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Most Northwest Passage expeditions originated in Europe or on the east coast of North America, seeking to traverse the Passage in the westbound direction. Some progress was made in exploring the western reaches of the imagined passage.
- Overview
- History of exploration
Northwest Passage, historical sea passage of the North American continent. It represents centuries of effort to find a route westward from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean through the Arctic Archipelago of what became Canada.
The quest for the passage was one of the world’s severest maritime challenges. The route is located 500 miles (800 km) north of the Arctic Circle and less than 1,200 miles (1,930 km) from the North Pole. It consists of a series of deep channels through Canada’s Arctic Archipelago, extending about 900 miles (1,450 km) from east to west, from north of Baffin Island to the Beaufort Sea, above the U.S. state of Alaska. Reaching the Northwest Passage from the Atlantic requires a hazardous voyage through a stream of tens of thousands of giant icebergs, which could rise up to 300 feet (90 metres) in height, constantly drifting south between Greenland and Baffin Island. The exit to the Pacific is equally formidable, because the polar ice cap presses down on Alaska’s shallow north coast much of the year and funnels masses of ice into the Bering Strait, between Alaska and Siberia.
Since the end of the 15th century, Western explorers have attempted to establish a commercial sea route north and west around the American land barrier encountered by Christopher Columbus. Such an accomplishment would realize an objective that has eluded humankind since King Henry VII of England sent John Cabot in search of a northwest route to East Asia in 1497. Five years earlier, Columbus had set out in search of a westward route after conquest of the Middle East by the Ottoman Turks in the mid-15th century disrupted Europe’s overland routes to the East. The Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama sailed south around Africa and reached India in 1498; another Portuguese explorer, Ferdinand Magellan, sailed southwest around South America to the East Indies (present-day Indonesia) in 1521; and Dutch explorers vainly sought a comparable passage to the northeast around Russia.
It was the Northwest Passage, however, that captured the imagination of many of the world’s famed explorers, including Jacques Cartier, Sir Francis Drake, Sir Martin Frobisher, and Capt. James Cook. All met with failure, and many met with disaster. Sir Humphrey Gilbert, whose treatise on the passage inspired many voyages by others, drowned during his own attempt in 1583. Henry Hudson, his young son, and seven others were cast adrift by a mutinous crew in 1611 when his discovery of Hudson Bay proved to be an icy trap instead of the passage he sought. Knowledge of an Arctic passage came slowly, over hundreds of years, from information gathered during voyages by such explorers as John Davis, William Baffin, Sir John Ross, Sir William Parry, Frederick William Beechey, and Sir George Back, augmented by overland expeditions by Henry Kelsey, Samuel Hearne, and Sir Alexander Mackenzie. The worst tragedy came when Sir John Franklin and 128 men aboard HMS Erebus and HMS Terror vanished in 1845.
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One searcher for the lost Franklin expedition, Robert (later Sir Robert) McClure, entered the passage from the west, became locked in the ice for two winters, and then sledged overland to another rescue ship coming from the east, thus completing the first one-way transit of the Northwest Passage in 1854. Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld led a Swedish-Russian voyage through the Northeast Passage (called the Northern Sea Route in Russia) over the top of Eurasia in 1878–79, and Soviet and later Russian polar icebreakers opened that route to limited use in modern times.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
The Northwest Passage is a sea route that connects the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. In the past, the Northwest Passage has been virtually impassable because it was covered by thick, year-round sea ice.
Oct 20, 2016 · This map, published in Russia in 1784, depicts a possible Northwest Passage: on the far right side, "R. de l'Quest” connects Hudson Bay to the Pacific Ocean.
Europeans searched for 400 years for a passage through North America that would take them to the fabled lands of the Orient. Their searches met with little success. The first man to take a sailing ship from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean through this fabled passage was Roald Amundsen (1872-1928) of Norway in 1903-06. By then, Europeans had ...
Feb 22, 2018 · The Northwest Passage is a famed sea route from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean through a group of sparsely populated Canadian islands known as the Arctic Archipelago.
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The Northwest Passage – a water route through the islands of northern Canada connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans – a treasure that explorers had sought for centuries. The new Arctic sea routes. The quest began as a search for a shorter shipping route between Europe and Asia.
