Northwest Passage Totally Explained

Everything about The Northwest Passage totally explained

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. 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.
Sought by explorers for centuries as a possible trade route, it was first navigated by Roald Amundsen in 1903–1906. The Arctic pack ice prevents regular marine shipping throughout the year, but due to climate change, the pack ice is being reduced and this Arctic shrinkage 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 Canadian Internal Waters, but various countries maintain they're an international strait or transit passage, allowing free and unencumbered passage.

Overview

Before the Little Ice Age, the Vikings sailed as far north and west as Ellesmere Island, Skraeling Island and Ruin Island for hunting expeditions and trading with the Inuit groups who already inhabited the region. 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 Northwest Passage represented a new route to the established trading nations of Asia. In 1493 to defuse trade disputes Pope Alexander VI split the discovered world in two between Spain and Portugal; thus France, the Netherlands and England were left without a sea route to Asia, either via Africa or South 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. This was driven in some part by scientific naiveté, namely an early belief that seawater was incapable of freezing (as late as the mid 18th century, Captain James Cook had reported, for example, that Antarctic icebergs had yielded fresh water, seemingly confirming the hypothesis), and that a route close to the North Pole must therefore exist. 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 again 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 it has been clear since they began keeping records in 1972.

From 900 to 1850

As a result of their westward explorations and their settlement of Greenland, the Vikings sailed as far north and west as Ellesmere Island, Skraeling Island and Ruin Island for hunting expeditions and trading with Inuit groups. The subsequent arrival of the Little Ice Age is thought to be one of the reasons that further European seafaring into the Northwest Passage ceased until the late 15th century.

Strait of Anián

In 1539, Hernán Cortés commissioned Francisco de Ulloa to sail along the peninsula of Baja California on the Western coast of America. Ulloa concluded that the Gulf of California was the southernmost section of a strait supposedly linking the Pacific with the Gulf of St. Lawrence. His voyage perpetuated the notion of the Island of California and saw the beginning of a search for the Strait of Anián.
The strait probably took its name from Ania, a Chinese province mentioned in a 1559 edition of Marco Polo's book; it first appears on a map issued by Italian cartographer Giacomo Gastaldi about 1562. Five years later Bolognini Zaltieri issued a map showing a narrow and crooked Strait of Anian separating Asia from America. The strait grew in European imagination as an easy sea-lane linking Europe with the residence of the Great Khan in Cathay (northern China). It was originally placed at approximately the latitude of San Diego, California leading some who live in the region to call it "Anian" or "Aniane".
Voyages by Jacques Cartier and Sir Humphrey Gilbert were motivated by its supposed existence, and cartographers and seamen tried to demonstrate its reality. Sir Francis Drake sought the western entrance in 1579. The Greek pilot Juan de Fuca claimed he'd sailed the strait from the Pacific to the North Sea and back in 1592. The Spaniard Bartholomew de Fonte (who, some scholars have stated, was fictitious) claimed to have sailed from Hudson Bay to the Pacific via the strait in 1640.

Northern Atlantic

The first recorded attempt to discover the Northwest passage was the east-west voyage of John Cabot in 1497, sent by Henry VII in search of a direct route to the Orient. This conclusion was supported by the evidence of Alexander Mackenzie who explored the Arctic and Pacific oceans in 1793.

19th century

In the first half of the 19th century, some parts of the actual Northwest Passage (north of the Bering Strait) were explored separately by a number of expeditions, including those by John Ross, William Edward Parry, and James Clark Ross; overland expeditions were also led by John Franklin, George Back, Peter Warren Dease, Thomas Simpson, and John Rae. In 1825 Frederick William Beechey explored the north coast of Alaska, discovering Point Barrow.
Sir Robert McClure was credited with the discovery of the real Northwest Passage in 1851 when he looked across McClure Strait from Banks Island and viewed Melville Island. However, this strait wasn't 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.

Franklin expedition

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 the ships 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 notes 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 may have been significant. The expedition took 8,000 tins of food which were sealed with a lead-based solder. The lead appears to have 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 frozen bodies of three seamen, exhumed from the permafrost of Beechey Island. Laboratory tests revealed high concentrations of lead in all three. Another researcher suggests that botulism, and not lead poisoning, was the cause of deaths among crew members. New evidence shows that cannibalism may also have been a last resort for some 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 and 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 who had travelled by sledge over the ice from a ship 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 in 1854, becoming the first people to circumnavigate the Americas, and to discover and transit the Northwest Passage, 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

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, which was the major driving force behind 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. John Rae's expeditions included less than ten people and succeeded. Rae was also the explorer with the best safety record, having lost only one man in years of traversing Arctic lands. In 1854, Rae returned with information about the outcome of the ill-fated Franklin expedition.

Amundsen expedition

The Northwest Passage wasn't 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 Strait, contained young ice and thus was navigable (see John Rae), some of the waterways were extremely shallow making the route commercially impractical.

Later expeditions

1920s

The first traversal of the Northwest Passage via dog sled was accomplished by Greenlander Knud Rasmussen while on the Fifth Thule Expedition (1921–1924). Rasmussen, and two Greenland Inuit, travelled from the Atlantic to the Pacific over the course of 16 months via dog sled.

1940s

In 1940, Canadian RCMP officer Henry Larsen was the second to sail the passage, crossing west to east, from Vancouver to Halifax. 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'd 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, Larsen'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.

1950s

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 North America. Shortly after her return in late 1957, she was reassigned to her new home port of Kodiak, Alaska.

1960s

In 1969, the SS Manhattan made the passage, accompanied by the Canadian icebreaker Sir 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 to be cost effective and the Alaska Pipeline was built instead.

1970s

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.

1980s

In 1984, the commercial passenger vessel MS Explorer (which sank in the Antarctic Ocean in 2007) became the first cruise ship to navigate the passage. David Scott Cowper set out in July 1986 from England in a 12.8 m (42 foot) lifeboat, the Mabel El Holland, and survived 3 Arctic winters in the Northwest Passage before reaching the Bering Strait in August 1989. He then continued around the world via the Cape of Good Hope to arrive back on 24 September 1990, becoming the first vessel to circumnavigate via the Northwest Passage.

2000s

On September 1, 2001, Northabout, an aluminium sailboat with diesel engine, built and captained by Jarlath Cunnane, a retired construction manager, completed the Northwest Passage east-to-west from Ireland to the Bering Strait. 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, 2001, to reaching the Bering Strait on September 1. The Northabout then cruised in Canada for two years before it returned to Ireland in 2005 via the Northeast Passage thereby completing the first east-to-west circumnavigation of the pole by a single sailboat. The Northeast Passage return along the coast of Russia was slower, starting in 2004, with an ice stop and 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 18 July 2003, a father and son team, Richard and Andrew Wood, with Zoe Birchenough sailed yacht Norwegian Blue

into the Bering Strait, which marks the western entrance to the Northwest Passage. Exactly two months later, in what proved to be a very difficult ice year and without ice breaker assistance, she sailed into the Davis Strait to become the first British yacht to transit the Northwest Passage from west to east. She also became the only British vessel to complete the Northwest Passage in one season.
On May 19 2007, a French sailor, Sébastien Roubinet, and one other crew member left Anchorage, Alaska in Babouche, a ice catamaran designed to sail on water and slide over ice. The goal was to navigate west to east through the Northwest Passage by sail only. Following a journey of more than, Roubinet reached Greenland on September 9 2007, thereby completing the first Northwest Passage voyage made without engine in one season.

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. including the United States and the nations of the European Union, consider them to be an international strait, where foreign vessels have the right of "transit passage". 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. In 1985, the U.S. icebreaker Polar Sea passed through, and the U.S. government made a point of not asking permission from Canada. 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 U.S. signed an agreement, "Arctic Cooperation", that didn't solve the sovereignty issues but stated that U.S. icebreakers would require permission from the Government of Canada to pass through.
   In late 2005, it was alleged that U.S. nuclear submarines had travelled 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 U.S. 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. 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.
   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.
   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."
   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.

Effects of climate change

Around the time of the Viking sagas and for at least two more centuries (a conservative interval from AD 1000 to 1200 that also happens to include the dates allotted to some of the larger Norse ships), prior to the Little Ice Age some limited regions of the Arctic may have been somewhat warmer than they were in the early twentieth century, and were certainly warmer than they were in the depths of the Little Ice Age (see Medieval Warm Period). Also, the sea-level in the Arctic was different from that of the present day. Because of glacial rebound land levels of the land masses about the Northwest Passage have risen upwards 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 doesn't anticipate the route as a viable alternative to the Panama Canal even within the next 10 to 20 years.
   On September 14, 2007, the European Space Agency announced that ice loss had opened up the passage "for the first time since records began in 1978". According to the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, the latter part of the 20th century and the start of the 21st had seen marked shrinkage of ice cover. The extreme loss in 2007 rendered the passage "fully navigable". The ESA suggested the passage would be navigable "during reduced ice cover by multi-year ice pack" (namely sea ice surviving one or more summers) where previously any traverse of the route had to be undertaken during favourable seasonable climatic conditions or by specialist vessels or expeditions. The agency's report speculated that the conditions prevalent in 2007 had shown the passage may "open" sooner than expected. At least 3 boats successfully completed the journey in 2007.
   Scientists at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union on December 13, 2007, revealed that NASA satellites observing the western Arctic showed a 16% decrease in cloud coverage during the summer of 2007 vs 2006. This would have the effect of allowing more sunlight to penetrate Earth's atmosphere and warm the Arctic Ocean waters, thus melting sea ice and contributing to the opening the Northwest Passage.

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