Even though the theme and purpose of Tundra Northwest 1999 was ecological research, no participant could escape the fact that the expedition sailed through waters full of historical perspectives. The seaways between the Canadian northern coastline and the Arctic Archipelago to the north have become famous and fabled as the legendary Northwest Passage since the idea took root at the end of the 15th century. The English King Henry VII sent the first expeditions to find this dreamt of northern sea route to the spice lands of the Orient soon after Columbus had rediscovered America for Europeans in 1492. John Cabot’s expeditions of 1497 and 1498 started the search in a manner that was to become typical for the history of the Northwest Passage: on the second voyage the five ships and their crews disappeared and their fate is still unknown today.

The most famous disappearing act, which was to have the greatest hearing on the history and mapping of both the Passage and the surrounding area, was the British naval Northwest Passage expedition led by Sir John Franklin, with the ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror and 128 men. Franklin’s expedition left London in May 1845 and was last seen by whalers two months later in northern Baffin Bay heading for Lancaster Sound. After this the expedition disappeared and the 129 men were never seen again alive. Over the next 15 years as many as 40 larger and smaller expeditions were sent out to look for Franklin and his men, losing more men and ships on the way. By the end of the 1850s the expedition’s fate had been more or less unravelled by the various pieces of information the search expeditions had uncovered and at the same time the geography of much of the Canadian Arctic area had been mapped.

By means of the place names on today’s maps, we can follow the history of the ships, the men and their sponsors and mentors. Franklin, McClintock, McClure, Beechey, Victoria, Booth, Victory, Fury and Hecla, Dolphin and Union are all used in place names connected both with the history of the area and with the Tundra Northwest 1999 expedition. And although these are all British, there are enough Scandinavian names too to show that this was not the first time Scandinavians had been this way.

Of course the naming of newly-discovered places by European and related American/Canadian expeditions ignores the fact that these places usually have been both seen and named previously by indigenous peoples.

Two famous and successful Norwegian expeditions left their historical mark on the area. Otto Sverdrup led a mapping and scientific expedition to the islands which now hear his name as well as many place names connected with the expedition. Not least the islands Axel Heiberg, Amund Ringnes and Ellef Ringnes, where the magnetic North Pole is currently located, were mapped and named during the expedition of 1898–1902. The magnetic North Pole and consequently the area connected with Sverdrup’s expedition were a goal for the first part of Tundra Northwest 1999, but unfortunately the heavy ice forced a postponement to the second stage. An aerial survey on the homebound Hercules flight provided some compensation.

Despite being more or less mapped by the end of the 1850s, the Northwest Passage had still not been sailed in all its length by one and the same ship. This feat was first accomplished by Roald Amundsen with the small, 47 ton sloop Gjøa in the years 1903–1906. Where large expeditions such as Franklin’s had failed, Amundsen used a different method: a small (70′ long) ship and a crew of only six. In this way he was able to squeeze through the last remaining unsailed part of the Passage, around the east and south of King William Island, and thus complete the navigation. As Tundra Northwest 1999 was also to experience, the apparently more obvious route to the west of King William Island was a major problem for earlier expeditions. Sea-ice coverage and sea currents are such that the pack-ice belt is swept down the M’Clintock Channel between Victoria and Prince of Wales Islands, filling the Larsen Sound and Victoria Strait to the north and west of King William Island more often than not. It was here that Franklin’s ships were caught and held in the grip of the ice from September 1846 until they were abandoned in April 1848. By this time Franklin and 23 of the men were dead. The 105 survivors crossed to Victory Point on north-west King William Island and started the march southwards which none of them was to survive.

We too, on the 11,500 ton icebreaker Louis S. St-Laurent had to struggle through the ice in the same area. Unlike Amundsen, who even with his small ship ran aground a few times on the way round the other side of King William Island, we had to keep to deeper waters and could not visit Gjøa Haven where the Norwegian expedition wintered for two years. However, both our landing at Victory Point and the site on Graham Gore Peninsula (named after one of Franklin’s officers) gave a good impression of the nature of the island, with its exposed flat, stoney surface, which corresponds well with the original photographs and descriptions from Amundsen’s expedition. The landing at Victory Point gave further impressions and questions concerning the fate of Franklin’s expedition. The area gives rightly enough a most bleak and desolate impression that cannot have encouraged the men who came ashore there obviously already in a bad state. And yet both there and on the Graham Gore Peninsula further south, large flocks of geese were seen as well as signs of musk-oxen and reindeer. Amundsen and his men had no problem obtaining fresh meat during their stay in the area 50 years after Franklin. Why could not Franklin’s expedition have ”lived off the land” in the same way?

The first expedition site after Resolute, on south Bathurst Island, had been in ”Parry territory”. On his British naval Northwest Passage expedition 1819–1820 William Edward Parry had sailed, as the first, west through the Parry Channel and discovered the southern coasts of the islands from west Devon to Melville, the western ones of which are now known as the Parry Islands. This wintering, in Winter Harbour on south Melville Island, was the first deliberate wintering in the Arctic by British naval ships, and was carried through with reasonable success. The site was visited on stage two of Tundra Northwest 1999. The north of Bathurst Island, where fog aborted our proposed site, was first mapped by a Franklin search expedition under Sir Edward Belcher in 1852–1854. Belcher had five ships under his command and, by of a seriously disputed decision, ordered four of them to be abandoned and the whole expedition to retreat on the fifth. Belcher was court-martialled on his return to England, but was grudgingly exonerated when he proved that he had kept within his orders. In a strange postscript one of the abandoned ships, the Resolute (the origin of the place name?), was carried by the ice southwards and then drifted in open water almost 2 000 km to the Davis Strait where she was picked up undamaged by an American whaling captain in September 1855.

Moving down the Franklin Strait to the west of Boothia Peninsula, named in 1829 by John Ross after his expedition sponsor Felix Booth, the well-known gin distiller, Tundra Northwest 1999 arrived at King William Island, as previously mentioned. The island was discovered and named, and the north-eastern part explored, by Ross’ nephew James Clark Ross in 1830 on the same, Booth-sponsored expedition. The southern part was explored by a British Hudson’s Bay Company exploring expedition led by Peter Dease and Thomas Simpson in 1837–1839, the same whose names are linked to the straits near Gjøa Haven and west of Cambridge Bay. The west and south-east of the island were explored by McClintock’s expedition in 1857–1859, which found the last-known message from Franklin’s expedition at Victory Point and thus turned the heat down on the search for Franklin and possible survivors.

Amundsen’s expedition made extensive magnetic measurements during their two year stay at Gjoa Haven ( Gjøahavn) and established the then-location of the magnetic North Pole, on the Boothia Peninsula, north of where Ross had first located it in 1831. On a sledging journey by two of Amundsen’s men, the south-eastern part of Victoria Island was mapped and the Nordenskiöld islands and Palander Strait (Louis Palander was captain on Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld’s ship Vega, the first through the Northeast Passage) were named. Jenny Lind Island is referred to in the expedition report as Lind Island (Jenny Lind, 1820–1887, was a famous Swedish soprano singer) and there is no mention of the actual naming of it. As the Louis passed this area the ice slackened and gave the first stage of the expedition no more trouble.

Tundra Northwest 1999 continued through Queen Maud Gulf (Norway’s first queen in modern time, 1905–1938) to the next historic site at Cambridge Bay, explored and reported to be an excellent harbour by the Hudson’s Bay Company explorer Dr. John Rae in 1851. Barn in the Orkneys, Scotland, Rae was a truly successful explorer, moving over huge distances on foot and snow shoes, or using small local boats and living off the land. In 1854 he was the first to obtain definite news of the fate of Franklin’s expedition by hearing from the Inuit of starving and dead white men they had met in the King William Island area and buying from the Inuit various articles they had picked up from the expedition remains.

At Cambridge Bay the wreck of Roald Amundsen’s ship the Maud was visited. Amundsen had the Maud built in 1918, modelled on the same idea as Nansen’s ship Fram to be able to withstand the enormous pressures of the ice. His plan was to freeze the ship into the ice of the Arctic Basin to the north of the New Siberian Islands and let it drift, as Nansen had done with the Fram, but hopefully further north and over the North Pole itself. The expedition lasted from 1918 to 1925. Amundsen was not on board for the last three years, having given up hope of success, and the Maud was sold to Hudson’s Bay Company to cover debts. She was used until1927 as a cargo ship and finally left half sunken off the settlement of Cambridge Bay, where her mast was used as a radio aerial. The settlement has now been moved to the other side of the bay and the wreck of the Maud lies with a small collection of other historical sites, ranging in type from a stone church from 1953, held together with a mixture of clay and seal oil, to a Loran navigation mast, also from the 1950s.

A few years ago the wreck of the Maud was bought for a symbolic dollar by an interested group in Norway, who had plans on returning her to Norway for exhibition and possible restoration. The local community protested, however, and her status as an historical monument is now marked on maps and by signs. There may not be as many visitors to the wreck where it lies now as there might have been in Norway, but there is no doubt that there are visitors and that the wreck lies where it belongs.

The Louis then continued westwards between Victoria Island’s south coast, surveyed by John Rae in 1851 and the mainland coast, surveyed between the Coppermine and the Mackenzie Rivers by two expeditions led by Sir John Franklin in 1819–1822 and 1825–1827. The Dolphin and Union Strait between the two areas is named after two small boats used on the latter expedition. Our site on Banks Island was in ”McClure territory”. Robert McClure was, in fact, the first to travel the entire length of the area north of the Canadian mainland, in 1850–1854, albeit lo sing his ship and nearly his men after wintering in Mercy Bay on the north coast of the island and being rescued by another British expedition from the east (McClure’s was one of the few expeditions that approached the Passage from the west). Thus he could not be given the credit of navigating a ship through the Northwest Passage.

As the Louis approached the Mackenzie Delta, we were reaching the western edge of the coastline explored by Franklin, a name which had followed us through most of the voyage so far. The river name, however, belonged to an earlier generation. Alexander Mackenzie, born in Scotland in 1765, explored for the North West Company, a Canadian fur company, in the 1780s, seeking a river route from the interior to the Pacific. In 1879 he travelled down the Mackenzie River to its delta and discovered it flowed into the Arctic, and not the Pacific, Ocean. His feelings were reflected in the name he gave the river: the ”River of Disappointment”. It was, however, ’a major step in the exploration of the Canadian sub-Arctic’ (Holland 1994:157) and provided an access from the south to the Arctic Ocean.

Although not many actual remains and monuments from European and related exploration of the Canadian Arctic were reached on this stage of Tundra Northwest 1999, the area travelled through was of great historical importance and the experience gave a deeper understanding of the courses of the various expeditions, their successes and their failures. The history of the modern exploration of the area is complicated, and personal experience of the landscape and natural conditions creates a deeper basis for historical analysis and interpretation.