The Quest for the Northwest Passage: Arctic Exploration

Whalers were also among the many individuals involved in finding passages through the Arctic Ocean. A European obsession with symmetry was born out of Greek geographical designs, which they in turn had bequeathed to the Romans. Medieval cartographers enshrined these designs in the maps that would guide the Western expansion following 1450. The voyages of Columbus and Magellan’s circumnavigation had by the early sixteenth century not only uncovered the American continents but also revealed that the circumference of the Earth had been greatly underestimated.

The passage to Cathay (China) proved thus to be a great deal more difficult than was originally assumed by the ancients. Magellan’s encounter with a strait bearing his name in South America made many geographers surmise, based on the principle of symmetry, that a similar strait could also be found in the northern regions of the Arctic. Two passages emerged from this line of thinking: A Northeastern Passage that would pass to the north of Eurasia (largely today’s Russia) and emerge in the Pacific. The second was the Northwestern Passage, which would pass to the north of the American continents. The exploration of these two “highways” to Cathay became a major preoccupation for the better part of five centuries.

During the second half of the 1500s, both British and Dutch explorers attempted to make headway into the Northeastern Passage but found their progress impeded by ice. They did, however, encounter the Svalbard Archipelago, which, as mentioned earlier, served as a base for further exploration. By the 1700s, the Russians would also involve themselves in the uncovering of the imagined straits. The most prominent voyages were those performed by the Dane Vitus Bering, who undertook extensive cartographic exploration for the Russian state. Bering, who ultimately died because of his efforts in 1741, was unable to locate the fabled passage. By the 1750s, however, most of the outlines of Russia and sections of Alaska emerged as mapped. From that time onward, attention shifted to the Northwest Passage.

The attempt to find a passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific to the north of the Americas was an extension of Columbus’s voyages. The English state, in particular, commissioned John Cabot to map North America and explore the possibilities of the Northwest Passage’s existence. Attempts to find this mythical place from the Atlantic Ocean continued in the late 1500s through the efforts of Martin Frobisher. In the 1600s, Henry Hudson, after whom the great inland sea is named, pushed farther. The emergent Hudson’s Bay

Company continued the search with limited success. Already by the late 1500s, attention had shifted away from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. By the 1560s, maps started to circulate in Europe listing the Northwest Passage under the “Strait of Anian.” In the late 1500s, two individuals—Juan de Fuca and Lorenzo Ferrer Maldonado—claimed to have sailed through this mythical passage. Their exaggerated claims landed unchecked on European maps, where they would encourage future exploration. By the end of the 1700s, the exploration of the Pacific Ocean also turned its attention to the northwest coast of the Americas, where numerous inlets promised passage to the Atlantic. Famous explorers such as Cook and Vancouver for Britain, La Perouse for France, and Malaspina for Spain searched for the passage in vain. In the late 1780s, Britain and Spain almost went to war over the control of the northwest coast.

The Napoleonic Wars brought an uneasy exploratory hiatus to the region, which Russian expeditions, most prominently that of Otto von Kotzebue, resumed following the Congress of Vienna. The cessation of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 also witnessed Britain’s renewed interest in Arctic Ocean exploration. It was at this time that the secretary of the British admiralty, John Barrow, set out to prove the existence of an open polar ocean—a theory that placed an open space free from pack ice beyond the Arctic archipelagos. His search for the Northwest Passage also held scientific significance.

Barrow and his partners sought to gather information regarding the Earth’s magnetic forces, as well as the impact of glacial movement on the northern climate. Due to a fortunate anomaly of a receding polar ice cap, Barrow’s plans took hold with the launch of two expeditions. Lieutenant William Edward Parry and Captain John Ross would command one voyage through Davis Strait, and Lieutenant John Franklin and Captain David Buchan would make their way through Spitzbergen. Barrow’s expedition ended in 1818 without any further proof of the existence of the Northwest Passage. Although perceived as a failure on Ross’s part by Barrow, the expedition was fruitful in furthering geographical knowledge. Other voyages soon followed.

By the first half of the nineteenth century, most of the northwest coast had been charted, revealing that the mythical passages of Anian and others were indeed fables. This sobering discovery, however, did not prevent other expeditions from heading east to west to find the passage. In 1845, it was the expedition of John Franklin, a veteran of Arctic exploration and Nelson’s stunning victory over Napoleon’s fleet in 1805 off Trafalgar, that obtained another mission to find the passage, only to disappear without a trace of the entire crew. John Franklin’s failure to reappear from the Arctic ice prompted concern in 1848, and soon American ships joined British vessels to unravel the mystery.

The search for Franklin revealed that there was no open passage to the Pacific Ocean, yet it mapped some of the most remote Arctic archipelagos. The fate of Franklin and his fellow crewmembers slowly emerged and revealed sad tales of exposure, cannibalism, and lead poisoning that ultimately killed every single man of the expedition. By the time the search for Franklin ended, a new race had replaced the search of passages: the race to the North Pole.

The race to the North Pole. The search for passages for faster commercial transit also encouraged attempts to reach the North Pole. Since the 1600s, a number of geographers had argued that the North Pole was actually surrounded by an ice-free (open) polar sea. Encouraged by such ideas, both Russian and British expeditions attempted to reach the North Pole via ships in the 1700s but failed to reach the destination. Supposed sightings of large open water by whalers operating in the Arctic Ocean encouraged further British expeditions, and by the second half of the 1800s, American ventures attempted to reach the North Pole. Because ice interrupted and even threatened these expeditions, the idea of an open polar sea was finally laid to rest by the end of the 1800s.

A new form of exploration emerged: trying to reach the North Pole by drifting with the ice. Fridtjof Nansen attempted to reach the pole through a specially designed vessel (Fram) in 1893. He came close but failed to accomplish his mission. Other, gradually more successful, ventures attempted to reach the North Pole via dog-pulled sledges. The claims by two individuals to have reached the pole through such means of transportation, Frederick Cook (1908) and Robert Perry (1909), are now scientifically contested. It was in the airship Norge that Roald Amundsen and his crew first officially flew over the North Pole in 1926. During the Cold War, American nuclear submarines and Soviet nuclear icebreakers reached the North Pole as well.