Out of the Northwest Passage

Canada’s Far North has intrigued explorers for centuries. Now, travellers are discovering its rustic beauty and rich culture, too, from creaking icebergs and polar bears, to mysterious mirages and UNESCO sites. By land and by sea, its allure is unmistakable.

BY BARB SLIGL

There are few places left in the world that still feel truly wild. There’s Antarctica, maybe the remote steppes (a mix of grasslands and forests) of Siberia, perhaps the ever-shifting desert dunes of the Sahara and Canada’s Arctic Archipelago. Passing through these frozen far reaches has been the intrepid adventurer’s holy grail since 1497, when John Cabot first sought a shorter route from Europe to East Asia.

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For centuries, this northern Atlantic-to-Pacific quest continued – some 800 kilometres above the Arctic Circle. It ranges from Henry Hudson’s failed attempt in 1611

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The only found his eponymous bay) and the ill-fated journey of John Franklin’s Erebus and Terror in 1845 (the entire crew froze and starved and the sunken ships were only discovered in this century) to the first triumphant crossing by Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen in 1906 (a threeyear odyssey). And more than 100 years later, I sailed past the Nunavut settlement named for Amundsen’s ship Gjøa on an expedition called Out of the Northwest Passage with Adventure Canada.

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The search for this mythical route has been steeped in trials and tribulations. And ice. The icebergs were what my mother, who joined me on this trip, loved most. Crenellated, colossal, changing from palest blue to orange sherbet with the sun’s rise and fall, they groaned like some alien beast. Aboard the Ocean Endeavour sailing on the eastern side of Baffin Bay in an icy Greenlandic fjord near where journeys usually start, we slowly circumnavigated one of thousands of these icebergs for a glorious hour or so.

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But our voyage started at the other end of the Northwest Passage in Kugluktuk, Nunavut. There we began our documentation of a plethora of other creatures: a ringed seal, followed by Arctic hares, bearded seals, harp seals, minke whales, humpback whales, muskox and polar bears. We saw three solo bears on three successive days, the first like a dollop of vanilla ice cream atop a floe in Prince Regent Inlet. We watched the large robust-looking male paw a nest of snow in which he curled up like a dog. The next day in Radstock Bay, we saw another bear amble along an icy beach beneath a cliff. The third was in Admiralty Inlet, playfully jumping from ice chunk to ice chunk.

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From that first seal in Kugluktuk to the 40-plus harp seals in Sisimiut, Greenland, the wildlife we witnessed eeking out an existence in the Arctic was astounding, including 40 species of birds we spotted, from the little auk to the peregrine falcon who hitched a ride across Baffin Bay on the top deck. Every night we discovered more about the surrounding environment and sometimes sordid history. The great auk – relative to the smaller flying version – once roamed these shores in vast waddles, much like the penguins of the Southern Hemisphere, but became extinct in 1844 after early explorers decimated the fatty flightless birds for food, bait and bonfires.

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We heard about Indigenous culture from Inuk crew members, one of whom was once the mayor of Kugluktuk and commissioner of Nunavut and shared Inuk words, including nanuq (polar bear) and umikmaq (muskox), and introduced us to Inuit “country food” (such as frozen whale and seal blubber). We came ashore to an Inuit hamlet on Baffin Island, met the residents of Arctic Bay and had a snowball fight with local children.

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Other onboard education came in the form of a sing-along of Canadian folk singer Stan Rogers’ famous “Northwest Passage” with the lines: “To find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea / Tracing one warm line through a land so wild and savage.” We learned of Vikings, female polar explorers, the first RCMP

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posts in the High Eastern Arctic (and visited Fort Ross), archaeological sites and the fragility of life, like the polar bears I mentioned earlier. We saw bursts of lichen on a hike in Dease Strait that were juxtaposed with the sculptural beauty of bleached bones of muskox carcass.

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The farthest north we reached was a latitude of 77º28’N at Qaanaaq in the northwest of Greenland. From there, we retraced the first explorers’ route, going south and skirting northwestern Greenland past Ilulissat, home of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Ilulissat Icefjord. There we saw three humpback whales on a sunset Zodiac trip in iceberg-dotted Disko Bay to Sisimiut. That evening – our last before flying from Kangerlussuaq across Davis Strait and back to Canada, we got another wild display – the great gleaming green ribbons of the northern lights.

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It called to mind a term learned earlier in this tour of the Far North – fata morgana or mirage. It’s something longago sailors saw at the start of the arduous route from Baffin Island to the Beaufort Sea. In 1818, British explorer John Ross entered Lancaster Sound seeking the Northwest Passage and found what he called the Crocker Mountains. But it wasn’t real, just a mere mirage. That rush of discovery remains strong here. Everything is extraordinary, filled with the promise of new – and real – land, centuries after the first ships sailed these waters.

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Antarctica – The Other Pole

VENTURE TO the opposite end of the globe, home of another great flightless bird that’s similar in appearance to the extinct great auk of the Arctic. In Antarctica, see thousands-strong waddles of penguins on an expedition cruise with stops on the far shores of the southern hemisphere. Adventure Canada also offers small-ship expedition cruises into the south polar region, alongside some 50 ships that sail Antarctic waters.

Seabourn has a new purpose-built expedition ship that debuted last year, Seabourn Venture (with two custom-built submarines). French company Ponant also has a new ship, Le Commandant Charcot, a luxury polar-expedition and electric-hybrid vessel that can navigate through ice and extreme environments, and sails into the Bellingshausen Sea to see large emperor penguins.

Silversea crosses the Drake Passage to stop at scenic spots like Neko Harbour on the Antarctic Peninsula and is launching new itineraries this year aboard the Scenic Eclipse. Set sail from King George Island, the largest of the South Shetland Islands, or board a bucket-list cruise for expedition lovers that goes beyond the Antarctic Circle – latitude 66º33’S – into an icy region less visited than the other pole.

And, with Lindblad Expeditions, another cruise company offering journeys to the Great White Continent, you can experience the thrill of crunching through the sea ice on board one of three state-of-the-art expedition ships and capture eye-catching images of scores of penguins and whales, thanks to tips from a National Geographic photographer.