1854 Northwest Passage

3 Responses to 1854 Northwest Passage

1. brian lemon says:

   May 10, 2012 at 12:53 pm

   I get a kick out of the alarmists – especially the civilians social studies peeps – that accuse the conservatives / warming sceptics of having bad brains and being stupid, when they haven’t even looked at historic facts and rely on modelled forecasts 100 years in the future. Fact is that the earth has survived for a billion years with an average temp from -50 to +80 and humans routinely now live in similar temperature situations. As I read yesterday – .7 degree change over 100 years? Heck, there’s more variation than that in our houses.

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2. Billy Liar says:

   May 10, 2012 at 4:20 pm

   It was a lot more complicated than the newspaper article makes out. As Wiki points out:

   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.

   HMS Investigator was trapped in the ice for 3 years near Banks Island and McClure and his crew, who were close to starvation, were found by a sledging party from HMS Resolute, one of the ships of Sir Edward Belcher’s expedition which had entered the NW passage from the east. McClure and his crew returned to England in 1854 and became the first to traverse the passage, albeit on two different ships and partly by sledge.

   The wreckage of Investigator was found in July 2010 in Mercy Bay at the northern tip of Aulavik National Park by a team from Parks Canada.

   The next person to complete the trip was Amundsen between 1903 and 1906 in Gjoa, a converted herring boat.

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   • Douglas Pohl says:

     May 12, 2012 at 3:42 pm

     Does any one know of another vessel who has successfully completed the ORIGINAL Northwest Passage “over the top of Banks Island” discovered by Captain McClure on HMS INVESTIGATOR? The only known vessel to challenge this original route is the icebreaker SS MANHATTAN which was stopped by sea ice even with 43,000 shp and had to turn around and use Prince of Wales Strait where HMS INVESTIGATOR spent their first winter trapped in the ice.

     Standing by,
     Doug

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