Reaching for the Beaufort by Cindy Regnier

 I’m guessing most of us have heard of the Northwest Passage, the route that takes ships back and forth between the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean via the Arctic Ocean near the northern borders of North America. But did you know, many ships and lives were lost in the attempts to find this route? The many islands and ice clogged waterways of the Arctic Archipelago made it very dangerous, especially for the early explorers looking for a route they weren’t sure even existed.

Ptolemy map

The idea of a sea passage from Europe to East Asia dates back to the second century A.D. as noted in the world maps drawn by the Greek geographer Ptolemy. Europeans developed an active interest in the sea passage after the Ottoman Empire over all the major overland trade routes between Europe and Asia in the fifteenth century.

 

This century finds the first record of explorers searching for the elusive passage, but these attempts were made so treacherous by the ice  that most expeditions were counted as failures shortly after beginning. Many tried and failed being met with thousands of giant icebergs rising up from the sea like mountains and huge masses of sea ice that could seal the waterways and trap ships unable to go forward or return. Some of the more notable explorers that searched were Henry Hudson, John Cabot and Jacques Cartier.

John Franklin

 Perhaps the greatest tragedy occurred in 1845 led by Sir John Franklin of the English navy. 128 men aboard two ships, the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror vanished without trace. Most believe the ships became ice-bound and were abandoned.

In 1850, Irish explorer Robert McClure and his crew set sail from England in search of Franklin’s lost expedition. McClure was able to confirm the existence of a route, though they did abandon the ship at one point and crossed the ice by sled. More than fifty years later Roald Amundsen would make the entire passage by sea, the first time in recorded history. After a three-year expedition, Amundsen and his crew, aboard a small fishing ship called Gjoa, emerged in the Beaufort Sea on Alaska’s Pacific coast in 1906.

Roald Amundsen

Even after the route was charted and established, it was rarely used as the passage was only open about one month of every year due to the ice cover. In other words, if you sailed this route, you remained on the other side for a year until you could make it back. It wasn’t until the summer of 2007 that the route was found to be entirely ice-free for the first time in history

As an item of note, a Canadian diving expedition found the wreckage of the HMS Erebus in 2014 off of King William Island. The wreckage of the HMS Terror was discovered slightly north, in Terror Bay, two years later.

Beaufort Sea off Alaska

So there you have it. Many brave explorers gave their lives to find the Northwest Passage that is now an important shipping route. Would you have been brave enough to set out on such a dangerous mission? I know I wouldn’t have.

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Fleeing her former employer who would use her to further his unlawful acts, an advertisement reads like the perfect refuge to Carly. Hiding herself on a Kansas cattle ranch is her best shot for freedom.
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