Transport: Northwest Passage II

When in the late spring of 1497, John Cabot, middle-aged Italian navigator, hired out to England's Henry VII and sailed westward from Bristol, his destination was Asia, in particular Mecca, which he had already visited. On board the little three-masted Mathew were 18 men. Crammed under her planks were such trinkets, knives and cloths that "heathens and infidels" delight to trade for, and in the master's cupboard the commission by which His Majesty agreed to take only 20% of the profits of the trip.

Seven and a half weeks later the land he saw was not Asia but what is now Canada, an impassable barrier of earth, mountain and forest. When his reports were compared with those of his contemporary, Columbus, invincible explorers of Portugal, Spain, France and Britain knew that one must sail beyond or around that barrier to get at the riches of the East. The four-century search for a northwest passage had begun.

Frobisher, Davis, Hudson, Baffin, Parry, Ross and Franklin, intrepid seamen and scientists whose names memorially dot the Arctic, were some among dozens who sought a key to the Northwest Passage to Asia across America's ice-locked top. But not until 1906 did any man navigate completely across the Arctic. Roald Amundsen, Norway's hero-explorer, in a three-year trip and with the loss of one of his seven men, traversed the first Northwest Passage*—Baffin Bay, Barrow Straight, along the west coast of North Somerset Island to Cambridge Bay and out to Beaufort Sea and the Pacific. Amundsen's icebound trail, full of shallows, swirling currents and subject to sudden storms has since been followed by only three or four ships.

Search for a shorter, climatically more favorable route went on. Long pondered by explorers like Ross, Franklin and Amundsen were the possibilities of Bellot Strait, named in 1852 after its discoverer Joseph Rene Bellot, French naval lieutenant. This lies at the extreme northerly point of North America's mainland, 2,000 miles directly above Minneapolis, and separates Boothia Peninsula from Somerset Island. (Barrow Strait, 150 miles further north, separates Somerset Island from Cornwallis Island.) Bellot Strait, situated on the 72nd parallel 400 miles inside the Arctic Circle, is also just 150 miles north of the North Magnetic Pole—so close that ships' compasses are useless. Explorers have known that if it were used it would cut 100 mi. from the Baffin Bay-Barrow Strait passage, save 400 miles if the still untraversed Fury and Hecla Strait were navigable. In 1858, after his fifth attempt, Captain Leopold McClintock claimed that he "steamed through the clear water of Bellot Strait this morning and made fast to the ice across its western outlet." Though many small trade-ships may have used its 30 tortuous miles in the past 80 years, on the record it has remained uncharted, impassable.