In short
The Northwest Passage is the only expedition route on earth where the history is the landscape. The graves are still on the beach, the depots are still on the headlands and the two ships that vanished in 1845 lie in water you sail over. This is the story, told in the order the ships meet it.
Why the Passage mattered
For three hundred years Europe wanted a sea route over the top of America to the Pacific. Cabot looked for it in 1497, Frobisher in the 1570s, Hudson in 1610, and each returned with ice, or did not return. By 1845 the Admiralty had mapped most of the Arctic coast of Canada from both ends and believed one voyage would close the gap. It sent its two best ships, its most experienced officers and three years of food.
Franklin, 1845: the expedition that disappeared
Sir John Franklin sailed from the Thames in May 1845 with HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, 129 men, steam engines fitted to the propellers, a library of 2,900 books and tinned food for three years. Whalers in Baffin Bay saw the ships in late July, waiting for the ice to open into Lancaster Sound. No European saw them again.
The expedition wintered at Beechey Island in 1845 and 1846. Three men died there and were buried above the beach: John Torrington, John Hartnell and William Braine. Their headboards still stand, and a landing at Beechey is the quiet centre of every Northwest Passage voyage. The following summer the ships sailed south down Peel Sound and were beset in the ice off the north-west coast of King William Island in September 1846. They never moved again under their own power.
Franklin died aboard on 11 June 1847. The ships were abandoned on 22 April 1848 and 105 survivors set out south across the ice towards the Back River, dragging boats. None reached it. The one written record of all this is a single sheet of paper, the Victory Point note, left in a cairn and found eleven years later.
The search, and what the Inuit knew
More than thirty expeditions went looking between 1848 and 1859, and in doing so mapped most of the Passage. James Clark Ross wintered at Port Leopold in 1848. Robert McClure, coming from the west, became the first to cross the Passage in 1854, by sledge, after abandoning his ship. The answer came from the Inuit. In 1854 John Rae, travelling overland, was told by Netsilik hunters of white men who had died walking south, and of evidence that the last of them had eaten the dead. London did not want to hear it. The Inuit were right, and the cut marks on bones found a century later confirmed it.
In 1859 Francis Leopold McClintock, in the yacht Fox paid for by Lady Franklin, found the Victory Point note, a lifeboat on the shore of King William Island with two skeletons in it, and the scattered relics of the march. The story closed there for 155 years.
Amundsen, 1903 to 1906: the first to sail through
Roald Amundsen left Oslo in June 1903 in Gjøa, a 47-tonne herring sloop with a crew of six and a thirteen-horsepower engine, chosen because a small ship could follow the shallow coastal water a naval vessel could not. He spent two winters in a harbour on the south-east coast of King William Island that is now the hamlet of Gjoa Haven, Uqsuqtuuq, where the Netsilik taught him to drive dogs, build snow houses and dress in skins. Everything he later took to the South Pole he learned there.
In August 1905 Gjøa met a whaler from San Francisco in the Beaufort Sea and the Passage was done, though a third winter near Herschel Island kept him from Nome until August 1906. Amundsen had succeeded by doing what Franklin could not: travelling light, travelling slowly and asking the people who lived there.
After Amundsen
The RCMP schooner St. Roch under Henry Larsen made the second transit, west to east, in 1940 to 1942, and in 1944 came back the other way in a single season, the first ship to do so. The first passenger ship, the Lindblad Explorer, went through in 1984. Today a handful of expedition ships transit each year in late August and September, and the Passage still closes some of them out.
What you see from the ship
Beechey Island
The three Franklin graves and a fourth, Thomas Morgan of the search ship Investigator, above a gravel beach in Erebus and Terror Bay. The ruins of Northumberland House, built by the searchers in 1854 as a depot. A silent landing, by convention, and the one every guest remembers.
Port Leopold and Fort Ross
At Port Leopold, on the north-east corner of Somerset Island, the depot left by James Clark Ross in 1849 and the hut of a later Hudson’s Bay Company post. At Fort Ross, at the eastern mouth of Bellot Strait, the two surviving buildings of the Company post that operated from 1937 to 1948, with the shelves still stocked by visiting ships.
Dundas Harbour
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police post of 1924 on the south coast of Devon Island, abandoned in 1951, with two graves and the buildings weathering slowly into the tundra.
Gjoa Haven
Amundsen’s harbour, now a Netsilik community of 1,300 with a heritage centre that holds the story from the Inuit side. Some voyages call here, and it is the right place to hear it.
The wrecks
Erebus was found by Parks Canada in September 2014 in Wilmot and Crampton Bay, in eleven metres of water, and Terror in September 2016 in Terror Bay, in twenty-four, both close to where Inuit oral history had always placed them. The sites are a national historic site managed with the community of Gjoa Haven, and access is controlled. Expedition ships do not visit the wrecks, and the respect in that is part of the voyage.
Sailing it now
The Passage opens for a few weeks from mid-August. The voyages run between West Greenland and the Canadian Arctic, through Lancaster Sound, Peel Sound or Prince Regent Inlet and Bellot Strait, and end at Cambridge Bay or Resolute, or carry on to Nome in the longest transits. Ice decides the route every year, and the expedition leader decides it every morning. Our Northwest Passage destination page sets out the ships, the months and the voyages, and Ponant’s Northwest Passage voyage is the one we plan most often.
Reading before you go
- The Victory Point note itself, transcribed and held by the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.
- The Inuit testimony collected by Rae, Hall and Schwatka, now treated as the primary source it always was.
- The Parks Canada account of the discovery of Erebus and Terror, and the Guardians programme at Gjoa Haven.
Questions we are asked about Franklin and the Passage
Do we land at Beechey Island?
On almost every Northwest Passage voyage, weather and ice permitting. It is a short, quiet landing and a long walk afterwards for most people.
Can we see the Franklin wrecks?
No. The sites are protected and visits are controlled by Parks Canada and the Inuit Guardians of Gjoa Haven. Some voyages call at Gjoa Haven itself, where the story is told by the people who kept it.
Is the Passage always open?
No. Some years the ice closes a route and the ship takes another, and in a hard year a transit becomes a return voyage. That is the honest nature of the place, and the expedition companies plan for it.
Which ships sail it?
Le Boréal and L’Austral, SH Vega, Ultramarine and the Aurora Expeditions ships among the ones we recommend, between mid-August and late September. The ship page for each shows the voyages.
