Amundsen's Northwest Passage Expedition

Description

The first explorer to conquer the Northwest Passage solely by ship was the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. In a three-year journey between 1903 and 1906, Amundsen explored the passage with a crew of six. Amundsen, who had sailed to escape creditors seeking to stop the expedition, completed the voyage in the converted 45 net register tonnage (4,500 cu ft or 130 m3) herring boat Gjøa. Gjøa was much smaller than vessels used by other Arctic expeditions and had a shallow draft. Amundsen intended to hug the shore, live off the limited resources of the land and sea through which he was to travel, and had determined that he needed to have a tiny crew to make this work. (Trying to support much larger crews had contributed to the catastrophic failure of John Franklin's expedition fifty years previously). The ship's shallow draft was intended to help her traverse the shoals of the Arctic straits.

Amundsen set out from Kristiania (Oslo) in June 1903 and was west of the Boothia Peninsula by late September. The Gjøa was put into a natural harbour on the south shore of King William Island; by October 3 she was iced in. There the expedition remained for nearly two years, with the expedition members learning from the local Inuit people and undertaking measurements to determine the location of the North Magnetic Pole. The harbour, now known as Gjoa Haven, later developed as the only permanent settlement on the island.

After completing the Northwest Passage portion of this trip and having anchored near Herschel Island, Amundsen skied 800 kilometres (500 mi) to the city of Eagle, Alaska. He sent a telegram announcing his success and skied the return 800 km to rejoin his companions. Although his chosen east–west route, via the Rae Strait, contained young ice and thus was navigable, some of the waterways were extremely shallow (3 ft (0.91 m) deep), making the route commercially impractical.

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