A mythical water route through northern North America, the Northwest Passage became the object of repeated exploratory ventures during the 16th century.
Contrary to modern legend, Europeans even before the 1492 voyage of Christopher Columbus knew that the world was round. They also knew that the markets of East Asia contained abundant valuable resources and that transporting them overland across Asia, through the Middle East, and into Europe, normally via Venice, was expensive and problematic. Although Portuguese and Dutch sailors who ventured to the SpiCE Islands had found an oceanic route to the Far East, such journeys were also long and often dangerous. Many who ventured on such expeditions never returned.
Although Europeans had a somewhat clear sense of the geography of the Old World, they had much less precise knowledge of what lay to the west. Once reports of Columbus began to circulate in 16th-century Europe, followed by accounts of Spanish CONQUistADORes, Europeans began to speculate about a possible water route through North America that would take sailors directly to Asia. This idea had particular appeal for northern Europeans—the Dutch, French, and English—who had been left out of the Treaty of Tordesillas and thus lacked any papally sanctioned claim to territory in the Western Hemisphere, yet the notion hinged on the belief that the world was smaller than it turned out to be. However wrong Europeans might have been about the size of the earth, and thus in error about the length of any possible expeditions, the basic lure remained: Because it was cheaper and quicker to travel by sea than overland, any route through North America would be worth finding.
Try as they might, Europeans never found the Northwest Passage. Of course, some did think they had found it. Whenever sailors ventured far up rivers, deep into modern-day Canada, they believed they might have found the route. Mysterious lands and communities found along such journey, such as Norumbega and Hochelaga, seemed possible resting stations for any adventure to Asia. Sebastian Cabot was desperate to find the Northwest Passage, and on a voyage that ended back in Bristol in 1509 he thought he had found it, although later investigations proved that he had sailed perhaps as far as modern-day Hudson Bay, an enormous body of water that he reasonably believed might be an ocean. jACQUEs Cartier and Martin Frobisher each believed they had found the Northwest Passage, although they had in fact made substantial additions to European knowledge of the modern-day Maritime Provinces and subarctic waterways that lay west of Greenland. The English sailor John Davis (ca. 1550-1605) also hoped to find the passage by sailing along the western coast of Greenland deep into Baffin Bay in the mid-1580s, although he, too, failed.
Despite repeated failures to find the way through, the goal remained. As Richard Hakluyt the Elder, a lawyer with an avid interest in geography, recognized the situation in 1585, the English should send settlers to North America because there was a “great possibilitie of further discoveries of other regions from the North part of the same land by sea, and of unspeakable honor and benefit that may rise upon the same, by the trades to ensue in Japan, China, and Cathay, &c.” With such heady promise, it is little wonder that Europeans continued to look for the Northwest Passage well beyond 1607.
Renewed interest in a passage emerged in the 18th century. Impelled by the efforts of exploration promoter Arthur Dobbs, British expeditions under Christopher Middleton in 1742 and William Moor in 1747 combed the western shores of Hudson Bay for the entrance of a passage to the Pacific. Between 1774 and 1779, Spanish concern about Russian encroachments on the North Pacific and about possible British discovery of a Northwest Passage led to another series of Spanish expeditions along the Pacific coast. Led by figures such as Juan Perez and Ignacio de Arteaga, Spanish ships sailed as far north as Alaska’s Hinchinbrook Island. British expeditions, motivated by both scientific curiosity and by interest in the strategic and commercial value of a Northwest Passage, also appeared in the waters of the North Pacific in the final decades of the 18th century. Captain James Cook, in 1778, and George Vancouver, from 1792 to 1794, surveyed the Pacific coast for the western entrance of a Northwest Passage. Cook carried his exploration through the Bering Strait to the Arctic Ocean, where he encountered the northern ice that made a journey along the top of the continent from the Pacific to the Atlantic impractical for early modern ships. These explorations made it clear that no Pacific entrance to a Northwest Passage existed.
Further reading: Angus Konstam, Historical Atlas of Exploration, 1492-1600 (New York: Facts On File, 2000).
—Paul Mapp
World History
