Journey Through Ice and Water

THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE, the trade route through the Canadian Arctic that connects the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, has been the subject of myth and nightmare for European sea explorers since 1497, when Giovanni Caboto—the flamboyant Venetian-English navigator and explorer who is today known as John Cabot—was sent off by Henry VII to find it. Part of the mystery of the passage is whether or not Cabot actually succeeded (and why, if he did, he thought he had landed in—of all places—China).

But attempts were made even before Cabot to cut through this channel of icebergs—in 985-6 CE. Norse explorer Bjarni Herjólfsson, chasing to catch up with the flotilla of Eirikr Thorvaldsson (Erik the Red), who wanted to colonise Greenland, was blown off course, coasted to southern Greenland, tacked east, and kept going until he spotted what was the east coast of North America. Not recognising the changing land terrain—wooded and hilly to mountainous and snowy—and being a trader, not a salty adventurer or an outlaw (like Erik the Red at that time), he turned back. The Norse were superstitious seafarers: Herjólfsson’s lucky boat was bought, 15 years later, by Erik the Red’s son, Leifr Eiríksson (Leif Ericson), who sallied forth with a crew of 35 and ended up founding, in 1,000 CE, what is known today as L’Anse aux Meadows (from the French L’Anse-aux-Méduses, or ‘Jellyfish Cove’) in Newfoundland. This is the only instance of Pre-Columbian transoceanic contact with the Americas that scholars accept as incontrovertible.

But this pre-Columbian exploration was, basically, Viking adventurism, celebrated not so much in cartography but in sagas. The first definitive, marked route was covered by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen in 1903-06, who hired six sailors, struck out on a 21-metre-long, 47-tonne, shallow-keel sloop to escape baying creditors, anchored near Herschel Island off the coast of the Canadian Yukon—and then skied 800 km to the settlement of Eagle, Alaska, to send off a triumphal telegram. And then skied 800-km back to his ship.

In those years, it was possible to ski straight through unbroken Arctic land. Today, you can’t. Global warming changed everything: in 2007, the European Space Agency took readings from its satellites and declared that Arctic shrinkage had made the Northwest Passage “fully navigable”. But it’s still not an easy journey, nor commercially viable: although, in August 2012, the giant, 43,500-tonne residential cruise ship, The World, became the largest passenger vessel to transit the Northwest Passage, following Amundsen’s trail, the Arctic Marine Transport Workshop (2004) concluded that it wouldn’t be an alternative to the Panama Canal for the “next 10 to 20 years”.

So, transiting the Northwest Passage remains a sea adventurers’ prerogative. This photo essay documents part of a voyage made this year through the Northwest Passage, the first time it has been accomplished by an Italian boat—Best Explorer, skippered by the Ligurian Nanni Acquarone, who has just published his book, Best Explorer—Dal Mar Ligure al Mare Glaciale Artico (Best Explorer—From the Ligurian Sea to the Arctic Ocean). Acquarone and his team began planning this project in 2010. After 15 days of navigation from the tiny island of Upernavik in northwestern Greenland—near the 73rd parallel north, 900 km inside the Arctic Circle—to Pond Inlet (or Mittimatalik in Inuit) in Nunavut territory, via Baffin Bay and Davis Strait, Best Explorer became the first ship to cross the passage this year.