Right of Passage

Books Discussed In This Essay:

Arctic Labyrinth: The Quest for the Northwest Passage
by Glyn Williams
Viking Canada (2009), 448 pp.

The Ice Passage: A True Story of Ambition, Disaster, and Endurance in the Arctic Wilderness
by Brian Payton
Doubleday Canada (2009), 352 pp.

Across the Top of the World: The Quest for the Northwest Passage
by James P. Delgado
Douglas & McIntyre (2009), 240 pp.

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Auyuittuq National Park is an awe-inspiring landscape of jagged mountain peaks and hanging glaciers, the kind of natural wonder that would be thick with tourists were it not on Baffin Island, hundreds of kilometres away from any urban centre, accessible in summer only by boat. Remarkably, small groups of visitors do sometimes make the trek to this swath of land on the edge of the Arctic Circle, and this past summer, after a series of lucky accidents, I found myself among one such group: an expedition of scientists and enthusiastic high school students exploring Canada’s polar region. Hiking north up the park’s valley floor, we waded through ice-cold rivulets that streamed down from the mountains, fed by the glaciers that locals say are retreating quickly, leaving the once ice-capped mountains brown and bare. It was impossible not to see the irony in the fact that Auyuittuq, which means “land that never melts” in Inuktitut, was, in fact, melting.

That night, when the botanists, geologists, environmentalists, oceanographers, and student chaperones gathered to sip drinks in the ship’s gently pitching lounge, talk inevitably turned to climate change. After all, it had only been two summers ago that an area of sea ice nearly four times the size of Texas had virtually disappeared, opening up large sections of the Canadian Arctic for the first time in perhaps a million years. Though the ice didn’t retreat as severely last summer, coverage was still the third lowest since satellite recording began in 1979, and signs of the thaw were everywhere. Climatologists now say that summer sea ice — a feature that seems as essential to the Arctic as sand to the Sahara — could largely be a thing of the past in just ten years.

By the time I returned home, Stephen Harper’s annual trek to the Arctic was making the news. Rather than expressing alarm at the signs of climate change, however, the prime minister made bold pronouncements about the future of the North. “With immense natural wealth and the growing potential for new global trade routes,” he crowed from the deck of a navy frigate in Frobisher Bay, “the strategic importance of Canada’s Arctic is heightened as never before.” The melting of the polar ice caps, it turns out, presents some exciting economic opportunities. New petroleum reserves may be exposed. Locked-in mineral resources could at last be accessible. Perhaps most intriguing, the Northwest Passage of myth and legend, a valuable shortcut between the Atlantic and the Pacific, could finally be open to commercial traffic.

A passage through the icy islands of Canada’s Arctic has been sought after for more than 400 years, from Martin Frobisher’s doomed sixteenth-century expeditions to Roald Amundsun’s three-year journey through the icy channels ending in 1906, which proved the passage was navigable but also completely impractical as a shipping route. The fact that the dream of a reliable, ice-free Northwest Passage could finally be achieved thanks to global warming is somewhat anticlimactic — as if we’d inadvertently discovered the Holy Grail while digging a landfill. Nevertheless, these environmental changes have set off a new round of Northwest Passage mania, reigniting the battle for Arctic sovereignty and renewing old hopes about the promise of an Arctic path.

Publishers have greeted this revival with three new books that trace the history of the hunt for the world’s most elusive shortcut. Naval historian Glyn Williams’ Arctic Labyrinth offers a compelling and erudite account of the many efforts to find a route through the Arctic’s scattered islands, while maritime archaeologist James P. Delgado’s handsome reference guide Across the Top of the World: The Quest for the Northwest Passage, first published in 1999, has been reissued with an epilogue that includes information on the staggering environmental developments of the past decade. In The Ice Passage, Vancouver writer Brian Payton takes a slightly different tack, imaginatively recreating the expedition that discovered the passage’s final link in 1850.

Each of these books contains familiar elements of the maritime adventure narrative: mutiny, cannibalism, deprivation, triumph, and so on. There’s another way to read them, however. Time after time, explorers ventured out to find the Northwest Passage, only to have their way blocked by a country they had hoped didn’t exist. What emerges, then, is a kind of inadvertent portrait of Canada, a nation built on northern pipe dreams. As national myths go, it isn’t particularly gratifying. But if we can bring ourselves to see Canada as the upshot of the futile expeditions chronicled by Williams, Delgado, and Payton, their stories have much to tell us about our new obsession.

In 1631, at the request of a society of merchants in Bristol, England, Thomas James set off in search of the Northwest Passage, armed with maps, instructions, and, perhaps a little optimistically, letters addressed to the Emperor of Japan. James wasn’t the first to attempt the passage — John Davis, William Baffin, Martin Frobisher, Henry Hudson, and a host of other ambitious Englishmen had already spent decades fruitlessly searching for the route — and the captain very much conformed to type. In Glyn Williams’ engaging account, he comes off as courageous but foolish, tough but arrogant, level-headed and yet completely unprepared for the ferocity of an Arctic winter. And, like so many others, he didn’t make it very far. Sailing through Hudson Bay, his ship was flung from island to uncharted island, battered between rocks and shoals, until in early October he and his crew found themselves stranded on the shore of the bay that would later bear his name, to endure a cruel Arctic winter.

Throughout the long, sunless months, the walls of their makeshift cabins were encrusted with ice, their beds blanketed with frost. While the cold waged its ceaseless attack, scurvy left them weakened, “all the teeth in their heads being loose, their gums so swoln with blacke rotten flesh, which every daye must be cut away,” according to James. First the gunner’s mate died, and then the gunner, his body pitched into deep water. Months later, returning from yet another funeral, the crew noticed that his corpse had drifted alongside the ship, where it had “frozen fast in the ice, his head downward, his heel (for he had but one leg) upward, and the bandage still on his wound.” Prospects for survival looked grim. “If it be our fortune to end our dayes here,” wrote James, “we are as neere heaven as in England.”