Northwest Passage

The Northwest Passage is a sea route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through the waters of northern Canada. From the east, the passage begins in Baffin Bay, takes various routes through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, passes into the Beaufort Sea, and exits into the Pacific Ocean through the Chukchi Sea and Bering Sea. After European explorers began sailing to North America in the sixteenth century, the prospect of discovering a viable northern pathway to the Pacific became a coveted and dangerous pursuit. For more than three centuries, sailors tried and failed to navigate through the ice-covered waters above North America. It was not until the early twentieth century that a famed Arctic explorer managed to traverse the Northwest Passage. In the twenty-first century, climate change has decreased the amount of ice choking the route, opening up the Northwest Passage for at least a few months out of the year.

Background

The first trade routes between the Chinese dynasties in the east and the civilizations in the west were opened in the second century BCE. For centuries, merchants engaged in a lucrative exchange of goods along several land routes to Asia called the Silk Roads. As empires rose and fell, the routes remained in use until 1453, when Turkish forces toppled the Byzantine Empire and established the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Turks severed all ties with the West and closed the Silk Roads, cutting Europe off from the riches of Asia.

In 1492, Italian explorer Christopher Columbus sailed west in command of a Spanish expedition tasked in finding a sea route to Asia. Instead of open water, Columbus found a landmass blocking his path. Believing this New World was only a narrow obstacle, European explorers who followed Columbus began to search for a way around it. With the Spanish and Portuguese controlling the sea routes around South America, the English, French, and Dutch began looking for a route to Asia around North America.

Overview

English explorers Martin Frobisher, John Davis, and Henry Hudson made the first attempts to discover the Northwest Passage in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Frobisher and Davis each made three journeys into the Arctic but reached only as far as Baffin Island in the modern-day Canadian territory of Nunavut before their quests were blocked by ice. On his fourth attempt in 1610, Hudson discovered the bay that bears his name but became stranded and was forced to shelter onshore for the winter. When spring arrived, Hudson wanted to press on, but his crew mutinied. Hudson and several members of his crew were set adrift and were never seen again. No evidence of their fate has ever been found. Several other expeditions reached the western coast of Baffin Island in the seventeenth century, but they too were unsuccessful. Further attempts were abandoned for almost a century.

When explorers in the late eighteenth century took up the search again, their efforts only seemed to confirm the belief that traversing the Northwest Passage was impossible. In 1845, a celebrated expedition led by British naval officer Sir John Franklin made an attempt to find a crossing. Two ships set out on the journey in May of 1845, and a whaling crew spotted them that July. The sighting was the last recorded contact with Franklin's expedition. The British government mounted about forty rescue attempts to find Franklin but discovered only a few graves. It was later learned that Franklin died in 1847, and the surviving crew members attempted to reach safety overland a year later when the ships became trapped in ice. None of the 129 members of the expedition survived.

As part of the search effort for Franklin, another British naval officer, Robert McClure, attempted the passage from the west in 1850. McClure's expedition made it as far as Devon Island in Nunavut before becoming icebound. The crew spent three years stranded in the Arctic before a rescue team reached them. They were evacuated by sled and made the rest of the trip to the Atlantic overland, becoming the first expedition to survive a journey across the Northwest Passage.

By the twentieth century, the dangers of the crossing were fully known and businesses no longer considered the passage a viable commercial shipping route. In 1903, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen—who would go on to become the first person to reach the South Pole in 1911—made an attempt at the passage to fulfill a personal dream. Three years after setting out, Amundsen and his crew emerged in the Pacific, becoming the first expedition to accomplish the feat solely by ship. The first crossing that took less than a year was made in 1944, and the first cargo ship to make the voyage succeeded in 1969, though a Canadian icebreaker, specially designed to cut through polar ice, had accompanied that ship.

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, warmer temperatures brought about by climate change have melted some of the sea ice in the Canadian Arctic and opened the Northwest Passage to ship traffic for a few months each summer. The passage is considered open to shipping if 60 percent or less is covered by ice. Despite the melting ice and the fact that a shortcut through the passage could shave about two weeks and 4,000 miles (6,437 kilometers) off a trip through the Panama Canal—the next shortest path to the Pacific—it is considered unlikely that the route will become widely used commercially. Many of the channels between islands are too shallow for larger ships, and Arctic ice conditions are too unpredictable, even in summer. As of 2016, about 240 ships have safely traversed the Northwest Passage since Amundsen's journey; a record thirty crossings were made in 2012 alone. Fifty of the ships that have made the crossing have been passenger vessels, including a luxury cruise ship called the Crystal Serenity that completed the voyage in 2016.

Bibliography

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Mooney, Chris. "The Arctic Is Melting—But Shipping through the Northwest Passage Is Another Story." Washington Post, 10 Sept. 2015, www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/09/10/why-the-northwest-passage-probably-wont-be-ready-for-shipping-any-time-soon/?utm‗term=.627a523853d1. Accessed 6 June 2017.

Nunez, Christina. "A Luxury Cruise Liner Is about to Sail the Arctic's Northwest Passage." National Geographic, 16 Aug. 2016, news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/08/crystal-serenity-luxury-cruise-arctic-northwest-passage/. Accessed 6 June 2017.

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