The Northwest Passage: a journey across the roof of the world

Entering Conningham Bay, in Arctic Canada’s Northwest Passage, the tide needed to be judged to perfection. It was a bitingly cold morning when Ian, the pilot of our zodiac inflatable, paused in choppy swell at the shallow entrance of this horseshoe-shaped bay. He revved the engine with the next tidal surge and we crested through. Inside, glacial shattered rocks harboured pockets of diminishing snow. It was the foreshore however – where the whitened skeletons of dozens of beluga whales lay – that piqued our interest. 

We weren’t here for an anatomy class, though. Conningham Bay presents the best opportunity in Arctic Canada’s Northwest Passage to see polar bears. Hungry ones, too. For the beluga that swims into this bay it can be a death trap because when the tide ebbs they may become stranded in the shallows and the bears pounce for a fatty, easy meal. "There’s something on the shoreline at one o’clock," said Ian, our zodiac driver. He didn't rev hard but pootled towards a large male bear whose nuzzle was stained red from a recent meal. He watched us impassively around 100 metres away as we photographed him and whispered our excitement. Eventually, he turned inland and vanished. Ian suggested he’d be back to look for another meal when the tide had drained, long after we were ensconced on our warm expedition ship. 

It wasn’t long ago that traversing the Northwest Passage was the quest of gnarled explorers, some of whom would never leave this perishingly harsh environment. The inimitable Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen was credited with the first traverse in 1905. He had completed a holy grail that has been ongoing for several hundred years: forging a high northern hemisphere passage between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. 

It seems remarkable, given the deprivations the explorers endured, that it is now possible to transit the passage in style and comfort. It’s a short season, between late July and early September, to make the transit, even despite research showing Arctic sea ice is decreasing fast. A NASA report found a 45cm thinning of ice between 2019-21, a loss in volume of 16%. Yet even now, a successful transit is no certainty, and since 2018, there have been a couple of summer seasons when the sea ice has been impenetrable. The Northwest Passage does not yield easily for either person or vessel.

Completing the Northwest Passage took Amundsen three years. These days, the wriggling route through a fractured archipelago of islands across Nunavut, Arctic Canada’s most northerly province, takes around 30 days, a voyage nearing 932 miles. Full traverses often start at Nome in Alaska, on the Pacific side. Vice versa, they sail in from Greenland. 

With less time to spare, there is an alternative – a partial transit. My last two voyages in the passage have been so, heading east towards Greenland, taking around 16 days. On both occasions I flew into the remote Inuit town of Cambridge Bay, in the western sector of the Northwest Passage, where my expedition vessel waited. The route after that veered north with a U-bend-like turn out of Victoria Strait, which at times had been so vast I could see neither shoreline. King William Island lay ahead, then beyond it eastwards, again passing the colossal Devon Island until Lancaster Strait funnels ships past Baffin Island. Western Greenland is a further two-day transit across the Davis Strait.

On both trips, my transits were ice-free, so with some irony we hankered after ice even though it was the bête-noir of so many sailors in the 18th and 19th centuries, whose vessels froze solid in the passage. I can’t disguise the thrilling sensation of a ship’s hull cracking through thin sea ice like shattering glass. Otherwise, the landscape around us is viscerally harsh yet stunning in equal measures. Humungous sea cliffs, stony cold beaches, frost-shattered peaks, plains of distant snow and lacerating winds as sharp as knives. The Northwest Passage is a canvas of magnificent austerity decorated culturally, naturally, and historically to create one of the most compelling journeys on Earth.

Even long sea days were a hive of activity on Greg Mortimer. I spent a lot of time on the top observation deck spotting wildlife and during lectures I learned about the ecology and culture of the passage. Yet one theme dominates – the ill-fated voyage of Sir John Franklin from 1845-48, a story that held us in thrall throughout. If that calamitous expedition sent shivers down my spine, it also made me grateful to be on a comfortable ship with a library, gym and spacious cabins. Unlike the fare of the Franklin expedition during its denouement of lead-tainted canned food, seal meat and ultimately human flesh, I felt a tinge of empathetic guilt as I looked forward to delicious meals. 

The passage delivers wonderful wildlife memories. Generally, it is less abundant than Antarctica, but the rewards are handsome. The more time you spend outside on deck, not least for birding, the more prosperous your natural history voyage will be. I've seen distant polar bears with binoculars, including a mother with cubs. I've watched Arctic foxes trotting along stony shorelines and fluffy white hares accelerating with lightning speed. I've caught sight of the ghostly forms of beluga and shouted at them not to go near Conningham Bay because the bears are waiting. Yet no sighting can be guaranteed, and those elusive unicorns, the narwhals, have never crossed my path.

Zodiac expeditions can be spectacular for natural history. I recall the mighty 800-metre-high cliffs of King Leopold Island, where I rode into a frenzied cacophony of birds. Guillemots, kittiwakes, northern fulmars and murre nest on high ledges that rise like the biblical Masada from the sea. And during a memorable excursion to Bathurst Island's Qausuittuq National Park – at 72ºN, aptly translates as the 'Place of No Dawn' – we hiked across the Arctic tundra to track endangered Peary caribou. Their white fur rendered them almost invisible against the snow. They have been hunted to such perilously low levels but are now well protected at Qausuittuq. On every land-based trek, you will notice that your naturalist guides carry rifles to frighten off any polar bears whose curiosity gets the better. 

I've had wondrous sightings beyond leaving the passage on my way to Greenland. Two summers ago, we followed a pod of bowhead whales, slow-moving leviathans, which were once rare to see due to hunting but are now recovering slowly. They fed in a cold, icy bay down the eastern coast of craggy Baffin Island. My parting memory from my last voyage was a shaggy herd of muskox on the shores of the mighty Kangerslussuaq Fjord as our journey neared its end.

The blood, sweat, and toil of the explorers who forged the Northwest Passage have left behind a ripe legacy of adventure that remains raw, as if their spirits linger in what for them must have been a Godforsaken place. Throughout, these stories are illuminated by expert onboard historians and authors. From the times when Jens Munk and his men in 1619 ate polar bear meat cooked inadequately and succumbed to trichinosis to the hallucinations of Sir John Ross centuries later. He turned his ship around, believing a mountain range had blocked their voyage ahead. There was no such thing. He’d experienced a fata morgana.

The most gripping tale of all is that of Sir John Franklin. A leader of modest abilities, he departed England in 1845 with two of the most well-equipped vessels to seek passage – the HMS Erebus and Terror. Britain expected. I learned from our onboard French lecturer, Cécile Manet, that after 1845, Franklin had no sight or sound, and all 129 men were never heard of again. It transpired later that both vessels were trapped by ice in 1846, close to where we sailed south of King William Island, where they eventually sank. They were rediscovered by Parks Canada in 2014 and 2016. Before going down, Franklin had died, leaving the remaining men to stagger onward for two years before submitting to slow starvation in some of the worst weather years ever recorded in the Arctic.

We make stops to piece together the physical evidence of how the Franklin mission played out. One chilly morning, we landed on the beach of Port Leopold on Somerset Island. It is the site of an old trading post with several wooden huts from 1927 constructed by fur trappers for the Hudson Bay Company. Nearby, Cécile showed us a rock carved ‘EI 1849’. It was engraved by James Clark Ross, whose ships, Enterprise and Investigator, were part of one of 39 missions dispatched to find Franklin. 

“Finally, in 1859, two letters were found on King William in a cairn written by the second-in-command, Francis Crozier, noting Franklin died in 1847 and the ships were abandoned. The survivors headed south on foot, but it was a death march,” said Cécile. The only bodies ever found are in three lonely graves on Beechey Island of crew members who had perished through sickness before the ships became icebound. On a sunny day, I walked along the island’s beach to reach the graves. Bar Shackleton’s grave in South Georgia it’s the most atmospheric place I have visited at either pole. 

Perhaps the most remarkable storytelling about Franklin’s despair can be heard from the oral history, or qaujisavinat (knowledge), of the First Nation Inuit, found in settlements along the passage.

"My ancestors tell stories of seeing kabloonas (white men) on King William Island dead in a dragged lifeboat alongside a cooking pot of human bones. It was so cold back then even my people fled because there was no food," said Louie Kamookak from Gjøa Haven during my visit there in 2017 on board Ocean Endeavour. "When I was young, Franklin's stories were our entertainment told by our elders". Louie was raised in an igloo until the age of seven.

Travellers to Nunavut will be shown ancient archaeology, such as stone hut circles of the Thule, a paleo-Eskimo culture dating back 4000 years. But the absolute joy of a Northwest Passage voyage is to stop by modern-day Inuit settlements. The Inuit are wonderfully hardy people battling with the great changes of modernity and climate change. During conversations, I've learned how challenging it is for them to hunt because of the melting ice.

There is no need at all to feel voyeuristic wandering around the settlements. They get a few visitors by ship and benefit financially from this exchange. At Gjøa Haven and Pond Inlet on Baffin Island, I've enjoyed cultural performances and throat singing and drum dancing recitals. I've been shown how women wear their oversized fur parkas, amauti, made from caribou hide. After one performance, Lamech Kadloo of Pond Inlet told me they were delighted to perform and keep their customs alive. "We were forbidden to practice drum dancing in the 1950s by Christian missionaries because they said it was shamanic," he said. 

They sell locally made handicrafts, which inject money into the community, such as bone-handled ulu and rounded blades for scraping skins. In one community, a man offered me a two-metre-long narwhal tusk (which had been legally hunted due to an agreed quota) for a few hundred dollars. Acutely aware I still hadn't seen a living narwhal, I declined because British customs would have had something to say about it. And besides, I planned another voyage in years to come to this ethereal realm to finally settle my desire to see this mystical unicorn-toothed whale.