Susan Tafler, age 10, of Albany, New York for her question:
Where is the Northwest Passage?
On December 1, 1957, the Coast Guard ship Storis sailed under the Golden Gate bridge and into San Francisco Bay. She reported that she was the first to ever sail the Northwest Passage. She had come from the Atlantic to the Pacific by rounding the northern shores of our continent. After some 300 years a dream had come true. This northwest Passage had taken the ship by Queen Maud's Sound, Stimpson Strait and James Ross Straight. All these places are inside the icy Arctic Circle.
The dream began in the 16th Century when Europe carried on a brisk trade with China. The trade route was the sea and the trading vessels were small sailing ships. Bold mariners took these frail ships around the Cape of Good Hope and some even sailed the stormy waters of Cape Horn. There was no Panama Canal and no Suez Canal to shorten the long, hazardous route to the Orient.
Men knew that the world was round. The Orient could be reached by sailing southwest or southeast. But what about trying a shorter route by sailing north of the great land masses? This was the dream of the Northeast and the Northwest Passage. The main figure in the dramatic search was the English navigator Henry Hudson for whom the Hudson River, Hudson Strait and Hudson Bay are named.
Several explorers had touched the Arctic regions. At least two maps were available. However, they were not very reliable because the map makers made up what they did not know. This is how matters stood when Hudson took up the quest for a short northern route to China.
He tried first to find a Northeast Passage, north of Siberia. His small ship, sponsored by the Muscovy Company, set forth in 1607 with a crew of ten men and a boy. He was stopped by the ice barrier off Spitzbergen and turned back. He tried again the next year and failed.
The third trip was made for the Dutch East India Company, The ship was the Half Moon with a crew of less than 20. Hudson started east again but his crew persuaded him to turn around and try for a northwest sea lane. He sailed by Newfoundland and into New York Harbor. He sailed up the river which now bears his name to a place where l1lbany now stands. He turned back when he was sure that this was not the way to China.
Hudson's fourth, and last, trip was sponsored by a group of Englishmen. He set forth in the Discovery on April 17, of 1610. He made directly for Davis Strait between Greenland and bleak Baffinland. He sailed through Hudson Strait and on August 3 he entered the largest land‑locked sea in the world, the cold, icy bay which now bears his name.
Winter came and the ship was locked in ice. When spring freed them, a mutiny was led by a sailor named Henry Greene. The mutineers took over the ship and Hudson, his young son and seven sick men were set adrift in a small open boat. Greene was slain by Eskimoes and the rest were jailed when they reached England.
Henry Hudson perished in his search for the Northwest Passage through the icy waters of the Arctic. No one succeeded until the USCGC Storis made the trip in July 1957.