Northwest Passage
The search for a passage around North America's northern coastline connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans is a recurring theme in the history of European exploration since the end of the fifteenth century.
While there are five possible deep water routes, they lie around eight hundred kilometres north of the Arctic Circle and less than two thousand from the North Pole. Entering the fifteen-hundred-kilometre route from the Atlantic side involves a hazardous voyage through giant icebergs between Greenland and Baffin Island. The exit to the Pacific via the Bering Strait, between Alaska and Siberia, is equally dangerous.
The quest for the passage cost Humphrey Gilbert, Henry Hudson and Sir John Franklin (among others) their lives. It attracted the attention of other notable figures, including Jacques Cartier, Sir Francis Drake, Sir Martin Frobisher, James Cook, John Davis, William Baffin, Sir John Ross, Sir William Parry, and Sir George Back. Roald Amundsen completed the first full transit of the Northwest Passage between 1903 and 1906.
The first commercial voyage through the passage occurred as recently as 2013 when the MV Nordic Orion carried 73,500 tons of coal from Vancouver to Finland. She cut around 1850 kilometres off the alternative route through the Panama Canal while carrying around twenty-five per cent more cargo. The American supertanker Manhattan had twice traversed part of the Passage in a feasibility study of oil delivery routes to the US forty-three years earlier.
Image:
Northwest Passage routes, based on a NASA image: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=16340. (Public domain via Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Northwest_passage.jpg)
Sources:
Janice Cavell, Who Discovered the Northwest Passage?
Andrea Charron, The Northwest Passage: Is Canada's Sovereignty Floating Away?
Encyclopedia Britannica
Google Maps
Hobart M. King, What is the Northwest Passage?
Caitlin O'Leary, The New Ice Age: The Dawn of Arctic Shipping and Canada's Fight for Sovereignty Over the Northwest Passage
Wikipedia
