Northwest Passage

This article is about the geographical Northwest Passage; for the film see Northwest Passage (film)

The Northwest Passage, or Estrecho de Anián (= Strait of Anián) in Spanish, is a hypothetical water route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Between the 16th century and the 19th century, European explorers, particularly the British, made numerous attempts to discover such a route north and west, through (by river) or around (by sea) North America: Captain John Smith, for example, sailed up the Chesapeake Bay from Jamestown in the early 1600s looking for a river that led to the Passage, but in the early 1800s Lewis and Clark proved there was no navigable route through the continent of North America, so the theory was shifted northward, to be an all-sea route through the Arctic Archipelago around the north of Canada. The earliest of the explorations were based on a mixture of legend, conjecture, and wishful thinking, but later expeditions built on what was learned and gradually extended their maps, at first of North America itself and then of Arctic America in particular. The notion of an Open Polar Sea, though eventually proved chimerical as well, had a long-lasting influence on the search for the Passage and was still believed in by some navigators and geographers as late as the 1890's.

Bibliography

• Across the Top of the World: The Search for the Northwest Passage, by James Delgado
• Arctic Journeys: A History of Exploration for the Northwest Passage (American University Studies Series IX, History), by Miller Graff [ISBN 0820417459 (1992 hdbk)]