Marine Glossary

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Northwest Passage

The sailing route over the top of Canada from Baffin Bay to Bering Straits, headed west. It has been traversed numerous times by ice breakers and large vessels but only a few times by sailing vessels. First passage was Roald Amundsen in the Gjoa (75-foot with 13-HP auxiliary) in 1903 to 1906. He spent two winters in the ice intentionally, but likely could have made it through the first season had he chosen to. He knew the right route by that time, but several hundred sailors from several countries had lost their lives in the preceding 50 years or so in discovering the right route.

Details on this fascinating sailing route are covered in:
Northwest Passage — the Quest for an Arctic Route to the East (Key Porter Books, Toronto, 1991) text by Edward Struzik and photos by Mike Beedell. This book has beautiful photos of this amazing waterway which show in part the fascination of the route.

Northwest Passage by Willy de Roos (International Marine, Camden, ME, 1979). He sailed the route in a 43-foot steel ketch with 62 HP auxiliary. Made it in one season. Followed Amundsen route, did more than half of it single handed, received fuel along the way, but was otherwise self sufficient.

Ordeal by Ice — The Search for the Northwest Passage by Farley Mowat (McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, 1960). An interesting survey of parts of the stories of the many expeditions that sought the route.

Although there are potentially several routes through the Passage, the one that has been sailed is the one most likely open, and these days one could learn this from Sailing Directions of the Arctic. It begins close in along the east coast of Baffin Bay, north through Melville Bay to the "North water" above the Baffin ice pack, then down or across to Lancaster Sound. Lancaster Sound to Resolute (an air station) on south tip of Cornwallis Island. Then south through Peel Sound and Franklin Strait and around the Southeast side of King William Island. And from there follow the north shore of the mainland past Cape Bathurst, the Mackenzie delta, Point Barrow, Icy Cape into the Bering Strait.

The highest latitude along the route is usually in northern Baffin Bay at some 74 or 75° N. The voyage from the south tip of Greenland to the Bering Strait is about 3,500 miles.

This is not the obvious route if you just looked at the map showing the distribution of land and waterways. It is dictated by the behavior of the ice.

It is possible that the best references for the route are the logs of the RCMP sailing vessel St. Roch (104-foot schooner, 150 HP auxuliary), now in a maritime museum in Vancouver BC. Under the command of Captain Henry Larsen, she made several passages in both directions in the early 1940s. De Roos and others make frequent reference to the value of this information but do not give specific references to where it is published.

Sadly enough, after all the life and resources that went into its discovery, this is not a practical commercial route for any vessel of any size — in contrast to the corresponding Northeast Passage over Russia which has been used commercially to some extent since the mid 1900s. Nevertheless, the Canadian Arctic remains one of the wonderful places on earth accessible by boat.

These days, any transit of the route or even waters approaching it must be cleared with Canadian Coast Guard, or possibly prohibited by them. It remains a dangerous undertaking and any single season transit of the route must be interpreted as being in large part luck. The advantage of modern sailing is the great resources we now have in satellite imagery and in the frequent research in the region which brings with it much air travel and subsequent ice observations.

Sometimes the eastward voyage along this route is called the "northeast passage," but more often this term applies to the east bound route over the top of Norway and Russia. See Northeast Passage.