II.

Foiled Attempts to Find the Passage

The search for the Northwest Passage began in earnest in 1576, when English navigator Sir Martin Frobisher was placed in charge of an expedition specifically to seek a sea route through the Arctic. He sailed as far north as Frobisher Bay in Baffin Island and erroneously believed the bay to be a strait between two headlands leading into the Pacific Ocean. Ten years later John Davis sailed even farther north, finding the strait later named Davis Strait.

In 1610 English explorer Henry Hudson set out on his fourth, and final, voyage in search of a northern sea route. In his new ship, the Discovery, he discovered the passage into what became known as Hudson Bay. Hoping that it would yield the long-sought Northwest Passage, Hudson explored the bay until his crew mutinied and sent him off in a small boat to die adrift in the freezing waters.

Most of the English expeditions to the area during the 17th century became bogged down in an ultimately fruitless attempt to find a passage by locating an outlet to the Pacific Ocean from the western shore of Hudson Bay. These included an expedition led by Luke Fox, who explored Foxe Channel, north of Hudson Bay, in 1631. One exception, however, was an expedition led by William Baffin and Robert Bylot in 1616. It pushed through Davis Strait and reached as far as latitude 77°45′ north, at the entrance to Smith Sound between Ellesmere Island and Greenland.

During the 1700s British expeditions were sent to the Pacific in the hope of finding a western entrance to the Northwest Passage. The third voyage of Captain James Cook (from 1776 to 1779) was specifically undertaken to discover a passage this way. The expedition headed north into uncharted territory in the Pacific Ocean and sailed along the west coast of Canada and Alaska. Twice Cook explored inlets that offered some promise of a Northwest Passage, but to no avail. Although the expedition had failed to discover a northern sea route, it added detailed charts of the North Pacific to Cook’s achievements.

In the early 19th century the British resumed the search for the long-sought Northwest Passage through the Arctic archipelago. Notable explorations included those of Sir John Ross, whose second expedition launched in 1829 was notable for discovering the location of the magnetic North Pole (which changes over time), the Boothia Peninsula, and King William Island. In 1845 the British Royal Navy mounted a lavish expedition to find the Northwest Passage under the command of Sir John Franklin. His large expedition vanished, leading to an intensive decade-long series of rescue expeditions that failed to find any sign of the expedition.