The Aventura at Cambridge Bay

While we were sleeping the Aventura visited Gjoa Haven and is now sailing towards Bellot Strait.
Bellot Strait is not large enough for tankers but it was used by ships of the early adventurers in the Arctic.
It almost looks like it was cut by prehistoric people to provide just such a channel for the Northwest Passage.



Click on the link below to see pictures and the story of where the Aventura is now.

cornellsailing.com/2015/08/final-stage/

wikipedia:
In 1762, the English trading ship Octavius reportedly hazarded the passage from the west but became trapped in sea ice. In 1775, the whaler Herald found the Octavius adrift near Greenland with the bodies of her crew frozen below decks. Thus the Octavius may have earned the distinction of being the first Western sailing ship to make the passage, although the fact that it took 13 years and occurred after the crew was dead somewhat tarnishes this achievement.

In 1845 a lavishly equipped two-ship expedition led by Sir John Franklin sailed to the Canadian Arctic to chart the last unknown swaths of the Northwest Passage. Confidence was high, as they estimated there was less than 500 km (310 mi) remaining of unexplored Arctic mainland coast. When the ships failed to return, relief expeditions and search parties explored the Canadian Arctic, which resulted in a thorough charting of the region, along with a possible passage. Many artifacts from the expedition were found over the next century and a half, including notes that the ships were ice-locked in 1846 near King William Island, about half way through the passage, and unable to break free. Records showed Franklin died in 1847 and Captain Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier took over command. In 1848 the expedition abandoned the two ships and its members tried to escape south across the tundra by sledge. Although some of the crew may have survived into the early 1850s, no evidence has ever been found of any survivors. In 1853 explorer John Rae was told by local Inuit about the disastrous fate of Franklin's expedition, but his reports were not welcomed in Britain.

Starvation, exposure and scurvy all contributed to the men's deaths. In 1981 Owen Beattie, an anthropologist from the University of Alberta, examined remains from sites associated with the expedition.[38] This led to further investigations and the examination of tissue and bone from the frozen bodies of three seamen, John Torrington, William Braine and John Hartnell, exhumed from the permafrost of Beechey Island. Laboratory tests revealed high concentrations of lead in all three (the expedition carried 8,000 tins of food sealed with a lead-based solder).[39] Another researcher has suggested botulism caused deaths among crew members.[40] New evidence, confirming reports first made by John Rae in 1854 based on Inuit accounts, has shown that the last of the crew resorted to cannibalism of deceased members in an effort to survive.[41]
McClure expedition

Franklin's ships were the Erebus and the Terror.
Erebus and Terror were both outfitted with steam engines, which were ex London and Greenwich Railway steam locomotives. Rated at 25 horsepower (19 kW), it could propel the ship at 4 knots (7.4 km/h). Twelve day's supply of coal was carried.[4] Iron plating was added to their hulls for their voyage to the Arctic with Sir John Franklin in overall command of the expedition in Erebus, and Terror again under the command of Captain Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier. The expedition was ordered to gather magnetic data in the Canadian Arctic and complete a crossing of the Northwest Passage, which had already been charted from both the east and west but never entirely navigated.

The expedition sailed from Greenhithe on 19 May 1845 and the ships were last seen entering Baffin Bay in August 1845. The disappearance of the Franklin expedition set off a massive search effort in the Arctic and the broad circumstances of the expedition's fate were revealed during a series of expeditions between 1848 and 1866. Both ships had become icebound and were abandoned by their crews, all of whom subsequently died of exposure and starvation while trying to trek overland to Fort Resolution, a Hudson's Bay Company outpost 600 mi (970 km) to the southwest. Subsequent expeditions up until the late 1980s, including autopsies of crew members, also revealed that their canned rations may have been tainted by both lead and botulism. Oral reports by local Inuit that some of the crew members resorted to cannibalism were at least somewhat supported by forensic evidence of cut marks on the skeletal remains of crew members found on King William Island during the late 20th century.

On 8 September 2014 it was announced that the wreckage of one of Franklin's ships was found on 7 September using a remotely operated underwater vehicle recently acquired by Parks Canada.[8][9] However, on 1 October 2014 Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced that the remains were that of Erebus.[10] The final resting place of Terror remains to be found. The remains of the ships are designated a National Historic Site of Canada with the exact location withheld in order to preserve the wreck and prevent looting.[11][12][13]



During the search for Franklin, Commander Robert McClure and his crew in HMS Investigator traversed the Northwest Passage from west to east in the years 1850 to 1854, partly by ship and partly by sledge. McClure started out from England in December 1849, sailed the Atlantic Ocean south to Cape Horn and entered the Pacific Ocean. He sailed the Pacific north and passed through the Bering Strait, turning east at that point and reaching Banks Island.

McClure's ship was trapped in the ice for three winters near Banks Island, at the western end of Viscount Melville Sound. Finally McClure and his crew—who were by that time dying of starvation—were found by searchers who had travelled by sledge over the ice from a ship of Sir Edward Belcher's expedition. They rescued McClure and his crew, returning with them to Belcher's ships, which had entered the Sound from the east. McClure and his crew returned to England in 1854 on one of Belcher's ships. They were the first people known to circumnavigate the Americas and to discover and transit the Northwest Passage, albeit by ship and by sledge over the ice. (Both McClure and his ship were found by a party from HMS Resolute, one of Belcher's ships, so his sledge journey was relatively short.[42])

This was an astonishing feat for that day and age, and McClure was knighted and promoted in rank. (He was made rear-admiral in 1867.) Both he and his crew also shared £10,000 awarded them by the British Parliament. In July 2010 Canadian archaeologists found his ship, HMS Investigator, fairly intact but sunk about 8 m (26 ft) below the surface.[43]

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 to the city of Eagle, Alaska. He sent a telegram announcing his success and skied the return 800 km (500 mi) to rejoin his companions.[45] 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.

One of those waterways was Bellot Strait.

Canadian RCMP officer Henry Larsen was the second to sail the passage, crossing west to east, leaving Vancouver 23 June 1940 and arriving at Halifax on 11 October 1942.[47] More than once on this trip, he was uncertain whether the St. Roch, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police "ice-fortified" schooner, would survive the pressures of the sea ice. At one point, Larsen wondered "if we had come this far only to be crushed like a nut on a shoal and then buried by the ice." The ship and all but one of her crew survived the winter on Boothia Peninsula. Each of the men on the trip was awarded a medal by Canada's sovereign, King George VI, in recognition of this notable feat of Arctic navigation.

Later in 1944, Larsen's return trip was far more swift than his first. He made the trip in 86 days to sail back from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Vancouver, British Columbia.[48] He set a record for traversing the route in a single season. The ship, after extensive upgrades, followed a more northerly, partially uncharted route.

On July 1, 1957, the United States Coast Guard Cutter Storis departed in company with USCGC Bramble and USCGC Spar to search for a deep-draft channel through the Arctic Ocean and to collect hydrographic information. Upon her return to Greenland waters, the Storis became the first U.S.-registered vessel to have circumnavigated North America.

In September 2013 the MS Nordic Orion became the first commercial bulk carrier to transit the Northwest Passage.[72] She was carrying a cargo of 73,500 tons of coking coal from Port Metro Vancouver, Canada, to the Finnish Port of Pori, 15,000 more tons than would have been possible via the traditional Panama Canal route.[73][74] The Northwest Passage shortened the distance by 1,000 nautical miles compared to traditional route via the Panama Canal.[73]