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the search for the northwest passage
For some four centuries finding a route through the Canadian Arctic became the holy grail for wealthy patrons and the sailors that would accept the challenge and possible death sentence that the Arctic offered. They searched in the hope that they would be the lucky ones to find the elusive passage and the wealth and fame it would bring. An Arctic route between Europe and Asia would cut thousands of sea miles off the normal trading voyages and fill in a mysterious void on the maps of the known world. And the British were determined to be the first to find this mythical route. Sailing over the top of North America would give the rich European courts quicker access to the spice and silk markets of China and the rest of Asia. It would replace tedious overland journey and the long and dangerous route around the Horn of Africa.
John Davis sailed into the Arctic and re-discovered Greenland, which had been abandoned and forgotten following the failure of Norse colonies there three centuries earlier. He punched his way through the ice into Hudson Bay but then made the blunder of assuming he was in the Pacific Ocean. The mistake cost him dearly, and after a horrific winter he was murdered by his mutinous crew, four of whom were later killed in a fight with the natives. The survivors managed to make their way home under the leadership of Robert Bylot, who was pardoned and sailed another day to find out that his captain’s assumptions about Hudson Bay were wrong. Bylot returned to the Arctic for the fourth time in 1616 with William Baffin, a skilled navigator and pilot who had Baffin Island named after him. The two set a new furthest north record which stood for more than two centuries. They also discovered three broad waterways which they hoped were the beginning of the passage. But interest in finding the Northwest Passage was fading and the number of expeditions dwindled.A Renewed Search Despite constant whaling activity in Davis Strait, the rush to find a passage to the Orient was largely forgotten until the early 1800s. By then, Britain had beaten France and sent Napoleon into exile on St Helena in the South Atlantic. This left the Royal Navy fleet tied up in port, her officers whiling away their time on half-pay. John Barrow Jr., an opportunistic Admiralty bureaucrat famous for his stubbornness, could not forget the voyages to Greenland he had made aboard whaling ships as a teenager. With idle ships and sailors at hand and Britain still in the flush of victory, Barrow put the wheels in motion for a renewed search for a passage through the Arctic. The Admiralty sent out several expeditions between 1818 and 1823, filling in the map around Baffin Island and the Parry Channel. Most expeditions travelled east to west as the Europeans set out from their home ports. William Edward Parry became the most famous Arctic explorer during this period, leading numerous expeditions and enjoying the wealth and fame brought by his success. Methods of Arctic exploration were slowly being refined, and intentionally spending a winter in the North became standard practice. Captains arranged plays, newspapers and school lessons to keep their crews from becoming restless while waiting for spring thaw. Often, when the long, dark winter was over and the 24-hour summer sun returned, it was too weak to melt the ice and crews had little choice but to hunker down for another year.But even after three centuries of Arctic exploration, the English officers were still uncomfortable with the Inuit, and they had not made an effort to learn from them. They were disgusted by the Inuit custom of eating raw meat and whale blubber. The officers and men, however, were not above enjoying the warm company of the Inuit women, who were willing to sell themselves for tools and trinkets. The English remained ignorant of how the Inuit diet kept scurvy at bay, or how to run dog teams. Instead, they ate hard tack and salt pork and man-hauled sledges across the ice during the long winters. The poorly prepared sailors had to rely on the Inuit as hunters and guides, without, of course, giving them due credit.  A Spectacular DisasterJohn Franklin (left), a British Royal Navy officer, became one of the most famous Arctic explorers as much for his failure as his success. His first expedition was a poorly planned overland trip along the Arctic shores east of the Coppermine River. He relied on is Native and French-Canadian voyageur guides to the point of becoming a burden, and the expedition turned into a nightmare of frostbite and starvation. He was forever after known as “the man who ate his shoes”. A second river expedition in 1823 was more successful, but Franklin’s place in history had yet to be made. A pudgy, soft man, Franklin was an unlikely Arctic explorer and most biographers agree he was an unimaginative, humourless man. But he had fought in many of England’s great sea battles as a Navy officer and was determined to find promotion and fame in the Arctic.
The expedition was last seen by Europeans on July 26, 1845 when a whaling captain came across the ships moored to an iceberg in Lancaster Sound. From there, Franklin led his men into the deepest Arctic, and they were never to return. After two years without word from her husband, Lady Franklin began pleading the Admiralty to send a rescue expedition. Franklin’s fame and the money offered for his rescue prompted a mad scramble of ships northward, and his distraught wife knocked on doors and used all the influence society had bestowed upon her to call for even greater resources. But they failed to find him, and eventually more ships and men were lost looking for Franklin than in the expedition itself. In 1854, explorer John Rae, while surveying the Boothia Peninsula for the Hudson's Bay Company, discovered evidence of the Franklin party's fate. Over the next four decades, about 25 more searches helped uncover bits of the story, although to this day it remains cloaked in mystery. Lead poisoning, bad weather, scurvy, and starvation killed the entire expedition, and knife marks on the bones of some of the crew's remains suggest they resorted to cannibalism in their dying days. The fate of Franklin and his men summed up Britain’s failure to conquer the Arctic and epitomised the grisly horrors that met those who attempted it. Amundsen Finds the PassageYet, the British had succeeded in charting much of the Arctic, and explorers were more confident than ever that it was possible to sail a ship from the Atlantic to Pacific Ocean. Even after Franklin’s disastrous expedition others continued to forge north. Explorers such as the Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen and the American Robert Peary made reaching the North Pole their goal instead of finding the passage, but they still added to the knowledge of the Arctic and how to survive in it. Nansen adopted and expanded on Inuit methods of Arctic travel and clothing that the British had ignored out of arrogance. He realised that man hauling, which the British viewed as more noble than using dog sleds, was a waste of energy and instead followed the examples of the Inuit dog teams. Instead of woven wool and hard leather shoes, Nansen dressed in skins and fur. The stage was set for an explorer to bring together all the knowledge that had been accumulated and use the maps slowly drawn over the centuries to do what no man had done before. As a teen Roald Amundsen (above) had watched Nansen return from the Arctic and knew that someday it would be his turn, and in 1903 it finally came. Although he would go on to become the first to reach the South Pole and be the first man to stand at both poles, it was the Norwegian’s journey through the Northwest Passage that cemented his place in history.
But the dream of a commercial Arctic channel between Europe and Asia has never come true. The Northwest Passage is too unpredictable, too rocky and dangerous, to attract large ships. Fishing fleets still ply the fringes of the Arctic and navy and coast card ships make occasional transits, but the passage remains the domain of those who call the Arctic home and the few explorers that brave these waters. Amundsen’s route through the Northwest Passage is now considered the classic route -- via Baffin Bay, Lancaster and Peel Sounds, and James Ross, Simpson and Rae Straits – and this is the course that the Silent Sound will follow in 2009. |
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| © Open Passage Expedition 2009 >> Site designed by Troy Dunkley |
Hundreds of men have died chasing their dream to sail through the Northwest Passage. They succumbed to raging storms, starvation and bitter cold while stumbling, lost, through a maze of Arctic islands and rocky waters. They died without knowing if there really was a passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
The first recorded attempt to find this shipping route came in 1497, when King Henry VII sent the Italian navigator John Cabot (Giovanni Caboto) (right) in search of a direct route to the Orient. He made it no further than present-day Newfoundland, but he led a long tradition of men that failed to find the way but helped draw islands and channels on an another wise blank map. Martin Frobisher was the next man to try making his name in the Arctic, setting off in 1576 on the first of three expeditions. “It is still the only thing left undone, whereby a notable mind might be made famous and remarkable,” he declared. Indeed, his name does remain on maps today, in Frobisher Bay on Baffin Island. However, he mistakenly fancied the body of water was a strait that would lead to a fortune of gold on the Pacific coast.
In 1845, already 59 years old, Franklin once again set off for the Arctic, leaving behind his long suffering wife Jane Griffin, who would figure large in the shaping his legacy. Franklin was in charge of two ships, the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, with 134 men (five men were later sent home from Greenland). Along with steam engines that allowed the ships to make four knots under steam, the expedition carried tinned preserved foods, a relatively new invention. Unfortunately, the tins were not properly sealed, allowing lead to leach into the food.
Amundsen set out with a crew of six in a sealing ship named the Gjøa (right). He spent two winters near King William Island in a settlement today named Gjoa Haven, where he learned all he could from the Inuit while he waited for an opening in the ice. His patience paid off, and on August 12, 1905 the coast of King William Island was clear. Amundsen steered the Gjøa through the “disconcerting chaos” of shallows and reefs that blocked his way westward. “We bungled through zigzag as if we were drunk,” he said. On August 26 his crew sighted another ship – one that had entered the Arctic from the Pacific Ocean. He had proven that the passage existed. It would take him another year to get out of the Arctic, but he had reached his goal of sailing the Northwest Passage. 
