In 1906 Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen successfully sailed through the Northwest Passage, a sea route that runs along the northern coast of North America and connects the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The difficulty of navigation severely limited the commercial uses of the route. The discovery of oil in early 1968 in Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay renewed interest in the passage, and in 1969 a United States ice-breaking oil tanker, the Manhattan, became the first large vessel to negotiate it. In this August 1990 article from National Geographic, ethnographer and explorer John Bockstoce describes how growth in the oil industry and other economic ventures has affected communities and natural settings along the Northwest Passage.

Changing Images of the Northwest Passage

By John Bockstoce

The crunch of ice along our steel hull snapped me awake. At the same moment crew member Craig George stuck his head through the cabin door.

'John, you'd better come topside,' he said. 'There's something weird on the radarscope—something really big, and it's dead ahead.'

Groggily I pulled on my clothes and joined Craig and my old friend Sven Johansson, a veteran Arctic sailor, in the pilothouse of our 60-foot research vessel Belvedere. We were picking our way through heavy drift ice in the Beaufort Sea north of Alaska. For hours I had stood lookout at the masthead, but then fog set in and I went below to sleep.

Sven sat hunched over the radar set, his bearded face washed sickly green by light from the scope. The blip on the scope indicated an enormous object, seemingly the size of an aircraft carrier.

'A huge piece of drift ice?' I suggested.

'I don't think so, John,' Sven answered. 'The water's too shallow here. A piece that big would have grounded farther offshore in deep water, and so would a ship of any size.'

I glanced at the chart on the navigation table. It only confirmed what I knew from sailing these waters years earlier: There was nothing here but empty sea.

Donning parkas, Craig and I made our way to the bow as Sven throttled back the engine. In the Arctic silence we could hear the ripple of water along the hull and somewhere to the north the great whooshing blast of a bowhead whale lazily blowing. Then from ahead came the faint clatter of machinery; the fog parted, and the 'thing' materialized.

It was a man-made oil-drilling island, a great lens-shaped mass of gravel dredged from the floor of the Beaufort Sea and crowned with a maze of tanks, buildings, machinery, piping, and the soaring drill rig itself. The entire scene was bathed in the eerie yellow glow of sodium-vapor lamps and punctuated here and there by the cold blue flicker of arc welders.

Craig shook his head and gave me a thin smile: 'So much for the latest charts of the Northwest Passage.'

The incident occurred several years ago, and our charts were as up-to-date as any that could be found. Yet here was an immense new feature of the historic Arctic waterway that probably had not been there the season before.

In the months and years that followed as I traversed the Northwest Passage, I came to accept such surprises as commonplace. All along its rugged course the legendary polar route between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans is undergoing profound and wrenching change.

Not only oil drilling but also mining, gas exploration, strategic military operations, tourism, shipping, and other industries are steadily invading the Arctic. The effect on native populations has been a confusing mix of benefits and drawbacks, including increased income and in many cases the drastic alteration of age-old cultures.

Meanwhile, disputes have arisen between Canada and the United States over national sovereignty in the Arctic, jurisdiction over military airspace, and free navigation through the Northwest Passage.

Following Columbus’s discovery of the New World in 1492, others soon realized that he had not reached the fabled Indies after all but had simply found a new continent. Almost at once the search was on for a way around it.

Charts of the passage feature the names of those who tried to find or to traverse the elusive waterway: Frobisher, Davis, Hudson, Baffin, Foxe, Parry—and the tragic name of Franklin.

In 1845 Sir John Franklin left England with two ships, Erebus and Terror, to find and claim the Northwest Passage for Britain. The expedition vanished in the Arctic. Over the ensuing years a number of rescue parties explored and mapped previously unknown regions until a complete map of the Arctic could at last be drawn. Though the ships were never found, the searchers confirmed that Franklin and his 128 men had all perished. As one 19th-century chronicler wrote, 'They forged the last link with their lives.'

In fact, the last link was put in place by a Norwegian, Roald Amundsen, who later became the first man to reach the South Pole. Between 1903 and 1906 Amundsen and a crew of six threaded the Northwest Passage from east to west in a 70-foot herring sloop named Gjöa, proving that a navigable northern route existed between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

Nearly four decades later, in 1942, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police sergeant named Henry Larsen and his crew completed the first west-to-east transit of the Northwest Passage in a 104-foot schooner, St. Roch. Two years later Larsen reversed course and became the first ever to traverse the passage in both directions.

My own traverse took six summers to complete, for as always in the Arctic everything depended on ice conditions. Besides, I was in no hurry. I had last sailed these waters in the 1970s by umiak, an Inuit open boat made of wood and walrus skin. On both these transits I took the southern route through the passage rather than the northern one.

During our initial season in 1983 we sailed Belvedere some 4,000 miles, from Seattle north through the Bering and Chukchi Seas, around Alaska's Point Barrow, and into the Beaufort Sea, where we had our encounter with the oil-drilling island. Soon afterward we brought Belvedere ashore for the winter at the Inuit village of Tuktoyaktuk, just east of the Mackenzie River Delta.

The following July my wife, Romayne, and eight-year-old son, Johnny, joined us at Tuktoyaktuk, known to Arctic hands simply as 'Tuk.' From there our first stop was Herschel Island, the major wintering-over site in the western Arctic for the 19th-century American whaling fleet. It is a place rich in history. During its heyday in the 1890s Herschel Island played host to as many as 15 ships and a thousand people at a time.

As a specialist on the Arctic whaling industry I had visited Herschel many times. It was a ghost settlement of empty shacks, rusting machinery, and lonely whalemen's graves interspersed with fields of wildflowers. Only the occasional cries of seabirds disturbed the silence.

But no longer. Well before we reached Herschel, our ship's radio began to crackle with an incessant barrage of voice traffic, all of it to do with oil—not whale oil but petroleum. When we arrived, we found the waters just outside the small harbor jammed with a fleet of dredges, barges, supply ships, and launches. Oil-company helicopters buzzed overhead like giant mosquitoes.

After several days spent completing a survey of old whaling sites, we left. For the first time I was glad to bid the island good-bye. 'Never mind,' said Romayne. 'The place probably wasn't any quieter when those 19th-century whaling ships were jostling around the harbor!'

On our way eastward from Herschel Island we stopped at King Point on the mainland coast. It was here that Amundsen and his men spent the winter of 1905-06 and here that a member of the crew, Gustav Wiik, died of an unknown disease.

Carrying a camera and a shotgun, Johnny and I took the ship's dinghy ashore. Johnny quickly spied a trail of fresh grizzly bear paw prints in the sand, and we followed them to the foot of a bluff a few yards from the beach. We clambered over a huge jumble of driftwood logs and scaled the bluff, which was eroding badly.

Johnny reached the top first, and I was entertaining uneasy thoughts about grizzlies when Johnny suddenly let out a whoop. I very nearly jumped out of my skin, but when I reached Johnny, he was merely holding a weathered board he had found at the edge of the bluff. The surface had been deeply inscribed with the name 'Gustav Wiik.'

Wiik's grave had eroded away with the bluff, and all that remained was the wooden marker. We moved the board 30 yards inland. Then after a bit more exploring, we returned to the ship. To my relief, though not to Johnny's, we never saw the grizzly.

The ice that had grudgingly let us pass in the summer of 1983 suddenly turned against us in 1984, blocking our way to the east. There was nothing to do but come ashore at Tuk and put Belvedere up for the winter.

Though Belvedere was immobilized, I was not, and I spent part of the following winter interviewing those who have helped bring major changes to the Northwest Passage. One of these is Vice Adm. George P. Steele, USN (Ret.), who as a young submariner in 1960 commanded the U.S.S. Seadragon on the historic first submerged transit of the passage. Like us, George Steele had had his problems with ice.

'We were entering Canada's Barrow Strait,' he recalled at his home in Baltimore, Maryland. 'In those days charts of the passage were quite inaccurate—some were actually based on exploration in the early 1800s.

'Just inside the strait our sonar picked up an uncharted shoal, and I admit I had some bad moments. We were in danger of being hemmed in by the pack ice above and the floor of the strait below, and I wasn't sure what lay on either side of us. If we got wedged between the ice and the sea bottom, we would probably become a permanent fixture in the Arctic.

'My stomach was in knots,' he continued, 'but as skipper I couldn't show it. For what seemed like an eternity we slowly followed the bottom contours, trying to maintain a ten-foot distance. Then to our relief the bottom began to recede.

'During less harrowing moments of our voyage I was fascinated by the view of the underside of the pack ice through the periscope. It was a wild, upside-down jumble of massive ice slabs, shaded in varying tones of blue and white—the most incredible scene I can ever recall.'

Fortunately, Seadragon found its way through Barrow Strait, then proceeded through the passage, and eventually returned home via the Pole and Bering Strait. Two years earlier another U. S. submarine, U.S.S. Nautilus, had made history by completing the first undersea traverse of the North Pole. The following year U.S.S. Skate was first to surface there through the ice. Such voyages helped transform the polar seas into a vast strategic amphitheater and ushered in an era of clandestine cat-and-mouse games beneath the ice that continues to this day.

Above the surface as well as beneath it the Northwest Passage has played a crucial role in the Arctic standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union. In the 1950s, when Soviet bombers developed the capability of striking American targets via polar routes, the United States and Canada built the Distant Early Warning (DEW) line—a chain of radar monitoring sites stretching from Alaska to Greenland. Most of the stations were built along the passage so that supply ships could reach them during ice-free periods or with the help of icebreakers.

Still, by 1968 only ten vessels of any type had ever managed to traverse the Northwest Passage. In that year a momentous, some say catastrophic, event occurred: Oil was discovered at Prudhoe Bay on Alaska's north coast. Overnight the passage took on vital significance as a possible route by which the world could tap Prudhoe Bay's estimated 11 billion barrels of oil reserves. Capt. Donald Graham helped prove the idea would work.

I called on him at his home in Falmouth, Massachusetts, where he is now retired after a lifelong career at sea in the U. S. merchant marine. He was one of three captains chosen to command Manhattan, the celebrated icebreaking tanker that made a round-trip between the Atlantic and Point Barrow in 1969.

'She was a real hybrid,' Captain Graham said of the ship. 'Humble Oil [now Exxon Corporation] chartered her, and she was the largest ship in the U. S. merchant fleet, with a length of 940 feet. But her hull had to be reinforced to withstand pack ice in the Northwest Passage, and she needed an icebreaking bow as well. To speed the job up, they cut her into four separate sections. Then they put her back together and launched her a second time. She had gained 65 feet in length, displaced 150,000 tons, and had a loaded draft of more than 52 feet.'

Despite all the remodeling Manhattan was accompanied by U. S. and Canadian icebreakers. Even so, when she reached M'Clure Strait in the western part of the passage, she could go no farther.

'We came up against that great river of old polar ice that flows down into M'Clure Strait from the Arctic Ocean,' he recounted. 'As an experienced sailor in the passage yourself, you know what that's like: pack ice between 6 and 14 feet thick, jammed solid under pressure from wind and current both. And there we were—150,000 tons of ship, with the turbines cranking out 43,000 horsepower, and we couldn't move an inch. It took us two days just to get back out of M'Clure Strait.'

Manhattan took an alternate route through neighboring Prince of Wales Strait and finally reached Point Barrow. The round-trip voyage was successful, but the idea of shipping Prudhoe oil through the Northwest Passage was abandoned in favor of a trans-Alaska pipeline.

Yet even with the pipeline, the oil still had to be shipped out of Valdez, a port in southern Alaska. Two decades after Manhattan made her historic voyage, the giant tanker Exxon Valdez made an even more memorable one: Twenty-eight miles southwest of Valdez the tanker struck a reef and spewed 11 million gallons of crude oil into the pristine waters of Prince William Sound.

I thought of Manhattan many times during the brief summer season of 1985. The pack ice east of Tuktoyaktuk was so bad that we made only about 60 miles north along the coast before we finally gave up and sailed back to Tuk.

The summer of 1986 was only slightly better, and I decided to detour north toward Manhattan's old route through Prince of Wales Strait. For our pains we were hit by a 40-knot gale soon after we left Tuk.

We resorted to an old Arctic mariner's trick when there are no harbors around for refuge: We made for some nearby pack ice and secured the ship to the lee side of one of the larger floes. It was a curious sensation to be afloat in relatively placid water while the gale above ripped our masthead flags to shreds. Yet at the edge of the floe the wind was so calm that we stepped ashore and enjoyed a rather slippery game of Frisbee.

After the gale died, we continued north and entered Prince of Wales Strait. Along the shores on either side we spotted herds of musk-oxen grazing in valleys carpeted by the lush green of the brief Arctic summer. We went ashore at Jesse Harbour on Banks Island. As our dinghy scraped the gravel beach, one of the herds of musk-oxen bolted, long hair streaming behind and the muffled thunder of their hoofs echoing among the rocks. To seaward an occasional seal's head popped up through the calm waters, spreading rings of perfectly concentric ripples.

Our luck soon ran out again, for halfway through Prince of Wales Strait a solid wall of pack ice barred the way. We turned back, going ashore briefly on Victoria Island's Walker Bay.

In 1940-41 Henry Larsen and the crew of St. Roch wintered over in this beautiful, secure harbor ringed by limestone bluffs. We found a beehive-shaped cairn they had built to mark the spot. After a while we returned aboard Belvedere, set a course for the southwest, and sailed once more in frustration back to Tuk.

For years Canada and the United States have disagreed about sovereignty over the Northwest Passage. Canada maintains that much of it consists of internal waterways subject to exclusive Canadian control. The U. S. recognizes Canadian sovereignty over the islands bordering the passage but insists that the passage itself is an international waterway open to ships of all nations.

Charges and countercharges have been leveled from both sides. Canadians accuse Americans of suffering from a 'Mercator mind-set,' referring to the old-fashioned Mercator map projection that greatly enlarges the polar regions and distorts the width of Arctic waterways.

'Mercator maps make the passage look very wide and very international,' agrees Leonard Legault, the bluff and friendly number two man at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D. C. 'In fact,' he told me cheerfully, 'the National Geographic Society has done us a real favor by publishing its new Robinson projection map of the world. It puts Canada and the Northwest Passage into a smaller scale that more accurately depicts the region.'

Canada and the United States finally agreed to disagree. Although both countries hold to their separate views of the Northwest Passage, U. S. merchant ships adhere strictly to Canadian regulations there. U. S. warships, meanwhile, are covered by bilateral defense agreements and NATO treaties allowing free passage, and icebreakers come under still another agreement. Before a U. S. icebreaker enters the Northwest Passage, the U. S. formally requests Canada's consent. It is promptly given, and both sides seem happy with the arrangement.

Prompted by Manhattan's voyage, Canada took a major political and environmental step in 1970 by passing the Arctic Waters Pollution Prevention Act. The law extended Canada's territorial waters from 3 to 12 miles and established a pollution-prevention zone. The law also set standards for the types of vessels allowed into Arctic waters and requires progressively stronger hulls for areas of increasingly heavy ice conditions.

Ice isn't the only hazard that ships face while under way. Several summers ago I joined Capt. Patrick Toomey aboard Pierre Radisson, one of the Canadian Coast Guard's most modern icebreakers. The ship was working out of Resolute in Canada's Arctic islands, escorting supply vessels to and from weather stations and other sites along the Northwest Passage.

Captain Toomey invited me to the bridge of Pierre Radisson during the run across Barrow Strait. As we crunched our way effortlessly through the closely packed ice floes, he told me a bit about escort duty.

'Of course, the heavier the ice,' he said, 'the closer you have to keep the ships behind you.' He swept a hand in front of us. 'This kind of stuff is nothing, but when you get into dense, thick ice that's several years old and you hit a big piece, it gets violent—feels like you've run aground at high speed.

'Then you have to look behind as well as ahead, because the real danger's that the ship astern won't be able to stop in time and will ram you.' He smiled grimly. 'In this business you look over your shoulder a lot.'

Not everyone along the passage welcomes the presence of icebreakers. I talked one day with an old friend, George Porter, an esteemed Inuit leader of the community of Gjoa Haven on King William Island in the central part of the passage. The village takes its name from Amundsen's sloop, which anchored there from 1903 to 1905.

George Porter's grandfather was a Yankee whaling captain who wintered many times at Herschel Island, and his father was both a fur trader and an Arctic seaman. I told George of my experience aboard Pierre Radisson, and his face turned grave.

'You know, John,' he said, 'for Inuit people the land and the water are the same thing—here the sea is frozen over most of the year. So to us, driving a ship through the ice is like driving a bulldozer across a field with the blade down.

'A few years ago,' he added, 'a group of hunters from Arctic Bay to the north of here were out on the ice miles from home hunting seals. Without knowing they were there, a Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker cut a lane between them and the village. They were stranded for several days until the ice closed up again. If it hadn't, those men could have died.'

What many native peoples fear most along the Northwest Passage today is the growing level of pollution. To them an oil spill such as the one caused by Exxon Valdez is not just an environmental disaster but a threat to life itself. Although oil has brought increased income and other material benefits, some like Luke Koonook consider the cost to be dangerously high.

A respected Eskimo leader in his village of Point Hope, Alaska, near the western entrance of the Northwest Passage, Luke is captain of an eight-man whaling crew that hunts bowhead whales each spring, when the great creatures come north to feed in the eastern Beaufort Sea.

Point Hope has 19 such crews, and they put to sea in sealskin boats with hunting gear little changed from that of the old Yankee whalers. The tradition of the bowhead hunt goes back a thousand years and forms a vital part of Point Hope's Eskimo culture.

For ten years I was a member of Luke Koonook's crew, and I visited him recently one spring during the hunt to see how things were going. I found him at the edge of the ice at his lookout station with his boat and crew nearby ready to launch at the sight of a bowhead. Several other boats were at sea pursuing whales already sighted. Luke greeted me with a grim question.

'John, what do you know about the tanker that's supposed to bring oil past here from Herschel Island?' I said I had seen the ship at Herschel, all 90,000 tons of it, and that I had heard the plan was going through. Luke shook his head.

'Those people just don't understand the ice the way we do, what it can do to any ship.' He swept a hand seaward at the half dozen boats and crews amid the ice. 'Just one accident and all this might go—and our way of life will go with it.'

Farther north at villages such as Wainwright and Barrow, whalers say much the same thing, adding that the noise and vibration of offshore drilling and dredging have already scared away some of the bowheads.

Canada and the world at large have begun to listen to people like Luke Koonook and George Porter. The threat of pollution has been a significant factor in the five Inuit Circumpolar Conferences—pan-Arctic gatherings first held in 1977 to discuss the future of Arctic peoples. Meanwhile, Canada has established regional planning groups with increasing local control over the use of land and other natural resources.

Here the Canadians had as a precedent the U. S. government's historic Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, which gave Alaskans with at least one Native American grandparent partial rights to the oil-rich lands of the North Slope. Oil revenues make the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation one of the richest land-rights associations in the world today.

Two local Canadian Inuit land-use planning groups along the Northwest Passage have a major voice in development or exploitation of natural resources. One group, based in Lancaster Sound, oversees the eastern area of the passage, and the Beaufort Sea group controls the western area. No major step affecting the environment can be taken without one or the other group's approval.

None of these developments have come too soon. To date 240 oil wells have been drilled in Canada's Beaufort Sea and Mackenzie River Delta area alone. In Alaska's part of the Beaufort Sea, an artificial island known as the Mukluk Well reportedly cost more than a billion dollars to drill and came up a dry hole. Meanwhile oil companies have begun eyeing the Chukchi Sea, off Luke's village of Point Hope, and Lancaster Sound, in the eastern part of the passage, as likely spots for exploration. More ominous still, they hope to explore Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for possible oil reserves.

The summer of 1987 turned out better than the previous three, but not quite good enough to get Belvedere through the Northwest Passage. We sailed more than a thousand miles to the east of Tuk, past Gjoa Haven, before pack ice in nearby James Ross Strait barred the way. We returned once more to Tuk, which I gloomily began to regard as Belvedere's permanent home port, and hoped for better luck the following year.

We got it at last. The summer of 1988 proved to be the warmest in five straight years in the western Arctic. Breakup came early, and we left Tuk with high hopes of reaching our final destination, the northwest coast of Greenland, before the ice did.

The weather held as we threaded Amundsen Gulf, Dolphin and Union Strait, Queen Maud Gulf, and our nemesis of the year before, James Ross Strait. En route we anchored in Simpson Strait off King William Island, where many of Franklin's men died in the vain effort to walk south out of the Arctic to safety.

We went ashore to visit a group of cairns built in memory of Franklin's men by those who had searched for them. And when we left that sad and lonely spot, we flew our ensign in their honor, as Roald Amundsen had done 83 years before.

On August 25 we reached Bellot Strait, considered the fulcrum of the Northwest Passage, for it is here that the tides of the western Arctic meet those of the east. Some years earlier, during my umiak voyage, a fur-trader friend at Spence Bay, Ernie Lyall, had urged caution going through Bellot Strait.

'If there's ice around,' Ernie warned, 'the current can send the floes through the strait like bowling balls, and conditions can change fast.'

Fortunately there was little ice in the strait on either occasion, and we ran it this time at slack tide without incident. As we left Bellot Strait behind and steered north for Lancaster Sound, little gray fulmars swooped around Belvedere, and we could see bowhead whales spouting ahead of us. They seemed a fitting welcome to the eastern Arctic.

The next day we entered Lancaster Sound, and a week later, after running down Baffin Bay, we reached Davis Strait, the end of the passage. Soon afterward we reached Greenland and the close of Belvedere's odyssey.

It had taken us six summers to traverse the passage, and Belvedere was the first yacht ever to make the west-to-east transit. Even today no more than 50 vessels of any kind have traversed the waterway in either direction, and it can hardly be called a practical commercial route—yet.

I hope it never will be. The pace of change in the Arctic is already dizzying enough for residents and outsiders alike. A great maritime highway through that vast and haunting realm of land, sea, and shifting ice would forever change the character of the Northwest Passage and those who live along it.

The world would be the poorer.

Source: Bockstoce, John. “Changing Images of the Northwest Passage.” National Geographic, August 1990.

Appears in

Canada; Franklin, Sir John; Arctic; Amundsen, Roald; Northwest Passage; Polar Exploration