The North West Passage

• Before the Little Ice Age (late Middle Ages), Norwegian Vikings sailed as far north and west as Ellesmere Island, Skraeling Island and Ruin Island for hunting expeditions and trading with the Inuit
• Between the end of the 15th century and the 20th century, colonial powers from Europe dispatched explorers to discover a commercial sea route north and west around North America.
• The belief that a route lay to the far north persisted for several centuries and led to numerous expeditions into the Arctic. Many ended in disaster
• Henry Ellis, born in Ireland, aimed to discover the Northwest Passage in May 1746. He sailed to Greenland, where he traded goods with the Inuit peoples. He crossed to the town of Fort Nelson and spent the summer on the Hayes River. He renewed his efforts in 1747 without success, before returning to England.
• 1776, Captain James Cook was dispatched by the Admiralty to explore the Passage. After journeying through the Pacific, to make an attempt from the west. He headed north along the coastline. They continued to the limits of the Alaskan peninsula and the start of the 1,200 mi chain of Aleutian Islands. Despite reaching 70°N, they encountered nothing but icebergs.
• From 1792 to 1794, the Vancouver Expedition (led by George Vancouver who had previously accompanied Cook) surveyed in detail all the passages from the Northwest Coast. He confirmed that there was no such passage south of the Bering Strait.
• Sir John Franklin in 1845. A lavishly equipped two-ship expedition sailed to the Canadian Arctic. Confidence was high, as they estimated there was less than 500 km remaining of unexplored Arctic mainland coast. When the ships failed to return, search parties explored the Canadian Arctic, which resulted in a thorough charting of the region, along with a possible passage. Many artifacts from the expedition were found over the next century and a half, including notes that the ships were ice-locked in 1846 near King William Island, about halfway through the passage. Records showed Franklin died in 1847 and Captain Francis Crozier took over command. In 1848 the expedition abandoned the two ships and its members tried to escape south across the tundra by sledge. Although some of the crew may have survived into the early 1850s, no evidence has ever been found of any survivors.
• In 1853, explorer John Rae was told by local Inuit about the fate of Franklin's expedition, but his reports were not welcomed in Britain on account of his reports of cannibalism amongst the surviving crews. The examination of tissue and bone from the frozen bodies of three seamen exhumed from the permafrost of Beechey Island. tests revealed high concentrations of lead in all three (the expedition carried 8,000 tins of food sealed with a lead-based solder) Another researcher has suggested botulism caused deaths among crew members. Evidence from 1996, that confirms reports first made by John Rae in 1854 based on Inuit accounts, suggests that the last of the crew may have resorted to cannibalism of deceased members in an effort to survive.
• While searching for him the McClure Arctic Expedition discovered the Northwest Passage in 1850.
• McClure's ship was trapped in the ice for three winters near Banks Island, at the western end of Viscount Melville Sound. Finally McClure and his crew—who were by that time dying of starvation—were found by searchers who had travelled by sledge over the ice from a ship of Sir Edward Belcher's expedition. They rescued McClure and his crew, returning with them to Belcher's ships, which had entered the Sound from the east. . They were the first people known to circumnavigate the Americas and to discover and transit the Northwest Passage, albeit by ship and by sledge over the ice. This was an astonishing feat for that day and age, and McClure was knighted and promoted in rank. (He was made rear-admiral in 1867.)
• In 1906, the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen was the first to complete the passage solely by ship, from Greenland to Alaska in the sloop Gjøa Since that date, several fortified ships have made the journey.
• In a three-year journey between 1903 and 1906, Amundsen explored the passage with a crew of six. His ship was the herring boat Gjøa. Gjøa was much smaller than vessels used by other Arctic expeditions and had a shallow draft. In 1903 Gjøa put into a natural harbour on the south shore of King William Island; by October 3 she was iced in. There the expedition remained for nearly two years. The harbour, now known as Gjoa Haven, later developed as the only permanent settlement on the island. Although his chosen east–west route, via the Rae Strait, contained young ice and thus was navigable, some of the waterways were extremely shallow (3 ft deep), making the route commercially impractical.
• Canadian Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer Henry Larsen was the second to sail the passage, crossing west to east, in 1940, from Vancouver, arriving at Halifax on October 11, 1942. Later in 1944, Larsen's return trip was far more swift than his first. He made the trip in 86 days to sail back from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Vancouver, British Columbia. He set a record for traversing the route in a single season. The ship followed a more northerly, partially uncharted route.
• There is an international dispute s to whether Canada controls who goes through the route , or whether it is an International route open to all. In 2019, the U.S. State Department said, "We view Canada's claim that the waters of the Northwest Passage are internal waters of Canada as inconsistent with international law,". Neither USA nor Canada appears to want to take the issue to an International court. So it stands a bit vague at the moment

Our trip along the North West Passage