In 1981, anthropologists exhumed three sailors from the permafrost of Beechey Island and found high lead levels, scurvy, and signs of botulism, evidence from the Franklin expedition. The search for a sea route through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago began with John Cabot in 1497, driven by the hunt for a westward path to Asia and by bad science: the theory of a warm open polar sea and the belief that seawater could not freeze. In 1611 Henry Hudson’s crew mutinied and set him, his teenage son, and seven others adrift in James Bay. Parliament later offered a 20,000 pound prize. In 1845 Sir John Franklin sailed with HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. Both ships were locked in ice near King William Island by 1846, Franklin died in 1847, and in 1848 the survivors abandoned ship and dragged sledges south until every man died. Their 8,000 food tins had been sealed with lead solder.

In 1854 John Rae of the Hudson’s Bay Company brought back Inuit reports of cannibalism, which Charles Dickens and others refused to accept. Rae succeeded by traveling light, using dog sleds and furs, and learning from the Inuit. Robert McClure crossed between 1850 and 1854 only after abandoning his ice trapped ship. Roald Amundsen made the first all sea transit from 1903 to 1906 in the 47 ton herring boat Gjoa with six men, wintering at King William Island and skiing about 800 kilometers to Eagle, Alaska, to send a telegram. In August 2007 the passage opened without an icebreaker. In 2013 the Nordic Orion carried over 73,000 tons of coking coal from Canada to Finland, and in 2016 the Crystal Serenity took over 1,500 people from Alaska to New York in 32 days.

• Only about 12 percent of Canada’s Arctic waters are charted to modern standards.
• Parts of the eastern route are barely 15 meters deep, and drifting multi-year ice makes schedules unreliable.
• Canada calls the passage internal waters, while the United States calls it an international strait.
• A gray whale, long gone from the Atlantic, appeared in the Mediterranean in May 2010.
• The Pacific plankton Neodenticula seminae is back in the Atlantic after about 800,000 years.