II.

First Transit of the Northwest Passage

After returning to Norway, Amundsen purchased a small sloop, the Gjöa, and set out with a crew of seven in June 1903 to the Arctic. His primary goal was to find the Northwest Passage, a northern sea route linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Amundsen sailed up the west coast of Greenland, via Baffin Bay and Lancaster Sound, and through the many small islands of the Canadian Arctic to King William Island. There he spent two winters calculating the exact position of the north magnetic pole, which changes over time and had moved since James Clark Ross first located it in 1831. He also discovered some of the remains of an 1845 expedition led by Sir John Franklin. It was the first discovery of any remnant of the expedition, which had seemingly vanished, and finally showed that Franklin and his men had perished after their ships became stuck in the ice.

By the summer of 1905 Amundsen had reached the mouth of the Mackenzie River, near the border between Canada and Alaska. When the Gjöa became ice-bound, he traveled 800 km (500 mi) overland to the telegraph at Fort Eagle, Alaska, to announce the first successful voyage through the Northwest Passage in a single vessel. He returned to his vessel, and reached San Francisco in October 1906, where he presented the Gjöa to the city. The achievement, which had eluded explorers for centuries, made Amundsen a world-famous explorer.