The Northwest Passage
Traversed in its entirety fewer than fifty times, the fabled Northwest Passage around the American continent exerts a continuing romantic allure - and, in the wake of oil discoveries in the far north, an increasing economic attraction too. The world's severest maritime challenge, it involves a 1500-kilometre traverse from north of Baffin Island to the Beaufort Sea above Alaska. Some 50,000 icebergs constantly line the eastern approaches and thick pack ice covers the route for nine months of the year, with temperatures rising above freezing only in July and August. Perpetual darkness reigns for four months of the year, and thick fog and blizzards can obscure visibility for the remaining eight months. Even with modern technology navigation is almost impossible: a magnetic compass is useless as the magnetic north lies in the passage, and a gyro compass is unreliable at high latitudes; little is known of Arctic tides and currents; sonar is confused by submerged ice; and the featureless tundra of the Arctic islands provides the only few points of visual or radar reference. John Cabot can hardly have been happy with his order from Henry VII in 1497 to blaze the northwest trail, the first recorded instance of such an attempt. The elusive passage subsequently excited the imagination of the world's greatest adventurers, men such as Sir Francis Drake, Jacques Cartier, Sir Martin Frobisher, James Cook and Henry Hudson - cast adrift by his mutinous crew in 1611 when the Hudson Bay turned out to be an icebound trap rather than the passage. Details of a possible route were pieced together over the centuries, though many paid with their lives in the process, most famously Sir John Franklin , who vanished into the ice with 129 men in 1845. Many rescue parties set out to find Franklin's vessels, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror , and it was one searcher, Robert McClure , who - in the broadest sense - made the first northwest passage in 1854. Entering the passage from the west, he was trapped for two winters, and then sledged to meet a rescue boat coming from the east. The first sea crossing , however, was achieved by the Norwegian Roald Amundsen , his success in 1906 coming after a three-year voyage. The first single-season traverse was made by a Canadian Mountie, Henry Larsen , in 1944 - his schooner, the St Roch , is now enshrined in Vancouver's Maritime Museum. More recently huge ice-breakers have explored the potential of cracking a commercial route through the ice mainly for the export of oil from the Alaskan and new Beaufort fields and for the exploitation of minerals in Canada's Arctic north.
Your Tip for Arctic Coast
Help other backpackers! Write your own guides and backpacking tips to Arctic Coast - they will appear instantly on this page - Please only write a tip/guide to Arctic Coast - visit the main Arctic Coast forum to ask a question!
Please do not post links to your site here (they won't work) - please use the Arctic Coast webguide section below! Thanks.
|
