Northwest Passage

• 1. Introduction

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  The Northwest Passage connects the Atlantic and Pacific oceans by threading through the Arctic Ocean along the northern coast of North America. For centuries, it existed more powerfully as a dream than as a route. Men froze to death chasing it. Ships were crushed in its ice. Entire expeditions vanished without a trace. And when the first person finally completed it by ship alone, in 1906, the route turned out to be far too shallow and ice-choked for commercial use.

  What drove so many explorers to risk everything for a sea lane that, for most of recorded history, was barely navigable? And what does it mean that the passage is now opening up, not through human conquest but through the warming of the planet itself? These are the questions at the heart of the Northwest Passage story.

• 2. A Route Born from Myth

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  Christopher Columbus set sail in 1492 partly seeking a westward route to Asia, and what he found instead was a continent that blocked the way. For the explorers who came after him, North America was an obstacle to be circumnavigated. The question became: was there a way through the frozen north?

  The name attached to this imagined strait was the Strait of Anian. Its origins trace to a Chinese province called Ania, mentioned in a 1559 edition of Marco Polo's book. Italian cartographer Giacomo Gastaldi put it on a map around 1562. Five years later, Bolognino Zaltieri issued a map showing a narrow, crooked strait separating Asia from the Americas. In European imagination, the strait grew into an easy sea lane linking Europe with Cathay, the old name for northern China.

  Some people believed seawater was incapable of freezing. Others held that an Open Polar Sea existed near the North Pole. As late as the mid-18th century, Captain James Cook reported that Antarctic icebergs had yielded fresh water, which seemed to support the idea that polar seas might be liquid. These were not foolish people. They were working with incomplete science in a region that resisted easy observation. The belief in a navigable northern route persisted for several centuries, long enough to send generation after generation into the Arctic.

• 3. The Franklin Disaster

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  In 1845, Sir John Franklin sailed into the Canadian Arctic with two ships and high confidence. His expedition estimated that fewer than 500 km of Arctic mainland coast remained unexplored. They were lavishly equipped by the standards of the day.

  The ships never returned. Notes recovered later showed the vessels became ice-locked in 1846, near King William Island, roughly halfway through the passage. Franklin died in 1847, and Captain Francis Crozier took command. In 1848, the surviving crew abandoned the ships and attempted to escape south across the tundra by sledge. Some may have survived into the early 1850s, but no evidence of survivors was ever found.

  In 1853, explorer John Rae learned from local Inuit what had happened to Franklin's men. His reports, which included accounts of cannibalism among the surviving crews, were not welcomed in Britain. Years later, in 1981, anthropologist Owen Beattie from the University of Alberta examined remains from expedition sites. He and his team eventually exhumed three frozen sailors from the permafrost of Beechey Island: John Torrington, William Braine, and John Hartnell. Laboratory tests found high concentrations of lead in all three. The expedition had carried 8,000 tins of food sealed with a lead-based solder. A separate researcher suggested botulism also contributed to crew deaths. Evidence from 1996 supported Rae's original Inuit accounts about cannibalism.

  The Franklin expedition was, in the grimly ironic way of disasters, one of the most productive mapping exercises in Arctic history. The search parties sent to find Franklin charted vast sections of the Canadian Arctic that had been unknown to Europeans.

• 4. The Passage Found by Sledge

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  Commander Robert McClure set out from England in December 1849, sailed south around Cape Horn into the Pacific, then headed north through the Bering Strait and east toward Banks Island. His ship became trapped in the ice for three winters near Banks Island, at the western end of Viscount Melville Sound.

  By the time searchers reached McClure and his crew, the men were dying of starvation. The searchers had come by sledge over the ice from a ship of Sir Edward Belcher's expedition, which had entered the Sound from the east. McClure returned to England in 1854 on one of Belcher's ships. His crew were the first known people to traverse the Northwest Passage, though they did so partly by ship and partly by hauling sledges over the ice. McClure was knighted, promoted, and eventually made rear-admiral in 1867. He and his crew also shared a prize of £10,000 awarded by the British Parliament. In July 2010, Canadian archaeologists found his ship, HMS Investigator, largely intact but sunk roughly 8 m below the surface.

  John Rae, an employee of the Hudson's Bay Company rather than the Royal Navy, approached the same challenge very differently. While Franklin and McClure employed hundreds of personnel and multiple ships, Rae's expeditions included fewer than ten people. He used dog sleds and survival techniques learned from the Inuit. Rae held the best safety record of any Arctic explorer of his era, having lost only one man across years of Arctic travel. In 1854 he identified the only usable route linking the entrances of Lancaster Sound and Dolphin and Union Strait. His approach would later influence Amundsen directly.

• 5. Amundsen Completes the Voyage

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  Roald Amundsen left Kristiania, the city now called Oslo, in June 1903. He was sailing to escape creditors who were trying to stop the expedition. His vessel, the Gjoa, was a converted herring boat of 45 net register tonnage, chosen precisely because it was small and had a shallow draft.

  Amundsen traveled with a crew of six. By late September 1903 the Gjoa had reached the south shore of King William Island, where she was put into a natural harbour. By October 3 she was frozen in. The expedition stayed for nearly two years, during which the crew took scientific measurements and learned survival skills from the local Inuit. The harbour is now known as Gjoa Haven and later developed as the only permanent settlement on the island.

  After completing the passage and anchoring near Herschel Island, Amundsen skied 800 km to the city of Eagle, Alaska, to send a telegram announcing his success. He then skied the 800 km back to rejoin his crew. His chosen route, via the Rae Strait, contained young ice and was navigable. But some of the waterways were extremely shallow, as little as 3 ft deep, making the route commercially impractical. He completed the full voyage from Greenland to Alaska in a journey that ran from 1903 to 1906.

• 6. Later Firsts and Strange Crossings

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  Greenlander Knud Rasmussen was the first to cross the Northwest Passage by dog sled, doing so over 16 months during the Fifth Thule Expedition of 1921-1924, traveling with two Greenland Inuit from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

  Canadian Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer Henry Larsen left Vancouver on the 23rd of June 1940, and arrived at Halifax on the 11th of October 1942, completing the west-to-east crossing under punishing conditions. He later described wondering whether his ship would be "crushed like a nut on a shoal and then buried by the ice." The crew survived a winter on Boothia Peninsula, and King George VI awarded each member a medal. Larsen's return trip in 1944 took only 86 days, setting a record for traversing the route in a single season.

  In 1960, a submarine completed the first underwater transit, heading east to west. In 1969, SS Manhattan, a specially reinforced supertanker of 115,000 deadweight tonnage, made the passage to test whether the route could carry oil from Alaska. Manhattan succeeded, but the route was judged not cost-effective. The United States built the Alaska Pipeline instead.

  In June 1977, Belgian sailor Willy de Roos completed the passage in a 13.8 m steel yacht called Williwaw, then continued to round Cape Horn and return to Belgium, becoming the first person to circumnavigate the Americas entirely by ship. In 1984, the first cruise ship to navigate the Northwest Passage made the journey, a vessel that later sank in the Antarctic Ocean in 2007.

  In July to October 2023, a team called the Arctic Cowboys became the first people to kayak the central portion of the Northwest Passage from Pond Inlet to Cape Bathurst, completing 1,600 miles entirely self-propelled, with no motors or sails, in a single season. The team was led by West Hansen and included Jeff Wueste, Mark Agnew, and Eileen Visser. Agnew was subsequently awarded European Adventurer of the Year.

• 7. Sovereignty and the Thawing Arctic

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  The question of who owns the Northwest Passage remains unresolved. Canada classifies the waters of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago as internal waters, while the United States insists they constitute an international strait where foreign vessels have free transit rights.

  The dispute became acute in 1969 with the SS Manhattan's oil-tanker voyage. In 1985, a U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker passed from Greenland to Alaska; the ship submitted to inspection by the Canadian Coast Guard but had not asked permission, which infuriated Canadian public opinion and sparked a diplomatic incident. When a Canadian reporter asked the U.S. government about it, officials confirmed they had not requested permission because they regarded the waters as international. Canada issued a sovereignty declaration in 1986. An agreement called "Arctic Cooperation" followed in 1988, resolving the practical issue without settling the underlying legal question. In June 2019, the U.S. State Department stated publicly that it viewed Canada's internal-waters claim as "inconsistent with international law."

  Meanwhile, the ice itself has been retreating. On the 21st of August 2007, the Northwest Passage became open to ships without an icebreaker for the first time since records began at the Norwegian Polar Institute in 1972. Professor Mark Serreze, a sea ice specialist at the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center, said at the time: "The passages are open. It's a historic event. We are going to see this more and more as the years go by."

  A 2025 study found that although navigability may increase over time, reliable planning still requires explicit consideration of highly variable ice conditions. Experts predict the passage may be traversable four months of the year by the end of the 21st century. The opening also carries ecological consequences: the gray whale Eschrichtius robustus, hunted to extinction in the Atlantic in the 18th century, turned up in the Mediterranean in May 2010, and scientists believe it may have followed its food sources through the newly accessible passage. The plankton species Neodenticula seminae, absent from the Atlantic for 800,000 years, has become increasingly prevalent there by the same route.