Point de la Guiche red; narrow strait Rasmussen sailed through yellow
Looking at the map above you might wonder why we navigated into this small bay and Point de la Guiche and then had to navigate an extremely narrow passage south of King Island. The next images of the area in 1854, a time when there was no summer and effectively two consecutive winters, shows the sea ice that was most likely Franklin's undoing. Fifty years later, Knud Rasmussen bypassed that possible blockade via the same route our Captain took. Franklin sailed down the west coast of King Island
Red Point de la Guiche; yellow the straits south of King Island; green where the Terror was found
We navigated in the circled area for a couple of days
We were sailing in the wake of explorers (and rescuers) of the NW Passage
And the NW Passage story keeps unfolding before our eyes. We sailed in the wake of Roald Amundsen near Point de la Guiche and Gjoa Haven; his 1903-06 expedition on his ship, the Gjoa, and six companions was the first to navigate the Northwest Passage. We navigated passed de la Guiche Point over night so I didn’t get to see the settlement of Gjoa Haven, but the next morning we went exploring Terror Bay on King William Island. This was quite an exciting day in our historic sailing of the NW Passage. The bay is named for the shipwrecked ‘Terror’ which was part of British Explorer Franklin’s lost expedition of 1845 seeking the NW Passage sailing the ships ‘Erebus’ and ‘Terror’. The two ships and their men disappeared with little trace. Canadian searchers found the sunken Terror in 2014 (and Erebus in 2016) off King William Island. We watched a documentary interviewing an Inuit of the region and it seems that his forebears saw at least one of the ships sticking out of the ice but didn't report it for fear they wouldn't be believed. When they saw the masts it was not where the ship finally sunk so one can only imagine that there may have still been sailors on board at that point. The Inuit have many stories about explorers, and indeed navigating these waters through the torturous channels, but most are dismissed as fanciful. One explorer who did not ignore the Inuit knowledge was Knud Rasmussen, explorer and ethnographer. He was the first European to cross NW Passage via dog sled; he traveled with two Inuit companions.
You can imagine how devastating tides and floating ice would be here in this flat landscape
Isolated in a shallow sea
Today we sailed near the site where the Terror was found; of course we weren't allowed to sail anywhere near the site but our Captain and EL got us as close as safely possible. It was quite eerie. In the middle of a rather desolate expanse of water with the land clinging featureless to the horizon, except for a few stone cairns dotted here and there most likely landmarks or direction indicators. In the middle of that great silent expanse, we huddled together in seven zodiacs while our onboard historian, Robert (Bob) Headland, talked about the possible fate of those men onboard the Terror.
It was unbelievably atmospheric and rather chilling. The ensuing silence was broken by the haunting song ‘Northwest Passage’ sung by Stan Rogers. It was a day of exploration, navigation, history and geology. Perfect ingredients. Expeditions don't get much better than that,
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