Beyond the Northwest Passage: Why Arctic Canada Is So Much More Than a Fabled Route

For centuries, outsiders looked at Arctic Canada and saw a way through. They searched for a navigable passage between oceans, sent ships into uncharted channels and drew coastlines around spaces they often described as empty. But the Canadian Arctic was never an empty space, and the Northwest Passage was never just a route.

Few stories have moulded our image of the Canadian Arctic region more powerfully than the disappearance of Sir John Franklin and the 129 officers and men aboard HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. The expedition has inspired histories, novels, documentaries and unending speculation. Still, Dan Simmons’ 2007 novel The Terror and its acclaimed television adaptation carried the story to an enormous new streaming audience. In fact, this series prompted me to revisit this extraordinary destination. 

The Terror presents a more fictional Arctic; Franklin’s men are trapped not only by ice, hunger and illness, but pursued across the frozen landscape by a supernatural presence. The result is compelling, atmospheric and frequently terrifying. It additionally reinforces a familiar image of Arctic Canada as a place of darkness and menace, an immense white wilderness waiting to consume those who enter it.

The reality is more complicated, and considerably more compelling.

Here, the ice has always set the terms. It trapped Franklin’s ships near King William Island, preserved their remains for more than 160 years and helped shape the movements of the Inuit communities whose knowledge ultimately led searchers back to the wrecks. It still determines when polar bears can hunt, when beluga whales enter Hudson Bay’s estuaries and where an expedition ship may be able to sail.

To explore Arctic Canada by expedition ship is to enter a landscape governed by ice but framed by history and storytelling. In this place, entire waterways open for a few short weeks before winter closes them again.

Yet the continued fascination with Franklin may obscure something fundamental. The Northwest Passage may have been a geographical objective to European explorers, but the lands and waters surrounding it were already known, travelled and inhabited. They were not blank spaces on a map. They were, and remain, Inuit homelands.

Today’s expedition travellers may arrive because they have read about Franklin, watched The Terror or dreamed of completing one in maritime history’s most fabled routes. What they discover is that Arctic Canada’s greatest stories begin when we stop treating it as somewhere to pass through.

When Franklin sailed from Britain in 1845, the ambition was unmistakably imperial. HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were to complete the charting of a navigable Northwest Passage, joining the Atlantic and Pacific across the top of North America. Both ships were originally Royal Navy bomb vessels, reinforced with iron plating and double-layered planking for the ice and provisioned for a very long absence.

The expedition wintered at Beechey Island in 1845–46, where three members of the crew died and were buried. The ships then became trapped in ice off King William Island. Franklin died in June 1847. By April 1848, the 105 surviving officers and men had abandoned the vessels and set out overland. None survived.

Beechey Island remains one of the most affecting places in the Canadian High Arctic. Its bleak shoreline and the graves of Franklin’s men make the expedition suddenly physical. This is no longer a story contained in books or dramatised on screen. It happened here, on ground that can still be walked.

But Beechey Island also exposes the limitations of the traditional Franklin narrative. European accounts long presented the Arctic as an unknown realm into which brave explorers disappeared. For Inuit, these waters, islands, animals and ice conditions were not unknown at all. Knowledge was carried through travel, observation and oral history, including accounts of the stricken ships and the men who left them. The modern search for Erebus and Terror ultimately returned to that knowledge. HMS Erebus was located in 2014 and HMS Terror in 2016, close to places identified through Inuit testimony.

The Wrecks of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror National Historic Site is now jointly managed by Inuit and Parks Canada, the first national historic site in Canada governed in this way. Inuit Guardians help protect and monitor the wreck sites, while archaeological work proceeds to recover and conserve artefacts from the ships.

In 2019, guests travelling with Adventure Canada became the first members of the public to visit the Erebus wreck site in partnership with Parks Canada. It was an exceptional visit rather than the creation of a conventional tourist attraction. The wrecks remain protected, access is restricted, and conditions dictate what is possible.

That makes Franklin’s final voyage a living story rather than a closed historical chapter. Archaeology, community stewardship and Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, or Inuit knowledge, are still changing how it is understood.

Perhaps the most important reversal is this: the Franklin mystery was never waiting for another outsider to solve it. Part of the answer had been living in the Arctic all along.

The phrase Northwest Passage encourages us to imagine a line across a map, like a canal. In reality, there is no single corridor. The passage is a complex network of sounds, gulfs, straits and channels running between thousands of islands, with several potential routes and no guarantee that any particular one will be open.

The map can also make communities appear like isolated points along that line, but they are nothing like that.

Mittimatalik, also known as Pond Inlet, faces the mountains and glaciers of Bylot Island across Eclipse Sound. Uqsuqtuuq, or Gjoa Haven, stands close to the heart of the Franklin story and takes its English name from Roald Amundsen’s ship Gjøa. Cambridge Bay, known in Inuinnaqtun as Iqaluktuuttiaq, means “place of many fish.” Each community has its own history, language and relationship with the surrounding land and water.

For expedition visitors, community calls can become some of the most memorable parts of a voyage, particularly when local people shape how their home is presented through storytelling, music, art, food and guided exploration. They also require care. Arctic communities are not exhibits from an earlier age, and Inuit culture is not a historical footnote to the era of European exploration. These are contemporary places responding to rapid social, economic and environmental change.

The most meaningful journeys acknowledge that distinction. They do not simply ask what happened to Franklin here. They ask what this place means to the people who live here now.

At the eastern approach to the Northwest Passage lies Tallurutiup Imanga, widely known as Lancaster Sound. To a navigator, it is a gateway. Ecologically, it is one of the richest marine environments in the Canadian Arctic.

Currents, channels and seasonal ice help create productive waters that support bowhead whales, narwhals, belugas, walruses and polar bears. On cliffs and coastal slopes, Brünnich's and black guillemots and other seabirds gather to breed during the short summer. The abundance is not accidental. From plankton to Arctic cod and beyond, each layer of life supports another.

Tallurutiup Imanga is now protected as a national marine conservation area created through an agreement between the Government of Canada and the Qikiqtani Inuit Association. Its protection recognises both its ecological importance and its central place within Inuit culture, harvesting and travel.

It also changes the way we think about the Northwest Passage. What European explorers regarded as the entrance to a route was already a destination, a hunting ground, a migration corridor and a place of deep cultural meaning.

Wildlife in Arctic Canada is sometimes presented as a list of possibilities, but never guarantees: polar bears, narwhals, belugas, walruses, muskoxen, caribou and Arctic foxes. The more revealing way to understand it is through timing.

The Arctic year is a sequence of openings and closures. Sea ice provides polar bears with a platform from which to hunt, and leads in the ice (long fractures or open channels of water running through sea ice) allow whales to breathe and travel. At the same time, the retreat of snow uncovers tundra vegetation for caribou and muskoxen, and returning daylight brings with it vast numbers of migratory birds north to breed.

An expedition ship enters this moving system for only a few weeks. Wildlife encounters therefore depend upon much more than reaching the correct coordinates. Ice conditions, tides, food and recent changes all matter. A bay that appears empty one day can hold whales or bears the next.

This is why Arctic Canada feels genuinely expeditionary. The uncertainty is not an inconvenience added to the experience. It shows the landscape is still operating on its own terms.

At Coningham Bay on Prince of Wales Island, one of Arctic Canada’s most extraordinary wildlife encounters is governed not only by ice but by the tide. Belugas sometimes enter a shallow lagoon through its tight opening. When the tide falls, whales can become trapped or restricted in the shallows, creating an unusual opportunity for polar bears.

Writing for ExplorEarth after entering the bay by Zodiac, travel writer Mark Stratton recalled how “the whitened skeletons of dozens of beluga whales” along the foreshore revealed what had happened there before. His group soon found a large male bear whose muzzle was stained red from a recent meal.

Polar bears normally hunt seals from sea ice and cannot match a healthy beluga in open water. Coningham Bay changes that balance. The shallow lagoon, constricted entrance and falling tide can briefly turn one of the Arctic’s most agile marine mammals into attainable prey.

Naturalists have also recorded bears using remarkable stealth here, entering the water and lying almost motionless with only the head and back visible, resembling pieces of floating ice as they approach the lagoon.

This is not simply another place to see a polar bear. It is a rare setting in which visitors can witness how an intelligent, opportunistic hunter has adapted its behaviour to a very particular landscape.

Modern technology has naturally transformed Arctic navigation. Expedition ships now travel with sophisticated tools, experienced ice navigators and ice-strengthened hulls. None of this, however, has made the Northwest Passage obedient. In fact, I’ve been personally involved in numerous operational challenges on Northwest Passage itineraries in recent years, involving the most advanced expedition ships.

To travel there by ship undoubtedly remains one of the great expeditions.

Routes can close, and landings can become impossible. Bellot Strait, a narrow channel separating Somerset Island from the Boothia Peninsula, can be blocked by moving ice or made difficult by strong currents. A captain may have to wait, turn back or choose a completely different course.

Mark Stratton captured this enduring uncertainty in his ExplorEarth account of navigating across Arctic Canada: “The Northwest Passage does not yield easily for either person or vessel.”

That uncertainty should alter how success is measured. Completing a full transit has undeniable historical and sentimental appeal, but an expedition is not diminished because ice changes its route. A Zodiac trip beneath a seabird cliff, an unexpected bear sighting, time spent with Inuit hosts or the sudden appearance of narwhals may ultimately matter more than joining two points on a chart.

Modern ships are safer, warmer and vastly better informed than Erebus and Terror. They have not made the Arctic predictable, and that is precisely why travelling here remains an expedition.

Churchill lies well to the south of the classic Northwest Passage routes, on the western shore of Hudson Bay. It’s a place you have almost certainly heard of, but some mistake it in photographs for a remarkable feeding ground in Svalbard because of its abundance of polar bears.

For me, few places reveal the seasonal character of Arctic Canada more clearly and while numerous well-trodden destinations are associated with one defining natural spectacle. Churchill has three.

During July and August, thousands of beluga whales enter western Hudson Bay, with around 4,000 moving into the Churchill River estuary. The relatively warm, shallow water provides feeding and socialising habitat and may help the whales rub away the outer layer of skin during their annual moult.

Belugas appear almost designed for an icebound world. They lack a dorsal fin that could strike the underside of sea ice, while unfused neck vertebrae allow them to turn their heads more freely than most whales. They are also intensely vocal. Their whistles, chirps and clicks, sometimes heard through the hull of a small boat or captured by hydrophone, have earned them the nickname “canaries of the sea.”

Churchill’s second great wildlife movement unfolds as summer gives way to autumn. Polar bears forced ashore by the thawing ice spend months fasting or surviving on limited food. As temperatures fall, they assemble along the Hudson Bay coast and wait for freeze-up, when the bay once again becomes a platform from which they can hunt seals.

The greatest concentrations generally occur during October and November, after most belugas have left. Yet polar bears can be encountered throughout the ice-free season. In late August and early September, it is therefore possible to watch belugas in the estuary, encounter a bear along the coast or tundra and, once darkness falls, see the aurora borealis overhead.

It is sometimes called the Churchill trifecta: bears, belugas and northern lights experienced during the same journey and, with exceptional timing and considerable luck, within a single day.

The final element only becomes possible as the midnight sun retreats. Churchill lies beneath the auroral oval and can experience auroral activity on as many as 300 nights a year, although daylight, cloud and solar factors determine what is actually visible. By late summer the nights are darkening again, creating a narrow overlap between the beluga season, the possibility of bears and the return of the night sky.

The great ambition of Franklin's voyage was always to complete the route. The success of early Arctic voyages was measured by whether a ship emerged into a second ocean and added another line to the map.

The Northwest Passage still carries a true romance, and there is an increasing desire for travellers to sail through those channels associated with Franklin, Rae and Amundsen and traverse a destination that is undoubtedly one of the most consequential chapters in maritime history. To stand at Beechey Island or sail close to King William Island is to feel that history with unusual immediacy.

But the old exploration narrative is no longer enough. It leaves too little room for Inuit knowledge, living northern communities, and the ecological relationships that make these waters so important. It can also encourage travellers to see the region as a challenge to be completed rather than a place to be understood.

Perhaps the great mistake was always contained in the name. A passage is something to move through. Arctic Canada asks us to stop, look and listen.

Its meaning is found in a story remembered across the generations, in a bowhead surfacing in protected waters, in the call that sends everyone to one side of a Zodiac and in a polar bear waiting for Hudson Bay to freeze. It is found in communities that have never regarded this immense region as empty.

The route may bring travellers here. Everything beyond it is why Arctic Canada stays with them.