THE QUEST FOR THE NORTHEAST PASSAGE
For hundreds of years, sailors and explorers from all over Europe have been looking for the Northwest and Northeast passages, in order to find an alternative route to the Orient. The main drivers of these explorations were the fragmentation of the Mongol Empire, which broke the Pax Mongolica and made it necessary to cross several borders to reach China, and the expansion of the Ottoman Empire, a sworn enemy of most Western European nations. And even when this quest was made redundant by the discovery of other routes which were way more practicable at that time, since they avoided the ice caps, the quest for the two Passages did not stop.
The quest for the Northeast Passage was initially led by England, where the Company of Merchant Adventurers to New Lands (later rebranded as Muscovy Company) was founded in 1551 in order to finance some expeditions towards the Arctic Sea. The Muscovy Company was the first joint-stock company in history, and it anticipated the various West and East Indies Companies which would play a main role in the development of British and Dutch colonialism in the following decades. The first expedition left London in 1553, composed by three ships, left London in 1553 and was commanded by led by Sir Hugh Willoughby, one of the three leading stockholders of the Company.
The outcome of this expedition was mixed. The expedition never went past Novaya Zemlya, which had already been discovered by Russian fishing communities living in the Arctic, and two of the ships had to moor in a bay on the Kola Peninsula, where the whole crew died (including Willoughby himself) because of the severe weather. Another ship, on the other hand, reached the mouth of the Dvina River, where its commander Richard Chancellor was summoned to Moscow by Czar Ivan IV, and this led to the establishment of a profitable trade route between Russia and Britain. The company still financed two other expeditions to the Northeast Passage, both unsuccessful, but its main activity was now the management of trade between Russia and Britain (as well as the quest of land routes to China and Persia through Russia), and this led to the company being officially renamed as Muscovy Company in 1555. The city of Arkhangelsk itself was founded in 1584 in order to service the trade route with Britain (and later the Netherlands), near the landing place of Richard Chancellor’s ship.
From the 17th century onwards, most expeditions along the Northeast Passage were led by Russia. Fearing that the British and Dutch explorations along the Arctic Sea would turn into some form of colonisation, the Kremlin closed them the access to the Northern Seas, while still allowing them to held profitable trade links through the Port of Arkhangelsk. A stepstone to the exploration of the region was the 1648 expedition from the Kolyma River in Eastern Siberia to the Pacific Ocean, which proved the lack of a land bridge between Asia and North America. Eighty years later, the Danish expeditor Vitus Bering was commissioned two expeditions in Eastern Siberia by Czar Peter the Great. The first one confirmed the existence of a strait dividing Asia and America which still bears his name; the second one, which lasted from 1733 to 1743, led to the mapping of Eastern Siberia and the discovery of Alaska, which was subsequently opened for Russian settlement. The Northeast Passage has not been sailed yet, but its existence was now proven.
The first successful expedition through the Northeast Passage was led by the Swedish explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskjöld in 1877-78. This success paved the way for a possible exploitation of the passage for military and commercial purposes (although only on some parts of the passage), as shown by the Kara Expeditions which transported Siberian agricultural produce through the Kara Sea. The invention of radio and icebreakers made the route more viable both for military and commercial exploitation. Its potential, after all, is great: the distance between Yokohama to Rotterdam will reduce from 11,133 nautical miles (around 20,600 km) via the Suez Canal to 7,010 nautical miles (around 13,000 km) via the Northern Sea Route, while the one between Shanghai to Rotterdam would decrease from 10,557 to 8,046 nautical miles (around 19,550 to 14,900 km). But, during the Soviet times, the route was used mostly for military and explorational purposes, or for voyages between the Siberian Arctic and the Russian mainland.
The collapse of the Soviet Union dramatically reduced commercial navigation through the Northeast Passage, leading to the abandonment of some previously flourishing Arctic ports, but it also led to an increased interest in the Northern Sea Route through the Northeast Passage as a potential international waterway. In 1997, the Finnish tanker Uikku became the first non-Russian vessel to sail through the Northern Sea Route, and in 2012 there was a sudden increase in the usage of the Northern Sea Route, with over 1 million ton of goods transported (although still way below the 6.6 million tons transported in 1987). The potential, nevertheless, is great, and the Russian Government has started a programme to revamp the route with 10 new emergency harbours and the reduction of the fees and the red tape required to sail through the Passage.
THE QUEST FOR THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE
The aims of the exploration of the Northwest Passage were akin to those of the exploration of its Northeastern twin; but, unlike that, it was promoted mainly by the Western European powers in the wake of the Age of Explorations. Some of the first expeditions were promoted in the 16th century by Spain, then the leading power on the American continent. At that point, it was thought that the Pacific Coast and the Atlantic Coast were joint by the Strait of Anian, which linked the Labrador Peninsula in nowadays Canada and Baja California in nowadays Mexico, which was originally thought to be an island rather than a peninsula. The notion of an Island of California was discredited by Francisco de Ulloa in 1539, who first reached the mouth of the Colorado River at the junction point between Baja California and the Mexican mainland and then circumnavigated Baja California up to the Cedros Island on the Pacific coast. But the quest continued, and in 1592 the Greek navigator Juan De Fuca, who sailed on behalf of the Spanish Viceroyalty of New Spain, went northwards as far as the strait which now bears his name, separating the Vancouver Island from the nowadays Washington State in the US.
In the meanwhile, French and English sailors explored the Atlantic coast up to the Hudson Bay, which currently bears the name of the English navigator who reached it for the first time in 1610, while further attempts to find out the Strait of Anian were made by sailing through the mouth of the Hudson and St Lawrence Rivers before discovering that they headed towards the American interior rather than the West Coast of the New World.
The discovery of Alaska by Vitus Bering in 1741 put an end to the notion of a Strait of Anian, replacing it with the idea of a Northwest Passage. During the following decades, the Pacific Coast was explored by Russian, British and Spanish sailors, with the main aim of setting up their territorial claims on the Pacific Northwest. The Spanish officer Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra sailed as far as the Prince William Sound near Anchorage, in Alaska, in order to claim everything up to that point as Spanish land; Russians, on the other hand, sailed southwards as far as Fort Ross, around 150 km north of San Francisco, where they set up a small trading and agricultural colony in the beginning of the 19th century. The British navigators James Cook and George Vancouver, in the meanwhile, mapped what is nowadays the Canadian Pacific Coast, while in 1826 Frederick William Beechey sailed as north as Point Barrow, past the Bering Strait.
Following the collapse of the Spanish Empire and the Alaska Purchase from the United States, the quest for the Northwest Passage was led mainly by Brits, who ultimately discovered the passage but never managed to sail it. We should wait until 1903 when the Norwegian sailor Roald Amundsen managed to sail through the Northwest Passage, on board of a small ship named Gjøa and with an expedition which lasted 3 years. As a whole, the geographical and environmental conditions of the Northwest Passage made its exploration much harder than the one of its northeastern counterpart. While the Northeast Passage goes mainly across open seas, with just a few straits, the Northwest one goes through the Canadian Archipelago, whose northernmost point (Cape Columbia) lies only 769 km south of the North Pole, and the passages through the Canadian Archipelago are likely to be covered by ice until the late summer if not year-round. We should wait 1954 to see another ship (as well as the first warship) transiting the Northwest Passage.
The discovery of the Northwest Passage was more important on a geographical point of view than on a commercial one. The usage of the Northwest Passage would dramatically reduce the length of several voyages (the distance between Newport, UK, and Vancouver, Canada, would decrease from 8,800 to 5,200 nautical miles, or from around 16,300 to 9,600 km), but the ice coverage and the lack of main seaports on the Canadian Arctic have limited its potential so far. Therefore, in order to avoid the Strait of Magellan with its long routes and its often-rough sea conditions – see Drake Shake –, the US and some Western European countries, mainly France, have rather focused on the possibility to build a canal in Central America linking the Atlantic and the Pacific. Panama was ultimately chosen for such project (the alternative was Nicaragua), and in 1903, as part of Theodore Roosevelt’s Big Stick policy, the United States supported the separation of Panama from Colombia in return to the Panama Canal Zone. The US would have completed the construction of the Canal, which was started in 1881 but stopped due to lack of funds, and would have kept it until 1999, when it was officially returned into Panama hands.
THE PASSAGES NOW
During the last decades, there has been a great increase in the interest for the Passages. The main reason is global warming, which is causing a dramatic decrease in the surface of the Arctic Ice Cap. In the second half of the 19th century, at the end of the so-called Little Ice Age, the average size of the Arctic Ice Cap in September was around 9 million km2. From then onwards, it started to decline, first slowly (there was even a trend inversion in the 1960s), then increasingly faster. The yearly sea ice minimum was around 8 million km2 in the 70’s, 6.1 million km2 in 2000 and it dropped below 4 million km2 in 2012, marking a negative record so far. The overall disadvantages of global warming greatly outnumber the positive outcomes, but the opportunity created by the melting of the ice sea are too great for the Arctic nations to be missed. On 21st August 2007, the Northwest Passage became transitable without icebreakers for the first time in recent history. Likewise, in August 2017, a Russian tanker managed to cross the Northeast Passage without any need for icebreakers, and according to the Copenhagen Business School large-scale shipments through the Arctic routes will become economically viable by 2040. It should not be overlooked that the usage of the Polar routes would decrease the emissions of CO2 related to transcontinental maritime transport.
Another prominent factor favouring the Arctic routes is the lack of constraints for the largest ships. The Suez Canal and the Panama Canal, the two main “competitors” of the Northern Sea Route and the Northwest Passage respectively, have recently been expanded in order to accommodate larger ships, but they are still unsuitable for the largest ships, such as supertankers with a capacity over 160,000 DWT and post-Panamax container ships. Even the Malacca Strait, one of the most trafficked sea routes in the world, has some constraints due to its shallow bottom (the minimum is 25 metres), and it is therefore suitable just for ships with a draft less than 20.5 metres (Malaccamax). Both Arctic passages, on the other hand, would be able to accommodate even the largest ships without constraints.
Last but not least, the ongoing geopolitical tensions in Eastern Europe and the Middle East are increasing the attractiveness of the Passages – especially the Northern Sea Route – as an alternative to the established routes. The Gaza War and the related Houthi attacks against the ships directed to Israel have inevitably affected the transit through the Suez Canal, forcing many ships to detour through the Cape of Good Hope, in South Africa. Relying on sea and land routes outside of the control of the Western nation is now a priority for both Russia and all the countries with ongoing geopolitical tensions with the US, starting from China and Iran, but these routes are becoming attractive also for those countries which are in good terms with the Western countries but want to keep an independent foreign policy, such as India. (On the other hand, from the point of view of the so-called Collective West, the Panama Canal lies in a region of the world which may drift away from its control, while a stronger hold on the Northwest Passage may be greatly beneficial in its proxy war against Russia).
At the moment, the Northern Sea Route is the most developed polar route. It is currently managed by a fleet of seven icebreakers operated by the Russian Rosatom Arctic, which provide support for the vessels crossing the route should the situation require it. As we saw before, the Northern Sea Route is highly competitive from an economic point of view, and it’s no wonder if the usage of the route is steadily increasing: in 2023, a record 35 million tons of goods have been transported through the Northern Sea Route, beating the previous record of 34.1 million tons in 2021, and this record is likely to be beaten very soon. During the last St Petersburg International Economic Forum, after all, Rosatom Arctic and the Chinese Hainan Yangpu Newnew Shipping Co. have reached an agreement to allow the year-round transit of mercantile vessels through the Northern Sea Route.
The Northwest Passage, on the other hand, is often still classified as a potential sea route. The first commercial vessel sailed the Northwest Passage in 2013, and while its usage is definitely increasing, by 2016 there have been only 240 complete crossings of the Northwest Passage, and 50 of which were carried out by passenger ships. A main obstacle to the large-scale exploitation of the Northwest Passage is its political status: unlike the Northeast one, which is entirely under Russia’s control, the Northwest Passage is divided between three nations, namely the USA, Canada and Denmark (through Greenland). Canada claims that the Northwest Passage are part of its internal waters, while the United States push for freedom of navigation. The Canadian claim is contested also by the Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC), although on a different basis: the ICC define their land as “anywhere our feet, dog teams, or snowmobiles can take us”, therefore including also the ice covering the Northwest Passage in winter.
As a whole, there are still many challenges to the development of the Northern Sea Route and the Northwest Passage. The first one is the environmental one. Global warming is also causing the melting of permafrost, and this implies the disruption of several Arctic urban and transport infrastructures, since many of them have been built on permafrost. And the future melting rate of the Arctic Ice Cap is difficult to foresee, although an inversion of the current tendency is unlikely unless there is some sort of exceptional event. The second one are the infrastructures, which are often unsuitable to support a large-scale usage of the Passages. Finally, many legal issues regarding the status of the waters are still outstanding, affecting both the Northwest and the Northeast Passage, and sorting them may not be easy given the ongoing geopolitical climate. But, despite these challenges, the potential for the development of the Arctic Sea routes is enormous, and we will almost certainly see a dramatic increase in the usage of the Passages in the upcoming years.
Giuseppe Cappelluti
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