The route and the real first
The Northeast Passage is the sea route along the Arctic coast of Russia, from the Barents Sea in the west to the Bering Strait in the east. Russia now calls much of it the Northern Sea Route. The first ship to sail the whole length in a single expedition was the Vega, commanded by Louis Palander of the Swedish navy and carrying the Swedish-Finnish scientist Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld as expedition leader. She left in 1878 and completed the transit in 1879.
That is a “first” for a complete transit by ship, but it is not the first time people had travelled parts of the coast. Russian traders, hunters and explorers had worked along sections of the Siberian shore for generations in small wooden vessels, and the Vega’s success rested on that earlier knowledge.
Early attempts
From the sixteenth century, English and Dutch merchants hoped a route north-east of Europe would lead to the markets of China and Japan. Willoughby and Chancellor sailed in 1553, and Chancellor reached the White Sea, which led to trade with Russia. Willem Barents later tried the route and his crew famously wintered on Novaya Zemlya in 1596 and 1597. The ice was too heavy for the sailing ships of that period and no one got far past the Kara Sea.
In the early eighteenth century the Russian Great Northern Expedition, led by Vitus Bering and others, charted much of the Siberian coast using small vessels sailing in sections, and explorers such as Semyon Dezhnev had earlier rounded the eastern end in the 1640s. Together these efforts mapped most of the coastline, but no ship had yet completed the passage in one go.
Nordenskiöld’s preparations
Nordenskiöld had experience of the Arctic from several earlier expeditions to Spitsbergen. By the 1870s steamships had become practical for ice work. He made trips to the Kara Sea and to the mouth of the Yenisei River in 1875 and 1876, proving that the sea could be crossed by steamer in summer and that river trade with Siberia was possible.
For the great attempt, the expedition was financed by the Swedish king, Oscar II, and by two private patrons, Oscar Dickson and the Russian businessman Alexander Sibiryakov. They chose the Vega, a steam-powered whaler built in Bremerhaven in 1872, a strong barque-rigged ship with an auxiliary engine. She was accompanied by a small steamer, the Lena, built to travel up the Lena River, and two other vessels that took on cargo.
The voyage
The ships left Karlskrona in Sweden in June 1878 and went through Norway to the Kara Sea. Sailing along the north Siberian coast, they rounded Cape Chelyuskin, the northernmost point of the Eurasian mainland, in August 1878. Soon after, the Lena parted company to go up the river from which she took her name.
Vega continued east, but near the end of the season ice closed in. In late September 1878 she was frozen in on the Chukchi coast, not far from the Bering Strait and only a short distance from open water. The crew had to spend the winter there. The men used the time for scientific work, taking meteorological and magnetic observations, collecting plants and animals and learning about the local Chukchi people, who traded and helped the expedition.
Everyone survived the winter, though the cold was severe. The wintering was a reminder of how much a polar crew depended on carefully stored shipboard provisions and steady routines.
Release and arrival
In July 1879 the ice released the ship and she passed through the Bering Strait into the Pacific, completing the first full transit of the Northeast Passage. She then continued across the North Pacific to Japan, reaching Yokohama in September 1879 to a warm reception. The expedition returned to Europe via Asia and the Suez Canal shipping route, and was welcomed in several countries, including Italy and Sweden, in early 1880.
What it showed
The voyage proved that the route could be sailed by a steamship, but it also showed how difficult it was. Vega lost most of a season to the ice, and the passage was clearly not an easy commercial shortcut. Nordenskiöld was optimistic about trade with Siberian rivers, which proved only partly realistic.
The expedition produced a large body of scientific work, published in several volumes, and Nordenskiöld became a national hero in Sweden and received the title of baron. Vega was later used as a whaler and sealer and was lost in Melville Bay, off Greenland, in 1903.
Later development
Regular use of the route took decades more. The introduction of powerful icebreakers, such as the Soviet Sibiryakov in 1932, made single-season transits possible, and later nuclear icebreakers supported year-round shipping on parts of the route. Vega’s voyage remains a landmark in the long story of Arctic ice navigation, which people on the Siberian coast had practised for centuries before and after her.