Northwest Passage

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.

Media

The 1940 movie Northwest Passage is about Rogers' Rangers, a force of American colonists recruited into the British army in the French and Indian War, the American theater of Europe's Seven Years' War. The film was based on the 1938 novel of the same title by Kenneth Roberts, and both are sometimes considered politically incorrect now because of their treatment of the indigenous tribes often now called "Native Americans" in the U.S. and "Original People" in Canada, groups of whom supported or opposed the European parties to the conflict to various extents at various times. The Northwest Passage was merely incidental to the plot -- at its beginning, a map a main character had drawn of the Northwest Passage causes Major Rogers to shanghai him into Rogers' Rangers, and at its end, Rogers tells the Rangers that they have been ordered (by King George II) to go to Detroit and then on toward the Pacific Ocean to find the Northwest Passage.

Northwest Passage @ imdb.com

Non-fiction books about the Northwest Passage include:

• Arctic Journeys: A History of Exploration for the Northwest Passage (American University Studies Series IX, History), by Miller Graff [ISBN 0820417459 (1992 hdbk)]
• The Northwest Passage: Arctic straits, by Donat Pharand [ISBN 9024729793 (1984 hdbk)]
• Northwest Passage: The Historic Voyage of The S.S. Manhattan, by William D. Smith [ISBN 0070584605 (1970 hdbk)]