The Northwest Passage

The Northwest Passage by Roger Pocock

Roger Pocock's account of the Northwest Passage opens with a sweeping historical survey of the centuries-long European effort to find a navigable route around the northern edge of the Americas to China. The passage killed sailors with scurvy for two hundred years until lime juice was introduced, after which explorers pushed deeper into the Arctic only to confront new obstacles: crushing ice that destroyed ships, useless compasses near the magnetic pole, dense fogs, and inner channels frozen for all but six weeks of the year. Even when ships were made strong enough to survive the ice and crews were equipped with Eskimo clothing and years' worth of compressed food, the sea lane through the passage proved so shallow and rock-strewn that no large vessel could traverse it. After three centuries of effort, British explorers had mapped the entire route but could not sail it. The account notes that the Norseman Nordenskjöld had meanwhile completed the Northeast Passage around Asia, yet the Northwest Passage remained unconquered. The solution came from a young Norse seaman who reasoned that where large ships failed on account of the shoals, a shallow-draught fishing vessel might succeed. Modern compressed provisions could supply a small crew for five years, and seven men, each skilled in several trades, could cover all necessary duties. Roald Amundsen secured the backing of Doctor Nansen and the Norwegian king, gathered support from across Scandinavia and a little from Britain, and prepared the Gjöa, a forty-seven-ton herring boat fitted with a thirteen-horsepower motor, for the attempt. The Gjöa sailed from Christiania in 1903, worked northward along the Greenland coast, took on stores at Godhaven, passed Upernivik and Tassinssak, and entered the dangerous three-hundred-mile glacier frontage of Melville Bay. Near Cape York she collected a deck load of stores left by a Dundee whaler and encountered three Danish explorers, among them Mylius Erichsen, who was heading toward his death on the north coast of Greenland. Crossing to Lancaster Sound, the gate of the Northwest Passage, the Gjöa paused at Beechey Island, tidied the graves of the Franklin expedition, left a message at Franklin's monument, and pressed on through channels that had been blocked for three hundred years, finding them miraculously clear. On the last day of August a fire broke out above the engine-room petroleum tanks. The crew's discipline was the only thing that prevented the ship from being blown apart, and the fire was eventually brought under control. Days later the Gjöa grounded in a labyrinth of shoals and was driven by a storm across rocks that stripped away her false keel and forced the crew to throw the entire deck cargo overboard. Amundsen described the vessel smashing from rock to rock under full canvas until she slid free, the rudder momentarily lifted off its mountings before its pins dropped back into their sockets. Remarkably, the ship did not leak. A sheltered harbor near the south end of King William's Land was named Joy Haven, and there the Gjöa wintered for two years while the crew conducted scientific work at the Magnetic Pole. They mapped the district, studied weather and the heavens, collected natural history specimens and fossils, hunted reindeer, and built friendly relations with the local Eskimos. Temperatures fell as low as seventy-nine degrees below zero during the first winter, a figure close to the world record for cold, though the text notes that with adequate food, functioning digestion, and Eskimo clothing, extreme cold below forty below zero brings a breathless calm and a dry invigorating air. The crew found the summer mosquitoes and the spring snow-blindness harder to bear than the winter darkness. The greatest event of the first year was engaging an Eskimo hunter to carry letters, who returned the following summer having reached a Royal Northwest Mounted Police vessel in Hudson's Bay. Major Moody and the captains of the Arctic and an American whaler sent greetings, charts, and husky dogs. When a northerly gale broke the ice in the second summer the Gjöa departed on the thirteenth of August, navigating without a compass through blinding fog, ice-fields, and shoals. After three sleepless nights of extreme strain the crew reached charted waters, met an American whaler, and enjoyed clear water as far as the mouths of the Mackenzie River, where ice again forced them into a second winter. They anchored thirty-six miles east of Herschel Island, close to a stranded ship, amid a community that included American whalers, a Northwest Mounted Police outpost, a mission, and an Eskimo village. Mail arrived by dog-train from Fort Macpherson through the Hudson's Bay Company posts along the Mackenzie Valley all the way to Edmonton, and Amundsen himself travelled by dog-train to Eagle City on the Yukon to send telegrams. In the summer of 1906 the Gjöa made her final run with a crew now reduced to six, one man having died and been left in a grave that received a dip of the ship's colors at departure. Ice still blocked the way and the Gjöa charged it repeatedly, smashing her engines and losing her peak, which rendered the mainsail useless. She nevertheless cleared Cape Prince of Wales, completing the Northwest Passage, and entered Bering Sea, putting in at Cape Nome for repairs where a thousand American gold miners greeted Amundsen and his crew with the Norse national anthem.

By Roger Pocock · First published 1910 · Genre: Adventure, Historical Non-fiction, Exploration Literature · 2,146 words

First lines

A. D. 1905

Once upon a time the Foul Fiend wanted a death-trap that would pick out all the bravest men and destroy them, so he invented the Northwest Passage.

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Arctic exploration · Canadian history · Geography · Adventure · Polar regions · Maritime history · Discovery · Navigation · Northern Canada · Historical exploration · Travel narrative · Ice navigation

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The Northwest Passage is listed on Textopian as a short story by Roger Pocock, dated 1910 CE.

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