Northwest Passage

The Northwest Passage is a sea route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through the Arctic Archipelago of Canada. Between the 16th century and the 19th century, European explorers, particulary the British, made numerous attempts to discover such a route north and west around North America. The earliest of these voyages were based on a mixture of legend, conjecture, and wishful thinking, but later voyagers built on what was learned and gradually extended their maps of Arctic America. The notion of an Open Polar Sea, though eventually proved chimerical, had a long-lasting infuence on the search for the Passage, and was still believed in by some navigators and geographers as late as the 1890's.