An idea that outlasted its usefulness
The Northwest Passage is the sea route from the Atlantic to the Pacific through the Arctic islands of northern Canada. The idea of such a route grew out of the sixteenth-century belief that there must be a short way to Asia around the top of North America. Once Europeans understood that the Americas were a separate landmass, many hoped a strait would lead through them. The main alternative, the Cape route to the Indies, was very long, so a northern shortcut was attractive.
The real route turned out to be a maze of channels, islands and shallow straits, often blocked by heavy ice, and it never became a practical trade route. Its history is largely a history of ships and crews in difficulty.
The first attempts
John Cabot’s voyage in 1497 is often seen as an early search for a western route, though it is better known for reaching Newfoundland. In the 1570s Martin Frobisher made three voyages to what is now Baffin Island. On the second and third he collected a large quantity of rock believed to contain gold, which proved worthless, and the venture ended in financial failure.
John Davis made three voyages between 1585 and 1587 and explored the strait that now bears his name, between Greenland and Baffin Island. His reports of open water to the north fed hopes for years.
Henry Hudson, an English navigator, sailed in 1610 in the Discovery and entered the great bay in northern Canada that now bears his name. After a winter in the ice, the crew mutinied in June 1611, and Hudson, his young son and several others were set adrift in a boat. They were never seen again. The survivors returned to England. William Baffin explored the waters north of Davis Strait in 1616, and his account suggested there was no passage that way, which discouraged exploration for some time.
Later the Hudson Bay region became important for another reason, as a base for the fur trade. The fur trade vessels of the Hudson’s Bay Company used the bay for supply voyages for centuries, even though the hoped-for passage was not found.
The nineteenth-century effort
After 1815 the Royal Navy, with spare ships and experienced officers, returned to the Arctic. John Barrow, a senior official at the Admiralty, promoted a series of expeditions. In 1819 and 1820 William Edward Parry took the Hecla and Griper west through Lancaster Sound, reaching Melville Island, farther west than anyone had sailed in these latitudes. Other expeditions mapped coastal sections by sea and by overland travel.
By the 1840s much of the northern coast was known, but the central channels were not. In 1845 Sir John Franklin sailed with HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, two sturdy ships that had earlier served on Antarctic voyages. They carried steam engines, screw propellers and provisions for several years. They were last seen by whalers in Baffin Bay in the summer of 1845.
The Franklin disaster and its search
When no news came, search expeditions were sent from 1848 onward, dozens of them over about a decade, with ships and sledge parties. They charted large areas of the Arctic archipelago in the process. In 1850 to 1854, Robert McClure’s Investigator approached from the Bering Strait side, became trapped in the ice and was abandoned. McClure and his men were rescued by another ship that had come from the east, which meant that parts of the route had in effect been traversed, partly over the ice, though not by one ship.
Evidence from Inuit testimony and from relics found by John Rae and later by Francis Leopold McClintock showed that Franklin’s ships had been beset off King William Island and that all of the roughly 129 men had died. The exact causes are still discussed by historians, who point to the combined effects of cold, illness and the difficulty of travelling on foot over the ice. The wrecks were located in the twenty-first century, Erebus in 2014 and Terror in 2016, in waters in the Canadian Arctic and in good condition.
Amundsen completes the route
The first person to take a ship through the whole passage was Roald Amundsen, who sailed from Norway in 1903 aboard the Gjøa, a small herring sloop with a crew of seven. Instead of a big naval ship he chose a shallow-draught, handy boat that could move through narrow channels. He spent two winters at Gjoa Haven on King William Island, learning from the local Netsilik people and making magnetic observations. The Gjøa passed the western end of the route in 1905 and reached Nome, Alaska, in 1906, the first complete transit by a single vessel, though it took three years and several winters.
Later, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police vessel St. Roch made the passage from west to east in 1940 to 1942 and returned in 1944, doing it in a single season on the second trip.
Why it matters
The route is now seen as a long episode in which national navies, whalers and explorers tested their ships against ice. The failures shaped ship design, from strengthened hulls to steam power, and encouraged the later development of icebreaker ships. In recent decades, a warming climate has made some sections easier to navigate in summer, but ice conditions remain unpredictable, and commercial use is limited.