Part 2: Gory, Glorious, Uproarious—Early Europeans and the Search for the Northwest Passage

For Europeans, the “discovery” of the Americas was, in some ways, a bummer. It revealed a continent-sized impediment between the Old World and Asia. Almost immediately, sailors sought a way around, including by venturing north and west. Some returned from these forays boasting geographical achievements—but never a passage. Just five years after Columbus landed at Hispañola, John Cabot failed to find a way west through what is now Atlantic Canada. Jacques Cartier was similarly rebuffed, as was Sir Humphrey Gilbert.

Then, in 1576, Martin Frobisher tried. Reaching Cathay, he proclaimed, was “the only thing left undone whereby a notable mind might be made famous and remarkable.” Instead, in a polar cul-de-sac now called Frobisher Bay, he found what was purported to be gold. Returning there for two subsequent summers, he oversaw the first attempt at English settlement in the New World, the first mining stock scam, and the first skirmish with Inuit, who shot him in the buttocks with an arrow.

Other explorers, even less fortunate than Frobisher, came to grief in the unmapped Arctic. In 1610-11, Henry Hudson and his crew were the first whites to overwinter in Canada’s North, in what is now Hudson Bay. They didn’t like it, and infamously cast Hudson and his son adrift, never to be seen again. Then, in 1619, Jens Munk set out with sixty-five men. They too wintered in Hudson Bay. Come spring, just three were alive. Somehow, they limped their ship back home.

And exactly a century later, trader James Knight went seeking the passage, accompanied by forty men. Years later, beside Marble Island near today’s community of Rankin Inlet, Nunavut, Knight’s vessels were found grounded in shallow water. Ashore were cannons, bricks, coal, and a grim tale. Inuit reported having encountered stranded qallunaat (white people). They spent two winters peering south, praying for rescue. The last one died while digging a grave for his friend.

Meanwhile, a few of the explorers who sought the Northwest Passage achieved something like glory. In the 1580s John Davis mapped Davis Strait; then William Bylot circumnavigated Baffin Bay. By the 1630s, Thomas Button, Thomas James, and Luke Foxe had thoroughly charted Hudson Bay, determining there was no passage south of the Arctic Circle. In 1771, Samuel Hearne, guided overland by Dene, descended the Coppermine River and encountered an icy ocean. Alexander Mackenzie confirmed the same at the mouth of the Mackenzie.

So, by the dawn on the 1800s, two things were clear. First, there were indeed saltwater channels atop Canada, perhaps even linking the Atlantic to the Pacific. Second, they were terribly remote, desperately cold, and almost always frozen. Navigating them would be a heroic feat.