The Northwest Passage

Story by Annie O’Brien

Throughout the eighteenth century, British explorers and naval officers unsuccessfully endeavored to discover the Northwest Passage, an aquatic Arctic route in North America connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Attempts to find the Northwest Passage began in the sixteenth century and continued until successful attempts in the early twentieth century.¹ James Knight, Christopher Middleton, and James Cook led the most notable eighteenth-century voyages, each one failing to navigate the icy archipelago above Canada and Alaska.²

Ship captain James Knight, a trader for the colonial enterprise the Hudson Bay Company, led the first doomed eighteenth-century expedition, departing England with his crew of forty men in 1719 before disappearing forever.³ With two ships paid for by the Hudson Bay Company, Knight aimed to cross the Strait of Anian and find gold.⁴ He had nearly half a century’s worth of experience, and the Hudson Bay Company entrusted him with total “power and authority” while on the voyage, making his disappearance all the more surprising.⁵ Reports from the local Inuit people suggested the whole crew died after their ships wrecked in a natural harbor, with a final survivor who died while trying to dig a grave for the penultimate survivor.⁶ Otherwise, there is no evidence for what happened to Knight and his crew.

Unperturbed by Knight’s failure, Irish politician Arthur Dobbs enlisted Royal Navy officer and Hudson Bay Company navigator Christopher Middleton to lead another expedition in 1741.⁷ Dobbs sought the Northwest Passage for economic gain, imagining “what great advantages might be made by having a passage to California in three or four months and so down to the Western Coast of America.”⁸ He was confident tidal patterns indicated there was a “Western Ocean flowing in at the Streight,” since mariners who sought the Northwest Passage a century earlier observed notably high tides in the middle of the Hudson Bay.⁹ The tides, Dobbs thought, indicated the Pacific was not much further than what previous expeditions had already navigated and that Middleton would likely find the Northwest Passage.¹⁰

Middleton set sail in June 1741.¹¹ He experienced a great deal of anxiety at the start of the trip, as he sailed a month later than expected and his crew had limited maritime experience.¹² Due to their delayed start and Middleton’s caution, the crew paused to spend the winter in a riverside frontier post in early fall 1741.¹³ The winter was a disaster. Frostbite blistered and froze the crew’s limbs in a “terrible manner.”¹⁴ While staying inside may have protected one from frostbite, Middleton’s journals describe “lying in” caused outbreaks of diseases that “generally” killed those infected in eight or ten days.¹⁵

Despite the harsh winter, Middleton’s remaining crew entered the summer sailing season of 1742 with optimism, accomplishing, in his words, “a very competent piece of seamanship … under very difficult and frustrating conditions.”¹⁶ Significantly, Middleton’s team stumbled upon a cape they believed was “the Extream Part of America.”¹⁷ In the morning, however, the crew discovered they had merely encountered a deep bay rather than another ocean.¹⁸ Maps for later expeditions preserved the names Middleton gave geographical features. On a Dutch map from 1750, Nouvelle Carte des Endroits, où l’on a taché de découvirir en 1746 & 1747 un Passage par le Nord-ouëst, avec les Routes, que les Vaisseaux ont tenues … Nieuwe Kaart, (New Map of Places, Where We Tried to Discover in 1746 & 1747 a Passage through the North-West, with the Routes, Which the Vessels Held… New Map) the cape the crew falsely believed was the tip of North America appeared as “Hope” and the name “Repulse Bay” memorializes the discovered bay. The team traveled through several frozen straits only to be met with continued failure.¹⁹ Middleton turned his crew eastward, arriving in England in October 1742 having made little progress finding the Northwest Passage.²⁰

Dobbs fumed at the premature return of Middleton. Though Dobbs never left the British Isles to explore the Northwest Passage himself, he thought Middleton had “proved the passage,” believing the frozen straits Middleton traversed would have led to the Pacific Ocean.²¹ To prove his point, Dobbs instigated another unsuccessful voyage in 1746.²² One of the captains, Henry Ellis, documented the journey on his map from February 1748, To Arthur Dobbs, Rowland Fry, James Douglas, Henry Douglas, John Tomlinson, Robert Mackey, William Bowden and Samuel Smith. Ellis noted several places where dangerous, unpredictable tides prevented exploration.

After several attempts to find the passage from the Atlantic, the renowned British mariner and explorer James Cook attempted and failed to navigate the Northwest Passage from the Pacific in the late 1770s. Cook had an impressive resume; he had charted Newfoundland’s Saint Lawrence River and the South Pacific.²³ A map made after Cook’s death entitled Chart of the World According to Mercators Projection, Shewing the Tracks and Discoveries of Captn. Cook demonstrated that if Cook had successfully navigated the Northwest Passage, he would have circumnavigated North and South America in his sailing career. Published in London in 1799, Chart of The World shows Cook’s discoveries between 1768 and 1780, as well as the progress of subsequent English and French explorers.²⁴

Cook’s journey failed, in large part, because of cartographers who constructed maps based on theory rather than actual navigation, which misled him into believing that the Arctic Ocean was free of ice for most of the year.²⁵ Without ever having traveled to the region, these cartographers theorized sunlight and waves in the mid-ocean prevented the Arctic Ocean from freezing, making it easily navigable in the warmer months.²⁶ Cook found himself lamenting his situation “upon a Coast where every step was to be considered, where no information could be had from Maps, whether modern or ancient.”²⁷ As seen in the Chart of the World, Cook and his team made it to Icy Cape in northwestern Alaska before heading towards the South Pacific, where Cook was killed in Hawai’i in 1779. His crew returned to England with neither their captain nor a discovery of the Northwest Passage.

The search for the Northwest Passage eluded discovery in the eighteenth century, killing skilled mariners and causing conflict among captains and geographical theorists. Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen finally successfully navigated the passage in August 1906, setting out from Sweden and landing on Canada’s Victoria Island. Amundsen traveled the farthest west of any eastbound ship, traveling over the ghosts of previous expeditions, to find the last “unsolved link in the North West Passage.”²⁸

Banner image credit: To Arthur Dobbs, Rowland Fry, James Douglas, Henry Douglas, John Tomlinson, Robert Mackey,…, John Carter Brown Library

Bibliography

Amundsen, Roald. The North West Passage: Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of The Ship “Gjoa” 1903-1907. Vol. 2. New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1908.

Barr, William, and Glyndwr Williams, eds. Voyages to Hudson Bay in Search of a Northwest Passage, 1741-1747. Vol. 2, The Voyage of William Moor and Francis Smith, 1746–1747. London: Hakluyt Society, 1999.

Middleton, Christopher. Voyages to Hudson Bay in Search of a Northwest Passage, 1741-1747. ed. William Barr and Glyndwr Williams. Vol. 1, The Voyage of Christopher Middleton, 1741–1742. London: Hakluyt Society, 1999.

Savours, Ann. The Search for the Northwest Passage. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.

“Searching for the North-West Passage.” Royal Museums Greenwich. https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/search-north-west-passage.

Stanford University. “A Chart of the World, According to Mercator’s Projection Shewing Latest Discoveries of Capt. Cook.” https://purl.stanford.edu/mb691tv4760.

Williams, Glyn. Voyages of Delusion: The Quest for the Northwest Passage. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.