Northwest Passage
The Northwest Passage is the sea route that skirts North America from the north, crossing the Arctic Ocean and connecting the Davis Strait and the Bering Strait, or what is the same, the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean.
The route runs through a set of straits located in the Canadian arctic archipelago, between the large arctic islands and the continental lands. From west to east, the Northwest Passage departs from the Pacific Ocean, from the Bering Strait —which separates Russia and Alaska— and continues through the Chukchi Sea and the Beaufort Sea. The route must then cross the Canadian Arctic Archipelago and there are five to seven possible routes—including McClure Strait, Dease Strait, and Prince of Wales Strait—although not all are suitable for large ships. The route continues across Baffin Bay and finally reaches the Davis Strait, already in the Atlantic Ocean.
It has been speculated that with global warming and shrinking Arctic ice cover, the Northwest Passage route may become ice-free enough to allow safe new commercial shipping, at least in part of the year. On August 21, 2007, the Northwest Passage remained open to shipping through the summer without the need for icebreakers. According to Nalan Koc of the Norwegian Polar Institute, this was the first time it had been freed since records began to be taken in 1972. On August 26, 2011, the pass was reopened. Some estimates indicate that the route may become navigable around 2020 and, if true, the maritime route between Europe and Asia would considerably decrease, becoming an alternative route to those of the Panama Canal and the Suez Canal: currently the route London-Osaka means 23,300 km through Panama and 21,200 km through Suez: by the The Northwest Passage would be reduced to just 15,700 km.
The Canadian government considers the straits through which the Northwest Passage route runs to be part of its internal waters, but several countries maintain that under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea those straits they should be considered international straits, which would allow free maritime traffic without tolls. This is a highly controversial issue, since significant reserves of oil, gas, diamonds and lead have been found in that territory in recent decades.
In the first half of the 19th century, some of the sections through which the Northwest Passage runs (north of the Bering Strait) were studied in depth both by sea —expeditions by John Ross, William Edward Parry and James Clark Ross—and by land—expeditions led by John Franklin, George Back, Peter Warren Dease, Thomas Simpson, and John Rae. In 1825 Frederick William Beechey explored the north coast of Alaska, discovering Barrow Point.
In 1851 Sir Robert McClure was recognized as the true discoverer of the Northwest Passage, when navigating through the Prince of Wales Strait he managed to spot, from Banks Island, Melville Island. However, this strait was not navigable for the ships of the time and the only usable route, the one that joins Lancaster Sound and the Dolphin and Union Straits, was discovered three years later by John Rae in 1854.
History
Expeditions
Before the Little Ice Age, Vikings on their hunting and trading expeditions with the Inuit who already inhabited the region would have sailed west from their Greenland settlements. According to archaeological remains, they would have reached waters as far north-west as the coasts of Ellesmere Island, Skraeling Island and Ruin Island. The change in climate caused by the Little Ice Age is thought to be the main reason why there were no more European seafaring expeditions to these Arctic regions until the late 15th century.
In 1493, to calm commercial disputes, Pope Alexander VI discussed the division of the New World lands between the two powers that opted for their discovery, colonization and domination: Castile and Portugal. In the Alexandrian Bulls of 1493, prior to the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), the dividing meridian of the Castilian and Portuguese areas of influence was set one hundred leagues from the Azores and Cape Verde. France, the Netherlands, and England were left without a sea route to Asia, either by skirting Africa or South America.
In 1497 Henry VII of England sent Juan Caboto in search of a direct route to the Orient, sailing from east to west, in what would be the first attempt to discover the Northwest Passage.
Finding the legendary Anian Strait was one of the greatest goals of maritime explorers throughout time.
16th century
The most propitious maritime routes between Europe and China had to border South America or Africa, but both were controlled during the XVI century< /span> by the Spanish and Portuguese navies.
Since the late 15th century, European colonial powers began sending expeditions to reconnoitre the northern region of North America, in an attempt to discover a new commercial sea route that would take them west around North America and establish a new trade route with Asian nations. Sailors like John Cabot, Martin Frobisher or Willem Barents explored the icy and inhospitable waters of the north, but all of them ended up defeated by the extreme cold and contrary winds. For a time the search for that Northwest Passage was abandoned.
The Spanish sailor Lorenzo Ferrer de Maldonado claimed to have crossed the strait in 1588, but there was never any official confirmation from any ecclesiastical official or king's envoy; later his account was refuted as entirely false, given the inconsistency of his statements, citing impossible latitudes and distances.
In 1539, Hernán Cortés commissioned Francisco de Ulloa to sail along the Baja California peninsula on the west coast of North America. Ulloa concluded that the Gulf of California was the southernmost point of a strait that supposedly connected the Pacific Ocean with the Gulf of San Lorenzo. His voyage gave rise to the idea of the existence of a California island and marked the beginning of the search for the Strait of Anián.
The strait probably took its name from Ania, a Chinese province mentioned in a 1559 edition of Marco Polo's book, and first appearing on a map published around 1562 by Italian cartographer Giacomo Gastaldi. Five years later Bolognini Zaltieri published another map showing a narrow and twisting Anian Strait separating Asia from America. That strait fostered in Europeans the belief of an easy sea route that would link Europe with the residence of the Great Khan in Cathay (north of China). The strait was believed, at the time, to be at roughly the same latitude as San Diego, California, leading some who lived in the region to call it Anian or Aniane.
Several cartographers and mariners tried to prove its existence: Sir Francis Drake searched for the western entrance in 1579; the Greek pilot Juan de Fuca claimed that he had sailed the strait from the Pacific to the North Sea and that he had returned again in 1592; the Spaniard Bartolomé de Fonte claimed to have sailed across the strait in 1640, starting from Hudson Bay to the Pacific.
For his part, the British Martin Frobisher would make three trips to the west in the arctic region in order to find that pass (Frobisher Bay, which he first mapped, bears his name). As part of one of his expeditions, in July 1583 Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who had written a treatise on the discovery of the pass and had been one of Frobisher's patrons, claimed Newfoundland for the English Crown. On August 8, 1585, the English explorer John Davis managed to navigate the waters of Cumberland Sound on Baffin Island for the first time.
Major rivers on the eastern coast were also explored for possible transcontinental passage. Jacques Cartier's explorations of the St. Lawrence River began with the hope of finding such a path on the mainland. In fact, Cartier so convinced himself that the pass was on the St. Lawrence that when he found his way blocked by rapids in what is now Montreal, he was so sure that those rapids were all that stood between him. of China (in French, la Chine), who called them the China Rapids.
17th century
In 1609 Henry Hudson sailed up what is now called the Hudson River in search of the pass; encouraged by the salty taste of the water, he made it as far as Albany, New York before giving up. He later also participated in the exploration of the Arctic, especially Hudson Bay.
18th century
Although most expeditions to the Northwest Passage originated from Europe or the east coast of North America and tried to traverse the Passage in a westerly direction, some progress was also made in exploring its western end. In 1728 Vitus Bering, a Danish officer in the service of the Russian Navy, explored the strait region that Semyon Dezhnev had discovered in 1648 (but later named after him, the Bering Strait), concluding that North America and Russia were masses. other than land. Later, in 1741, Bering, with Lieutenant Alexei Chirikov, went in search of new lands beyond Siberia. In separate ships, Chirikov discovered several of the Aleutian Islands while Bering charted the Alaskan region before scurvy struck his crew who were shipwrecked off Kamchatka.
In 1762, the English trading ship Octavius perilously attempted the West Passage, but became trapped in the pack ice. In 1775, the whaler Herald found the Octavius adrift near Greenland, with the lifeless bodies of the crew frozen below decks. Thus, the Octavius may have been the first Western sailing ship to make the Passage, although the fact that she was 13 years older than him and that the entire crew perished soon after mars the feat.
The Spanish made numerous voyages to the northwest coast of North America in the late 18th century and one of the main motivations was to determine the existence of the Northwest Passage. Among the trips that were organized, the careful search for passage in the trips of 1775 and 1779 by Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra stands out. The journal of Francisco Antonio Mourelle, who served as Quadra's deputy in the 1775 expedition, fell into English hands and was translated and published in London. Captain James Cook made use of the journal during his explorations of the region. In 1791 Alessandro Malaspina sailed to Yakutat Bay, Alaska, as it was rumored that the pass might be there. In 1790 and 1791 Francisco de Eliza made several reconnaissance expeditions in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, in search of the long-awaited Passage and discovered the Strait of Georgia. In order to study this new inland sea in depth, an expedition led by Dionisio Alcalá Galiano was sent in 1792, with the express order to explore all the channels that could become the Northwest Passage.
In 1776 Captain James Cook was dispatched by the British Admiralty on the encouragement of a 1745 bounty, which, when extended in 1775, promised a prize of £20,000 to whoever discovered the pass. Initially the Admiralty had wanted Charles Clerke to lead the expedition, with Cook (in retirement after his Pacific explorations) as consultant. However, Cook had studied Bering's expedition, and ultimately the Admiralty relied on the veteran explorer to lead the expedition, with Clerke as his chaperone.
After traveling across the Pacific, in another west-east attempt, Cook began at Nutca Strait in April 1777 and headed north along the coast, which he charted, searching the regions in which the Russians had sailed 40 years earlier. Admiralty orders specified to ignore all inlets and rivers until reaching latitude 65° N. Several of the expedition's officers, including William Bligh, George Vancouver, and John Gore, believed that the existence of such a route it was "unlikely." Before they reached 65° N they found the coast that pushed them south, but Gore convinced Cook to navigate Cook Inlet in the hope of finding the route. They continued to the limits of the Alaska Peninsula and the beginning of the thousand-mile chain of the Aleutian Islands. Despite going as far as 70°N they found nothing but icebergs and Cook made no progress in discovering the Northwest Passage.
From 1791 to 1795, the Vancouver Expedition, led by George Vancouver who had previously accompanied Cook, reconnoitred all passages from the British Columbia coast and confirmed that no passage existed south of the Bering Strait. This conclusion was supported by evidence from Alexander MacKenzie who explored the Arctic and Pacific oceans in 1793.
19th century
In 1817 the British government offered a reward of 20,000 pounds sterling for whoever found the aforementioned pass, which encouraged the organization of numerous expeditions.
In 1845 a well-equipped two-ship expedition led by Sir John Franklin sailed into the Canadian Arctic to chart the unknown parts of the Northwest Passage, convinced of success, as the stretch of coastline to be mapped was less from 500km. When the ships did not return, several expeditions set out to search for them and help them to help explore the Canadian Arctic, resulting in an increase in cartography of the hypothetical pass. Successive salvage teams found remains of the Franklin expedition and its fatal outcome, including notes indicating that the ships became icebound in 1846 near King William Island, about halfway up the ocean. step, and that they could not free themselves. Franklin died in 1847 and the last member of the expedition died in 1848, after abandoning the ships and trying to escape overland by sleigh.
While famine and scurvy contributed to the deaths of the crew, another factor may have been important: the expedition carried 8,000 tins of food sealed with lead solder, and that lead may have contaminated the food, poisoning the crew and causing weakness and disorientation (later stages of lead poisoning lead to insanity and death). In 1981, Owen Beattie, an anthropologist at the University of Alberta, found new remains at expedition-related sites, leading to further investigation and examination of tissues and bones from the frozen corpses of three sailors, exhumed from the permafrost on Beechey Island. Laboratory tests revealed high concentrations of lead in all three sailors. Another researcher suggests that botulism, rather than lead poisoning, was the cause of death among crew members. There is new evidence showing that cannibalism it may also have been a last resort for some of the crew.
During the search for Franklin, Commander Robert McClure and his crew on HMS Investigator first crossed the Northwest Passage from west to east, between 1850 and 1854, partly by sailing and part in sleighs. McClure had left England in December 1849, sailing across the Atlantic Ocean to Cape Horn and entering the Pacific Ocean. He reached the North Pacific and crossed the Bering Strait, turning east at that point until he reached Banks Island.
McClure's ship was trapped in ice for three winters near Banks Island, at the western end of Viscount Melville Sound. Finally, McClure and his crew—by now starving—ran into some members of another expedition searching for Franklin from the east, the expeditioners from Sir Edward Belcher's ship who had been sledding on the ice.. McClure's crew returned with them to one of Belcher's ships, which was also trapped in the ice near Melville Island. In April 1854 McClure and his crew were sent by sledge to Beechey Island, where they boarded HMS North Star, a transport ship. They finally reached England on September 28, 1854, along with the rest of Belcher's crews, who had lost four of his five ships on that disastrous expedition. They became the first people to circumnavigate the Americas and to discover and transit the Northwest Passage, although part of it was ice sledding. This was an astonishing feat for his time, for which McClure was knighted and promoted to captain, and both he and his crew shared in the £10,000 reward offered by the British Parliament.
The Franklin and McClure expeditions followed the tradition of British exploration: well financed, with ships using the most modern technology of the day, and generally including Royal Navy crews. John Rae, however, was an employee of the Hudson's Bay Company, the main engine of exploration in the Canadian north, and he took a more pragmatic approach, based on land-based reconnaissance campaigns. While Franklin and McClure tried to explore the passage by sea, Rae did so from land, using dog sleds and using survival techniques learned from the native Inuit. The Franklin and McClure expeditions employed hundreds of people and several ships, and although John Rae's expeditions numbered fewer than ten people, they were nevertheless successful. Rae was also the explorer with the best safety record, having lost just one man in all the years he traversed the Arctic lands. In 1854, Rae returned with information about the fate of the Franklin expedition.
20th century
In 1906, the Norwegian Roald Amundsen —a young sailor captivated by the stories of the unfortunate fate suffered by the members of the Franklin expedition— finally achieved the objective and after a three-year voyage he reached the Pacific coast of Alaska, aboard the small sailing ship Gjøa (it should be noted that Amundsen would also reach the geographic South Pole for the first time in 1911). Since that date, many expeditions in all types of boats, conditions and routes have made the trip.
The Northwest Passage route was not conquered by sea until 1906, when Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, setting off just in time to escape his creditors trying to stop the expedition, completed a three-year voyage on the < i>Gjøa, a small converted tuna boat weighing only 47 tons. At the end of the trip he walked to the city of Eagle (Alaska) and sent a telegram announcing his success. Despite choosing the east-west route through Rae Strait, which although young iced was still navigable, some of the sections of the route he followed ran through very shallow water making the route commercially impractical.
Since then, the Northwest Passage route has been accomplished in many ways, routes, and means. The first dog sled tour was carried out by the Greenlander Knud Rasmussen, while he was on the Fifth Thule Expedition (1921-1924). Rasmussen, and two Kalaallit, Inuit from Greenland, traveled from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean on a 16-month journey by dog sled.
In 1940, Henry Larsen, an officer in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, was the second man to cross the pass by sea, this time from west to east, from Vancouver to Halifax. More than once on that trip he doubted whether the St. Roch, an ice-strengthened schooner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, could survive the ravages of sea ice. The ship, and all but one of its crew, survived the winter on the Boothia Peninsula. Each of the participants in the voyage was awarded a medal in recognition of this remarkable feat of arctic navigation in Canada, awarded by the sovereign, George VI. Later in 1944, Larsen's return voyage was much faster than his first: the 28 months his outward journey took him was significantly reduced, setting the mark for traveling the route in a single season. The ship followed a more unexplored route in the northern part that brought significant improvements.
On July 1, 1957, three US Coast Guard cutters Storis, Bramble, and SPAR set out to search for a deep channel through the Arctic Ocean and collect hydrographic information. Upon her return to Greenland waters, Storis became the first US ship to circumnavigate North America. Shortly after her return in late 1957, she was reassigned to her new home, Kodiak Harbor, Alaska.
In 1969, the SS Manhattan made the crossing accompanied by the Canadian icebreaker CCGS John A. Macdonald. The Manhattan was a specially reinforced supertanker and was sent for testing to determine the feasibility of the passage for the transport of oil. Despite the success of the Manhattan, the route was deemed unprofitable, and the Alaska Pipeline was built in its place.
In June 1977, sailor Willy de Roos left Belgium to try to cross the Northwest Passage on the Williwaw (named after the sudden williwaw wind), a 13.8m steel yacht. He reached the Bering Strait in September and after a stop in Victoria, British Columbia, rounded Cape Horn and sailed back to Belgium, becoming the first voyager to circumnavigate the Americas entirely by ship.
In 1984, the commercial passenger ship MS Explorer (which sank in the Southern Ocean in 2007) became the first cruise ship to sail through the pass.
David Scott Cowper left England in July 1986 in a 12.8m lifeboat, the Mabel El Holland, and survived three Arctic winters in the Northwest Passage before reaching the Bering Strait in August 1989. It then went on to circumnavigate the world, via the Cape of Good Hope, arriving back on September 24, 1990., becoming the first ship to circumnavigate the world through the Northwest Passage.
21st century
On September 1, 2001, the Northabout, a 14.3 m diesel-powered aluminum sailboat, built and captained by Jarlath Cunnane, completed the Northwest Passage from east to west, leaving from Ireland through the Bering Strait. The voyage from the Atlantic to the Pacific was completed in a very quick time of 24 days. The Northabout stayed in Canada for two years, before returning to Ireland in 2005 via the Northeast Passage, completing the first east-west circumnavigation of the poles by a single ship. The return via the North East Passage, along the Russian coast, was slower, starting in 2004, with a winter stop at Khatanga, Siberia, and returning to Ireland via the Norwegian coast in October 2005. On January 18, 2006, the Cruising Club of America awarded Jarlath Cunnane its "Blue Water Medal", an award given to the "meritorious sailor and sea adventurer on behalf of amateur sailors of all nationalities".
On July 18, 2003, a father and son team, Richard and Andrew Wood, accompanied by Zoe Birchenough, sailed on the yacht Norwegian Blue in the Bering Strait. Two months later they were sailing in the Davis Strait, being the first British ship to transit the Northwest Passage from west to east. She also became the only British ship to complete the Northwest Passage in a single season.
On May 19, 2007, Sébastien Roubinet, a French sailor accompanied by another crew member, set sail from Anchorage on the Babouche, a 7.5 m designed to navigate on water and slide on ice. The objective was to sail west to east through the Northwest Passage without an engine, pushed only by sail. After a journey of more than 7200 km, Roubinet reached Greenland on 9 September 2007, thus completing the first non-powered Northwest Passage voyage on a season.
Disputes over the sovereignty of the waters of the Northwest Passage
The Canadian government claims that portions of the Northwest Passage, particularly those through the islands of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, are Canadian sovereign, with Canada free to establish the conditions for transit through those waters. Maritime nations, including the United States and member states of the European Union, consider this to be an international strait, through which all ships have the right of "transit of passage". Under this regime, Canada would have the right to regulate fishing and environmental conditions, as well as to establish fiscal legal provisions, against smuggling and the safety of maritime transport, but not the right to close the passage.
In 1985, the US icebreaker USCGC Polar Mar passed through the route without the US government seeking permission from Canada. They argued that it was simply a cost-effective way to bring the ship from Greenland to Alaska and that there was no need to seek permission to travel through an international strait. The Canadian government issued a declaration in 1986 reaffirming Canadian rights to those waters. However, the United States refused to recognize this Canadian claim. In 1988 the Canadian and US governments signed the "Arctic Cooperation" agreement, which does not resolve sovereignty issues, but states that US icebreakers will require Canadian government permission to pass through.
In late 2005, it was reported that US nuclear submarines had traveled unannounced through Canadian Arctic waters, sparking outrage in Canada. In his first press conference after the 2006 Canadian election, Prime Minister-designate Stephen Harper responded to an earlier controversial statement by the US ambassador that Arctic waters were international waters, noting the intention of the Canadian government to assert its sovereignty there. The allegations arose after the United States Navy released photos of the USS Charlotte surfacing at the North Pole.
Effects of climate change
In the time of the Viking sagas and for at least the next two centuries before the Little Ice Age—a conservative period from the year 1000 to 1200, and which also allows for the dates assigned to some of the the largest Norwegian ships—some regions of the Arctic may have been somewhat warmer than they were at the beginning of the 20th century, and certainly warmer than they were at the height of the Little Ice Age (see Medieval Warm Period). On the other hand, the sea level in the Arctic was different from today. Due to postglacial rebound, current levels of the coastal lands around the Northwest Passage have risen by more than 20 m in the centuries since the Vikings.
In the summer of 2000, several ships took advantage of the summer thinning ice cover in the Arctic Ocean to make the voyage. It is thought that global warming is likely to open up the passage and increase the periods when it is free, making it attractive as a major shipping route. However, the passage through the Arctic Ocean requires significant investment in escort ships and fitting out ports. For this reason, the Canadian commercial shipping industry does not plan to pursue that route as a viable alternative to the Panama Canal, at least in the next 10 to 20 years.
On September 14, 2007, the European Space Agency declared, based on satellite imagery, that the loss of ice had opened up the pass "for the first time since 1978." According to the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, the last part of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st had seen a decrease in ice cover. The extreme loss in 2007 left the pass "fully navigable". However, the ESA study was based solely on analysis of satellite images and may in practice confirm nothing about navigation in the waters of the Northwest Passage.. The ESA suggests that it would be navigable "during reduced ice cover by multi-year ice pack" (nominally, sea ice survives one or several summers), where previously any crossing of the route would have to be carried out in favorable seasonal climatic conditions or by specialized ships or expeditions. The agency report speculates that conditions in 2007 have shown that the pass may "open up" ahead of schedule. However, reports from 2008 reveal that the pass was still not ice-free and navigable.
Scientists, at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union on December 13, 2007, revealed that NASA satellite observations of the western Arctic showed a 16% decrease in cloud cover during the summer 2007, compared to 2006. This would have the effect of allowing more sunlight to penetrate Earth's atmosphere and warm the waters of the Arctic Ocean, melting some of the sea ice and contributing to the opening of the Northwest Passage..
Since the summer of 2007, the retreat of the ice has allowed the Northwest Passage to be traveled by tourist boats, some of them Russian oceanographic vessels converted into passenger ships.
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