Quest for the Northwest Passage Transcript

Kate Jaimet: Welcome to Canada’s History’s Stories Behind the History podcast. I’m Kate Jaimet, Senior Editor of Canada’s History magazine and in this podcast, we take a deeper look at some of the stories in our award-winning print publication. 

In our June-July 2022 issue, Ken McGoogan writes about the Danish explorer Jens Munk and his disastrous 1619 expedition in search of the Northwest Passage. But what is the Northwest Passage and why were so many European sailors willing to risk their lives to find it. 

Ken McGoogan is the author of fifteen books including five bestsellers about Arctic exploration and has won numerous awards for his work. He joins me today to discuss the bold and gruesome history of the search for the Northwest Passage. Ken, welcome to the podcast!

Ken McGoogan: Bold and gruesome, we gotta love it. Thanks!

Kate: I have to admit that I am morbidly fascinated by these stories of these explorers who meet a grisly death while searching for the Northwest Passage. So I’m so glad that you can join us and talk to us about it. What is the Northwest Passage and maybe you could explain how it sort of existed in people’s imaginations before they actually knew if it actually existed in reality or not.

1:26

Ken: Absolutely! Well, the passage is indeed a concept. It’s an idea — the idea is getting from Europe over to Cathay which embodies India and China and it was driven by profit-seeking merchants mainly in Britain initially who faced a particular challenge in the seventeenth century and the late sixteenth. 

The Portuguese and the Spanish controlled the trade routes to China and India and they were coming home with all these wonderful goods and the merchants in Britain scratched their heads and said, “Gee, you know, it’d be awful good to get in on this action and then how do we go to do it? Well you know if we’re here and, you know, Cathay is just over there. Why don’t we just you know find a way through you know I call it the straits of aeon or the Northwest Passage. You know, get from here to there. How difficult can that be?” So that’s how the idea was born. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

02:44

Kate: And this passage would be over the top of what we now call Canada, right? That was sort of the idea of like to go north over the top of that continent that was kind of blocking their way.

Ken: Exactly. They had no idea even that it was a continent. They just knew: we’re here, they are there. It’s not a continent; it’s just a little bit of land, you know, or maybe should be sea all the way open sailing. Let’s do it.”

3:00

Kate: Okay, so they wanted to go to China and India via the West rather than going around the Horn of Africa which is where the Portuguese were going, right?

Ken: Yeah, there were all kinds of Portuguese and Spanish pirates out there plundering the ship. So that wasn’t really viable. How were they going to do this? It’s very much a European idea — the Northwest Passage.

Kate: Okay, and so tell me about how they then first started out trying to find this thing and who were some of the very earliest people who tried this and what happened to them.

03: 45

Ken: The most prominent early one would be Martin Frobisher in the late 1500s and he actually went three times. (They) were looking for gold or he thought he found gold. He piled his ships high with these black rocks that seemed to have all kinds of gold in them and of course, it ended up being fool’s gold which was kind of unfortunate. Yes, from his point of view, it’s not easy sailing in these tiny little wooden ships in some of the heaviest seas in the world. Not as bad as down in the Drake Passage and so forth, but it can be pretty bad up north there and crossing Davis Straight. 

He was early on, but then came in 1610 another figure who was well known — that’s Henry Hudson, But these guys had a certain mindset. Hudson was known for example, well when they were swashbucklers they were daring individuals. Hudson was known to take his orders and head out and see if the orders were working and “well, it wasn’t working, I’m going to go my own way. I’m going to go decide what I’m going to do.” I kind of enjoy these guys in that respect. So Hudson takes a few voyages around and then he manages to cross Davis Strait, and enter in through Hudson Strait which had been known but no one had gone into Hudson Bay. You’re heading west is where you do, “Oh Hudson Bay, whoa this is a big place” and at this point, you have no idea. Yeah, you know you can’t see the other side so you’re sailing along and well, winter comes on — that’s always a bit of a problem as you probably know, the northern Canadian winter. I grew up in Montreal myself so I know a bit about winter. But winter up north can be still more dreadful.

So Hudson’s with this man, I think he’s got 20, 21 or 22 men, small little ship and made of wood, right? And by the time you get down in the southern reaches of Hudson Bay, down in James Bay and so forth. Okay, winter is coming on and you’re getting frozen in the ice. That’s okay, we can get through this and they do manage to get through that first winter but it is bitter. And when spring starts to come, the guys are saying, "Okay we’ve had just about enough of this. Ah, let’s head for home."  And Hudson is saying, "Oh no, no now wait a minute, guys. We’re not going to quit. We’re gonna keep looking for this passage through the other side here. This is how it’s going to be." He sets up a chart and he shows them: here’s what it looks like.  And they are not convinced, to say the least. Don’t forget, you’re also shut up on this tiny little ship so there are personality conflicts arising by now. Anyway comes a day, a couple of guys lead a mutiny and Hudson has two boys, two young men with him, including one his son. 

Anyway, the mutineers put Hudson and 8 people into this little boat, basically a big rowboat, and say, “Okay guys,” not give them any food or anything, “Okay, guys. We’ve had about enough of you so we’ll see you later.” So then there’s the incredible image certainly fixed in my mind of Hudson and these guys desperately rowing after the ship as it sails away. The ship just raises its sails and goes back to England and makes it back there. They tell a story of course; they could be charged with mutiny and hung, but a couple of these guys now realize, like Robert Violet, he’s a pretty good navigator, if these guys have already been overlooking for the Northwest Passage, they have a pretty good idea. So we’ll just charge them with murder and acquit them and then they can go back out on another voyage. So that’s the kind of thing that went on.

Kate: So these mutineers actually got acquitted because the merchants or whoever figured they were too valuable to lose? Wow.

Ken: Yeah, that’s basically it. Well I mean it’s all interpretation, right? But low and behold, the guys are back on the ship a year or two later, so figure it out, right?

Kate: So, Hudson, he dies, right? I mean, he perishes.

Ken: Yeah, he disappears. The bodies have never been found. It’s a fascinating story but certainly Hudson was never heard from again alive, that’s for sure. 

Kate: They had reached the Pacific Ocean initially when they went into Hudson Bay. Did they think, “Hey, this is it. This is great”?

Ken: Well, they wondered. Then I think they began to get the idea because they did do some exploring down in James Bay so there was a coastline trending north. So maybe not but surely there’s a way through is what they were is what they were thinking. That led then directly to the Jens Munk expedition a few years later. Munk is thinking, “well why should these British navigators, get all the glory” and he’s a veteran navigator as well, and he’s got something on that same mindset of “he’ll take the hindmost," I’m going for the Northwest Passage. We already know that if you go through here, all you have to do then is find the way out on the other side. So, that’s what they thought they were doing.

Kate: So they knew how to get into Hudson Bay. Now the question is how do you get out of Hudson Bay to the riches of China and India, right? That was in their mind? 

Ken: Exactly. Exactly. That is what they thought they were doing.

Kate: So I know we have your whole article about Jens Munk. But Jens’s expedition does not end well either.

Ken: No, it doesn’t. He gets across Hudson’s Bay and he goes into what is now the Churchill River; it’s not what he called it but that’s what we call it now. The Churchill River, he manages to go in there and ends up spending a winter there. By that time, I think he lands with sixty-four men including himself and sixty-one died. Incredibly he and two others, they’d arrived with two ships. He and two others managed to make it back to Denmark — an extraordinary feat. Really three guys making it all the way back across the Hudson Bay area through Hudson Strait, across Davis Strait back to Europe — extraordinary navigator Jens Munk. It was a complete and utter wipeout. The worst disaster certainly up until that time.

Kate: So okay, I’m now a merchant in Europe and I’ve seen what has happened to Henry Hudson; he gets marooned and dies. His crew comes back and says, “This man was crazy. He wanted to keep going west. No way in hell.” Jens Munk goes; 61 out of 64 people die. 

Why then did these merchants and kings and queens not just give up and say look, “We’ll risk the pirates around the horn of Africa because this is just doom. We’re just sending people into the ice to die.” What was it that kept people going?

12:28

Ken: I think there’s something in humankind, why? Why are we sending people up to the moon and to circle the moon and we’re heading for Mars? It’s out there; we can maybe do it and individually, the guys who do it, and it’s all guys at this point, going to be fantastic. I mean “I’m going to be immortal. I’m going to be in history if I can just find this passage in sail on though I mean it’s fantastic.” So the merchants are backing me for their usual monetary reasons and they’re finding adventurers because there’s always plenty of those but a few of those who are very highly competent outdoors and upright, challenge like we’re going to climb Everest. It’s the same idea. Why did we start climbing Everest? Why are we going around climbing all these mountains? If you look at it logically, it’s maybe hard to explain. And until you accept this drive in humankind to go and to see and to search out and “I’m going to be the guy who’s going to do it.” So that kind of thing —  psychology. It’s going to take someone with a psychological background than me to explain it all.

Kate: Was there something in it monetarily for the sailors? Like not just the leader of the expedition, the captain but also he had to recruit people to go with him, right? I mean they had to have some kind of incentive, the ordinary sailor guy, to get on that ship, right?

Ken: Yes, yes, absolutely and the convention arose that well certainly there was a lot of piracy on the high seas and if you took a ship, the captain decided — Okay, we’re going to share this around, that was the deal. So, if you were on the ship when you caught up an incredibly wealthy merchant vessel you would get a part of the share. That would be pretty cool, in addition to your salary. These are tough times and guys are desperate for work or trying to stay alive. “I’ve got a wife and 2 kids I want to send them some money.” Yeah, so it’s the usual thing.

Kate: So these sailors, if they managed to get to the wealth of India and China, they would get some kind of a share of whatever this ship was going to buy and presumably take home to England, right? 

Ken: Yeah, exactly. That would be an impetus for them until, like Hudson’s men, they got caught in James Bay and spent a winter there that would cool their ardour.

Kate: For sure. So explain to me, though because I’ve always wondered about the timing like if you were going to take one of these great big ships. Now let’s say, you’re leaving from England, you have to sail across the Atlantic, and you have to then sail past Hudson Bay you have to. Even if you knew exactly where you were going. You have to sail all the way across, get out on the other side of Alaska and then get to China. Could you? How would the timing work to do that and could you actually do it without getting frozen in by the winter? Is there enough of a window of time there to get through in one of those old big sailing ships?

Ken: No, there is probably not. Back in this time — the little ice age is in full force. So it was colder and now with global warming, we see the passage opening up a little bit more, well, quite a bit more. But even into the 19th century, it would open up but not in a big way and not everywhere; some areas just stayed frozen and so they were dealing with that on top of everything else. In the very best case, it would take at least one winter at that time and given that technology at least one winter, two-step process, go in, winter over, carry on. Of course, they found out that.

17:00

Kate: So at some point, they realized. “Okay, we’re not going to do it in one season. We have to go, we have to let our ship get frozen into the ice and then start off again in the spring. That was sort of what they realized, right?

Ken: Well, that’s basically right. That’s what happened with John Ray, for example, who was working for the Hudson’s Bay Company. He just signed on as a surgeon, he thought it was a summer job. On the Prince of Wales, they sail in, load up the ship and then start out but the ice is terrible; they couldn’t get out; they had to return around. Go back, spend the winter in the southern reaches of the Bay — Charlton Island — and they’re frozen in and they’re not really ready for that. They aren’t hunters for the most part; Ray was a hunter but most of the others didn’t adapt. People are dying on the ship, the ice conditions could be bad. And the storms are forcing you back but guys you have frozen in the ice even just going between Greenland and Hudson’s Bay, especially if they were going farther north because they realized after a while into the 19th century/the late 1700s, “Gee, it doesn’t look like it’s through here.” So they started going farther north into what’s known mainly as Lancaster Sound and that would prove a more viable, but complicated bit of business.

Kate: So I want to talk about the Inuit people who obviously were living there and who encountered these somewhat crazy Europeans coming over. But maybe first let’s touch briefly on Franklin, the most famous, legendary fail Northwest Passage expedition. Tell us a little bit about Franklin.

Ken: Um, yeah, well he he sailed in 1845 from just south of London. It was May and they all called in Orkney which is where so many HBC guys came from, a place called Login’s Well. They would take on some fresh water. Then, they go across and Franklin thought he was doing pretty well. It’s been a matter of putting it together. What happened, right? But he wintered over on one of the most famous historical sites in the Arctic, on Beechey Island, 1845-46, after probing north for a bit. Then, the ice breaks up and he starts south and the ships, two of them, get trapped in the ice and there ensues the worst catastrophe in the history of Arctic exploration. It’s taken a long time. 

Kate: How many men die how many men die in the Franklin expedition they all die, right?

19:45

Ken: They all died. I think there were 129 including Franklin so that’s double the Jens Munk catastrophe.

Kate: But the Franklin expedition is kind of interesting, right? By this time, people already figured out it’s going to take two sailing seasons, we know we’re going to be frozen in the ice, Franklin’s ready for this and they have also figured out, “Okay, we cannot go by Hudson’s Bay. It is going to be a dead end.” If we have to find this Northwest Passage, we have to go further north and so, he does. And the island you mentioned he wintered on, Beechey Island, it’s way beyond the Arctic Circle, it’s further north of the Baffin Island. He gets frozen in ice. All goes according to plan. How did things then go so terribly wrong? 

Ken: He didn’t get trapped in the ice after he went south from Beechey Island. And okay, you’re talking about what happened, but that’s the greatest mystery in the history of Arctic exploration and people have been arguing about it since 1847-48, trying to find to figure out what had happened. But actually, I write about this in my forthcoming book. A number of theories have been put forward as to what happened because look James John Ross and James Clark Ross had spent four winters in the ice trapped not far away from where Franklin was, down to the bottom of Prince Regent inlet. They had managed to survive and find their way. Back into the main channel, there in the north and managed to hitch your ride home after four winters in the Arctic. 

So then the question becomes how come, that’s just one example, how come the Rosses could survive four winters in the Arctic and Franklin perished after a couple of winters? He’s supposed to have all this food he brought with him, the state-of-the-art ships. What happened has been the biggest mystery.

Kate: Wow. There are lots of mysteries. So we’ve got Henry Hudson’s mystery. We’ve got the Franklin mystery. After Franklin overwintered on Beechey Island, why did he then go south? Why did not he keep going west towards China and India which was his ultimate destination?

Ken: I think of the Northwest Passage as two channels: one in the north and one in the south. The southern channel is along the Arctic Coast of Canada, by the time Franklin arrived and went in there on his voyage they knew of those two channels, you go in through Lancaster Sound. Now they had got cut off by this incredible mass of ice. There’s no going through all the way through the strait but they knew that along the coast because Samuel Hearn in 1771 had become the first to reach the Arctic Coast of Canada by travelling with this great Indigenous leader Metonymy. But what Metonymy did with his Dene-Chipewyan people, Hearn went along with that and he managed to succeed. He could learn from the native peoples after that. 

So, he in effect geographically planted a flag. Okay, here’s the Arctic coast. So then they started looking. Mackenzie went down the Mackenzie River he was disappointed. He called it the River of Disappointment because he thought he was going all the way to the Pacific. He finds himself on the Northern Coast so there are two points then in the north and then you got people heading east trying to figure that out. Let’s see how far this southern channel extends. So they still didn’t know that if they didn’t have fantastic flying ships that could go over no drones to send up and see what’s over the horizon. 

So yeah, so then guys who did well were the fur traders travelling with inevitably the native peoples including the Cree and the Ojibwe who knew how to travel there. So, if this guy says it’s too dangerous, I better not go this particular way whereas Franklin would come in and say, “What do they know? I’m with the Royal Navy.” 

So by the time he sailed in 1845, they had an idea that, “Okay, look we got these two channels, one in the north, one of the south. All we have to do is to connect them. How hard can that be.” This was coming in from the east and they knew they could get out the west. They could get out of the southern channel or they believe they did by going along the coast. So all we have to do is go in here and get down there get down to the coast. So, that’s what Franklin was attempting when he got trapped in the ice for good, in effect. There’s a whole saga of what happened and there’ve been countless books and I’m adding to that number.

25:16

Kate: We hope it will be the definitive one, Ken, that no one will ever need to write another book about it after but so.

But the picture you’re explaining now is a bit more complicated than the original where it was just coming in on ships because now you have fur traders going over land, they’re going down different rivers there, they’ve got these guides and from various different Indigenous groups. So it’s kind of getting a bit more crowded up there as they’re all sort of from multi-pronged approach to try to find this passage is what I’m sort of imagining but what was the role then and this is a broad question but of the Indigenous people in finding or helping to find the passage because obviously they had local knowledge but they didn’t have a passage that they travelled through and they could just say oh yeah, well here it is right? They didn’t do that.

Ken: No, no, because they were living there. They weren’t seeking a passage to go through there. They were living in their particular environments and adjusting to the land. But for example, in 1903-1904, when Roald Amundsen became the first to sail the passage, how did he do the voyage? How did he find his way between the northern channel and the southern channel while there was a missing link there? That was the final link in what would become the first navigable passage and the explorer who found that in 1854 was this fur trade doctor John Ray, but he did it with two Indigenous people — William Ouligbuck Jr. the Inuk and Thomas Mistegan who was an Ojibway. 

Because what happened was Rae was out looking and exploring and trying to figure out the lay of the land. He set out with a number of guys and when he was down to four, two of them were not functioning; this is overland, this is man-hauling sleds. This is really tough work so in the end there were only two guys that could keep up with him. He was in his late thirties I think and they were younger. They were the Indigenous guys who were with him, Mistegan and Ouligbuck. They were the guys he went up along the coast of — this is getting a bit archaic — but along the coast of Boothia and he looked out. There’d been a mistake made in the mapping because of the terrible weather. James Clark Ross had placed a bay with actually a strait; now Rae went there. He’s travelling across the land and he looks out and he says, “You know what,” he’s with these two guys, “well that’s King William Island over there, we all thought it was King William Land attached to the main line but it’s not, it’s an island and there’s water flowing through here.” That was the missing link in the first navigable Northwest Passage when Amundsen came down through what became known as Rae Strait.

28:40

Kate: And so that little missing link was found essentially by a team of these three people, two of whom were these Indigenous guys. But other than those two individuals, it must have been throughout the history that these sailors were encountering, say, Inuit people and sort of asking them, “Hey, what do the next hundred miles look like?” Was that in play in this, sort of, incremental discovery?

Ken: Well yes, absolutely because Rae found that particular passage but the Arctic archipelago, Canada’s multitude of islands up there and straits and so forth, what really opened it all up was the search for Franklin which is driven essentially by Lady Franklin — an extraordinary individual in her own right. But in every case, the search for Franklin, they were relying on Inuit interpreters and hunters to keep them alive because at this point you’re talking about Charles Francis Hall and Frederick Schwaka going in the 1860s and 70s. They’re travelling Inuit style with the Inuit hunters and interpreters and they’re looking for people. Ah, Kate were you on the ships? Did you meet Franklin? Did you hear about this? And things like that. So it was the interpreters and so forth who hadn’t been there themselves oftentimes but they could talk to the people who had been there because they could speak the language. 

It was that search that gradually opened up the archipelago. So people — the British — then mapping, okay, yeah, okay, this is how the whole thing fits together. And it’s extremely difficult to get through here unless you know what you’re doing and even now. We hear about ships going around. I was on one myself. It’s not well charted underwater. There’s a lot that’s not charted even now. There are certain routes that are extremely well-known but you put the ship in the middle of the strait, you don’t go over to the side here.

Kate: So if I could sort of put this all together in a bit of a picture in my head of what’s going on is that the initial sailors were getting as far as Labrador and then they were getting as far as Davis Strait and then they got as far as Hudson Bay and then they decided, we gotta keep going west and then gradually, there are other explorers who are going over land with Indigenous people and finding like pieces of the puzzle like this is what the coast looks like over here, this is what the coast looks like there. Then after John Franklin’s expedition disappears and Lady Franklin basically sends these people to hunt for him, then they’re exploring even more and saying these are what the islands look like, they’re mapping it. They’re gradually putting these pieces of the puzzle into place, right? So tell me about how Roald Amundsen is the first person to actually sail this thing?

32:05

Ken: Well, He’s a Norwegian adventurer and he learned how to ski earlier and he’s a smart guy. He would later become the first to reach the South Pole because of what he learned from the Inuit on these earlier trips. 

So he takes a small ship, he spends two winters at Gjoa Haven now. Gjoa Haven, it was not a settlement at this point. His ship was called the Gjou and he found this, okay things are getting difficult. The weather is turning bad winter is coming on and he sails into this nice harbour — this haven if you will. Then Inuit discover him and they begin to trade with him. He’s got a dual objective. 

He’s also trying to figure out the scientific location of the north magnetic pole. That’s a whole dimension here that we haven’t really talked about but scientific knowledge had to figure that why were compasses going crazy, let’s figure this out, so Amundsen sets up all these observatories. There’s a hill there in Gjoa Haven and you can go up and you can see where they were his observatories. So, he spends two winters there and many he carries on through along the southern channel. Amundsen credits John Rae; he says, “Good thing, he told me where that was because I wouldn’t have got to Gjoa Haven.” So that’s how Amundsen did it, became the first and wired from the west coast. 

Kate: Well that makes it sound so easy — I just sailed right through.

Ken: Yeah sure, that’s right. It was hazardous all the way along. And these guys are adventurers. There’s no question about it. Amazing. And the obsessiveness that’s involved. Speaking as a writer, that’s what driving a large part of the interest is the obsessiveness of these guys that makes them interesting as characters, if you will, real-life characters. They were bent on achieving something. So let’s see what happened.

Kate: By the time Roald Amundsen actually got through the Northwest Passage in 1904, remember way back to that original purpose, that you could find China and and trade and you wouldn’t have to pass by the pirates and around the horn of Africa. Has this original purpose  completely evaporated by that time?

35:00

Ken: Yes, they realized, “Wow, this is maybe a little wilder than we thought.” But even today, there’s an interesting debate and a worry. In fact, think about oil tankers plowing through the north, the Northwest Passage. You know, in oil spills, well it’s one thing if it’s down in Florida. You can get the emergency vehicles in there. You know you can get the ships. But something happens in the Northwest Passage, that can take an oil spill, that would be something else now. What’s quasi-good news on effort is it’s much more likely that anybody carrying oil is going to go through along the Russian coast, along what’s called the North Sea route in other words, not the Northwest but the Northeast, but this has gotten more complicated now that Russia has done what it’s done geo-politically, and people are going to say, “Well, I don’t think I want to go along the coast of Russia.”

But don’t forget, it’s also opening up a bit so there may be more ways. People have identified there are six or seven different ways now. Now, you get through the passing, you go over here, down here and around this way because it’s such a jigsaw puzzle as you said. Maybe the ice will reduce enough that they are going through but by then we’ll be in a whole other mess. So yeah, it’s still complicated.

Kate: Is the Northwest Passage used as a commercial shipping route today?

Ken: Yeah, a little bit, but the reason being that it’s a shorter route than going around some of the other way but it’s so dicey and so forth. So what’s happening more in the Northwest Passage is adventure travel. You know the company I did a lot of travel with was in Adventure Canada. You go up there and you see the animals, the polar bears, you meet the people who live there in the settlements and that kind of thing seems to be blossoming. But yeah, so that is more what’s happening in the Northwest Passage because it’s not readily viable. 

At this point, I mean you can get through. If you’ve got an ice breaker, even if you’ve got a great big oil tanker, you bring an ice breaker in front of you and these things ride up on the ice and pound through the ice in front of the ship behind them. That’s how when push comes to shove, they pound through the ice behind the icebreaker. So, obviously that’s not an easy way to do it. With climate change maybe it’ll become more viable, there are pros and cons obviously.

Kate: Is it international water or is it considered Canadian water or who would regulate what can go through the northwest passage?

Ken: Oh, now you want to pick a fight with me. Well, Canada says these are Canadian waters. It’s obvious to me. USA says no, these are international waters. So our closest pal, Uncle Sam, doesn’t agree with what we say is internal. They say no this is international. So that’s where that stands.

Kate: So, the Northwest Passage remains contended and mysteries still abound. Well, Ken, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. Thank you for elucidating our listeners about this and of course they can pick up any one of your five books about Arctic exploration and the upcoming one. When’s that one going to be published?

Ken: That’s coming in October. It’s called Searching for Franklin: The Royal Navy Man who Discovered Arctic Catastrophe. Coming Soon. Thank you, Kate, bye for now.

Kate: The Stories Behind the history podcast is produced by Canada’s History Society. If you enjoyed the podcast, why not subscribe to Canada’s History magazine? To subscribe or to simply find out more, visit us at Canadashistory.ca.

Our theme music is the Red River Jig performed by Alex Kustrok from the album Metis Fiddling for Dancing. I am Kate Jaimet, senior editor of Canada’s History magazine. Thanks for joining me.