the Bering Strait in 1648. In 1728, Vitus Bering sailed to Bering Strait from the Pacific. In 1776, James Cook set sail from England in search of the Northwest Passage from the Pacific. While in 1825, Frederick William Beechey explored the North coast of Alaska, discovering Point Barrow.

Sir John Franklin expedition

Main articles: John Franklin

In 1845, a well-equipped two-ship expedition led by Sir John Franklin sailed to the Canadian Arctic to chart the final unknown parts of the Northwest Passage. Confidence was high, as there was less than of unexplored Arctic mainland coast left. When it failed to return, a number of relief expeditions and search parties explored the Canadian Arctic, resulting in final charting of a possible passage. Traces of the expedition have been found, including records that indicate that the ships became ice-locked in 1846 near King William Island, about half way through the passage, and were unable to extricate themselves. Franklin himself died in 1847 and the last of the party in 1848, after abandoning the ships and attempting to escape overland by sledge. While starvation and scurvy contributed to the deaths of the crew, another factor was significant. The expedition took 8,000 tins of food which were soldered with lead. The lead contaminated the food, poisoning the crew. They would have become weak and disoriented—later stages of lead poisoning include insanity and death. In 1981, Dr. Owen Beattie, an anthropologist from the University of Alberta examined remains from sites associated with the expedition. This led to further investigations, and the examination of tissue and bone from the mummified bodies of three seamen, exhumed from the permafrost of Beechey Island. Laboratory tests revealed high concentrations of lead in all three. New evidence shows that cannibalism may also have contributed to the deaths of the crew.

McClure expedition

During the search for Franklin, Commander Robert McClure and his crew in HMS Investigator traversed the Northwest Passage from west to east in the years 1850 to 1854, partly by ship and partly by sledge. McClure started out from England in December of 1849, sailed the Atlantic Ocean south to Cape Horn and entered the Pacific Ocean. He sailed the Pacific north with a stop at Hawaii and then finally passed through the Bering Strait, turning east at that point and reaching Banks Island. McClure's ship was trapped in the ice for three winters near Banks Island, at the western end of Viscount Melville Sound. Finally McClure and his crew – who were by that time dying of starvation — were found by searchers travelling by sledge over the ice from one of the ships of Sir Edward Belcher's expedition, and returned with them to Belcher's ships, which had entered the sound from the east. On one of Belcher's ships, McClure and his crew returned to England arriving in 1854 becoming the first people to circumnavigate the Americas, discover and transit the North West Passage in their journey, albeit by ship and by sledge over the ice. This was an astonishing feat for that day and age and McClure was knighted and promoted to Captain and both he and his crew shared £10,000 awarded them by the British Parliament.

Explorations by John Rae

Main articles: John Rae (explorer)

The expeditions by Franklin and McClure were in the then-current tradition of British exploration: Well-funded ship-borne expeditions using modern technology, and usually including British Naval personnel. By contrast, John Rae was an employee of the Hudson's Bay Company. The Hudson's Bay Company was the major driving force behind the exploration of the Canadian North. They adopted a pragmatic approach and tended to be land-based. While Franklin and McClure attempted to explore the passage by sea, Rae explored by land, using dog sleds and employing techniques he learned from the native Inuit. The Franklin and McClure expeditions each employed hundreds of personnel and multiple ships, and ended in failure. John Rae's expeditions included less than ten people and succeeded. Rae was also the only explorer to traverse these lands without ever losing a man. In 1854 ^[11], Rae returned with information about the fate of the ill-fated Franklin expedition.

Amundsen expedition

The Northwest Passage was not conquered by sea until 1906, when the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, who had sailed just in time to escape creditors seeking to stop the expedition, completed a three-year voyage in the converted 47-ton herring boat ''Gjøa''. At the end of this trip, he walked into the city of Eagle, Alaska, and sent a telegram announcing his success. Although his chosen east-west route, via the Rae Straight, contained young ice and thus was navigable (see John Rae), some of the waterways were extremely shallow making the route commercially impractical.

Later expeditions

The first traversal of the Northwest Passage via dog sled^[12] was accomplished by Greenlander Knud Rasmussen while on the Fifth Thule Expedition (1921-1924). Rasmussen, and two Greenland Inuit, traveled from the Atlantic to the Pacific over the course of 16 months via dog sled.
In 1940, Canadian RCMP officer Henry Larsen was the second to sail the passage, crossing west to east, from Vancouver, Canada to Halifax, Canada. More than once on this trip, it was touch and go as to whether the ''St. Roch'' a Royal Canadian Mounted Police "ice-fortified" schooner would survive the ravages of the sea ice. At one point, Larsen wondered "if we had come this far only to be crushed like a nut on a shoal and then buried by the ice." The ship and all but one of her crew survived the winter on Boothia Peninsula. Each of the men on the trip was awarded a medal by Canada's sovereign, King George VI, in recognition of this notable feat of Arctic navigation.
Later in 1944, Larson's return trip was far more swift than his first; the 28 months he took on his first trip was significantly reduced, setting the mark for having traversed it in a single season. The efficiency was due to the ship following a more northerly partially uncharted route, together with extensive ship upgrades.
On July 1, 1957, the United States Coast Guard cutter ''Storis'' departed in company with U.S. Coast Guard cutters ''Bramble'' (WLB-392) and ''SPAR'' (WLB-403) to search for a deep draft channel through the Arctic Ocean and to collect hydrographic information. Upon her return to Greenland waters, the ''Storis'' became the first U.S. registered vessel to circumnavigate the North American continent. Shortly after her return in late 1957, she was reassigned to her new home port of Kodiak, Alaska.
In 1969, the SS ''Manhattan'' made the passage, accompanied by the Canadian icebreaker ''John A. Macdonald''. The ''Manhattan'' was a specially reinforced supertanker sent to test the viability of the passage for the transport of oil. While the ''Manhattan'' succeeded, the route was deemed not cost effective and the Alaska Pipeline was built instead.
In June 1977 sailor Willy de Roos left Belgium to attempt crossing the Northwest Passage in his steel yacht ''Williwaw''. He reached the Bering Strait in September and after a stopover in Victoria, British Columbia went on to round Cape Horn and sail back to Belgium, thus being the first sailor to circumnavigate the Americas entirely by ship.^[13]
In October, 2005, a aluminium sailboat, ''Northabout'', built and captained by Jarlath Cunnane, a retired construction manager, completed the first east-to-west circumnavigation of the pole by a single sailboat using the increasingly open Northwest Passage to get from Ireland to the Bering Strait in 2001. The voyage from the Atlantic to the Pacific was completed in a very fast time of 24 days — from sailing into Lancaster Sound off Baffin Bay on August 7 to reaching the Bering Strait, Alaska on September 1. The ''Northabout'' then cruised in Canada for two years. The return Northeast Passage along the coast of Russia was slower, starting in 2004, with an ice stop/winter over in Khatanga, Siberia — hence the return to Ireland via the Norwegian coast in October 2005. On January 18, 2006, The Cruising Club of America awarded Jarlath Cunnane their Blue Water Medal, an award for "meritorious seamanship and adventure upon the sea displayed by amateur sailors of all nationalities."
On May 19 2007, French sailor Sébastien Roubinet and one other crew member left Anchorage, Alaska in the sailboat ''Babouche'' to navigate west to east through the Northwest Passage by sail only.^[14]

International waters dispute

The Canadian government claims that some of the waters of the Northwest Passage, particularly those in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, are internal to Canada, giving Canada the right to bar transit through these waters. Most maritime nations,^[15] including the United States and the nations of the European Union,^[16] consider them to be an international strait, where foreign vessels have the right of "transit passage".^[17] In such a régime, Canada would have the right to enact fishing and environmental regulation, and fiscal and smuggling laws, as well as laws intended for the safety of shipping, but not the right to close the passage.^[18][5] In 1985, the U.S. icebreaker ''Polar Sea'' passed through, and the U.S. Government made a point of not asking permission from the Canadians. They claimed that this was simply a cost-effective way to get the ship from Greenland to Alaska and that there was no need to ask permission to travel through an international strait. The Canadian government issued a declaration in 1986 reaffirming Canadian rights to the waters. However, the United States refused to recognize the Canadian claim. In 1988 the governments of Canada and the US signed an agreement, "Arctic Cooperation", that did not solve the sovereignty issues but stated that US icebreakers would require permission from the Government of Canada to pass through.^[20]
In late 2005, it was alleged that U.S. nuclear submarines had traveled unannounced through Canadian Arctic waters, sparking outrage in Canada. In his first news conference after the federal election, then-Prime Minister-designate Stephen Harper contested an earlier statement made by the American ambassador that Arctic waters were international, stating the Canadian government's intention to enforce its sovereignty there. The allegations arose after the U.S. Navy released photographs of the USS ''Charlotte'' surfaced at the North Pole.
On April 9, 2006, Canada's Joint Task Force North declared that the Canadian military will no longer refer to the region as the Northwest Passage, but as the Canadian Internal Waters.^[21] The declaration came after the successful completion of Operation Nunalivut (Inuktitut for "the land is ours"), which was an expedition into the region by five military patrols. ^[22]
In 2006 a report prepared by the staff of the Parliamentary Information and Research Service of Canada suggested that because of the September 11, 2001 attacks the United States might be less interested in pursuing the international waterways claim in the interests of having a more secure North American perimeter.²⁰ This report was based on an earlier paper, ''The Northwest Passage Shipping Channel: Is Canada’s Sovereignty Really Floating Away?'' by Andrea Charron, given to the 2004 Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute Symposium.⁸ Later in 2006 former United States Ambassador to Canada, Paul Cellucci agreed with this position, however the current Ambassador, David Wilkins states that the Northwest Passage is in international waters.^[23]
On July 9, 2007 Prime Minister Harper announced the establishment of a deep water port in the far North. In the government press release the Prime Minister is quoted as saying, “Canada has a choice when it comes to defending our sovereignty over the Arctic. We either use it or lose it. And make no mistake, this Government intends to use it. Because Canada’s Arctic is central to our national identity as a northern nation. It is part of our history. And it represents the tremendous potential of our future."^[24]
On July 10, 2007 Rear Admiral Timothy McGee of the United States Navy, and Rear Admiral Brian Salerno of the United States Coast Guard announced that the United States would also be increasing its ability to patrol the Arctic.
U.S. Bolsters Arctic Presence to Aid Commercial Ships (Update1)

Effects of global warming

Around the time of the Viking Sagas and for at least two more centuries (a conservative interval from 1000–1200 AD that also happens to include the dates allotted to some of the larger Norse ships), prior to the Little Ice Age the climate was not only warmer, but the sea-level in the Arctic was also quite different from that of the present day.^[25] Between the glacial rebound and global cooling, land levels of the land masses about the Northwest Passage have risen upwards to the order of 20 m in the centuries after the Viking times.
In the summer of 2000, several ships took advantage of thinning summer ice cover on the Arctic Ocean to make the crossing. It is thought that global warming is likely to open the passage for increasing periods of time, making it attractive as a major shipping route. However the passage through the Arctic Ocean would require significant investment in escort vessels and staging ports. Therefore the Canadian commercial marine transport industry does not anticipate the route as a viable alternative to the Panama canal even within the next 10 to 20 years. ^[26]

See also

★ North West Passage Territorial Park

★ Territorial claims in the Arctic

References

1. ''Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary'' definition
2. ''The Northwest Passage Thawed''
3. ''IHO Codes for Oceans & Seas, and Other Code Systems'', including ''IHO 23-3rd: Limits of Oceans and Seas, Special Publication 23'', 3rd ed. (1953), published by International Hydrographic Organization.
4. TP 14202 E Interpretation - Transport Canada
5. The Northwest Passage and Climate Change from the Library of Parliament - Canadian Arctic Sovereignty
6. Naval Operations in an ice-free Arctic
7. The Northwest Passage and Climate Change from the Library of Parliament - Canadian Arctic Sovereignty
8.
9. North-West Passage is now plain sailing
10. Vancouver's discovery of Puget Sound Meany, Edmond Stephen
11. John Rae - Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online
12. Knud Johan Victor Rasmussen, biography by Sam Alley. Minnesota State University.
13. Willy de Roos' big journey at the CBC archives
14. The North-West Passage by Sailboat
15. Nathan VanderKlippe. Northwest Passage gets political name change, CanWest News Services, ''Ottawa Citizen'', April 9, 2006.
16. Climate Change and Canadian Sovereignty in the Northwest Passage
17. The Northwest Passage Thawed
18. UNCLOS part III, STRAITS USED FOR INTERNATIONAL NAVIGATION
19. The Northwest Passage and Climate Change from the Library of Parliament - Canadian Arctic Sovereignty
20. Relations With the United States from the Library of Parliament - Canadian Arctic Sovereignty
21.
22.
23. ''Dispute Over NW Passage Revived'' from the Washington Post
24.
25.
26.

External links

★ Irish Expedition completes the elusive Northwest Passage

★ Cunnane's Bluewater Medal achievement description - PDF

★ Arctic Passage at PBS' Nova site has articles, photographs and maps about the Northwest Passage, particularly the 1845 Franklin and 1903 Amundsen expeditions

★ Exploration of the Northwest Passage

★ The Sir John Franklin Mystery

★ 'The Great Game in a cold climate'

★ Mission to Utjulik

★ The Voyage of the ''Manhattan''

★ U.S. nuclear submarines travel in Canadian Arctic waters without permission

★ Canada considers the Northwest Passage its internal waters, but the United States insists it is an international strait.

★ Information Memorandum for Mr. Kissinger - The White House 1970

★ CBC Digital Archives - Breaking the Ice: Canada and the Northwest Passage

★ ''Nova Dania: Quest for the NW Passage'' - NEARA Journal Vol. 39 #2