And Now You're Gonna Believe Us

An orange line shows the most direct route the ice-free Northwest Passage beside partially blocked Northeast passage (blue line) in this Envisat ASAR mosaic photo of the Arctic Ocean, early September, 2007. The dark grey colour represents the ice-free areas, while green represents areas with sea ice.

I don't think there is anybody who doesn't believe that global warming is taking place, it's just a question of how quickly and by what means. Well this photograph from NASA shows that the fabled North West Passage linking West-East is now a reality. All those hundreds of years searching and now we have the technology to see exactly what is happening to one of the great mythical trading routes. The world is genuinely getting to be a smaller place in terms of unexplored and inaccessible regions and I find that quite scary rather than reassuring.

I can remember when I was a small boy seeing a television programme about the famous Franklin voyage. My Dad was quite keen on the old adventure stories and he told about Cook, Amundsen, Cabot, of Everest expeditions, of Shackleton. I suppose the voyages of Cabot and his son, Frobisher and Franklin are the three that have stayed in my mind.

In 1497 John Cabot and possibly his son Sebastian, sponsored by Henry VII, set out across the Atlantic from Bristol hoping to find a way to the East. Little is known about the voyage although they probably landed at Maine, Newfoundland or Nova Scotia. In 1498 John Cabot again travelled westwards in search of a route to Japan but never returned to England. Ten years later Sebastian went on a disputed expedition in two ships with 300 men in search of a Northwest Passage. Recent evidence suggests that he sailed through Hudson Strait and into Hudson Bay. Cabot also believed that he had reached the Pacific Ocean.

On his first Northwest Passage expedition in 1576 Frobisher discovered Frobisher Bay and thought he had found gold, thus prompting further expeditions in 1577 and 1578 that were partly sponsored by Elizabeth I. On the third voyage Frobisher entered Hudson Strait, which he named Mistaken Straightes . He would have liked to search for the Northwest Passage but his orders were for mining only. Having built a small house on an island in Frobisher Bay, his ships returned to England with over 1000 tons of useless ore.

On May 19, 1845, the 59- year-old Sir John Franklin, together with 127 officers and men, set sail in the Erebus and Terror in the unexplored region between the south side of Barrow Strait and the north coast of America. In July 1845 two whalers sighted Franklin's ships in northern Baffin Bay, but after that, the members of the expedition lost all contact with the outside world.