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Andorion, on 13 September 2016 - 05:59 PM, said:
QuickTidal, on 13 September 2016 - 05:46 PM, said:
Andorion, on 13 September 2016 - 05:26 PM, said:
I find the history of the hunt for the North west passage to be one of the most frustrating and yet intriguing reading topics. At least the hunt for the North East passage yielded the overseas trade route to Russia. The NW passage was just a string of failures. They never correctly estimated the northern extent of Canada. There were weird speculation bubbles about gold deposits in Baffin Bay (fake) Lots of parties thought the northern Canadian bays and inlets to be the Passage and ended up getting stuck. Also the weird beliefs people had - I seem to recall reading that at one point it was widely believed that if you could get through the ice, the North Pole itself was a balmy tropical paradise of open water and islands.
Indeed, and when you realize that they were on the right path initially to get through...if only they had not turned into the Victoria Strait and kept going more or less straight west, they might have feasibly have made it...or at the very least mapped the passage through.
If a few of the first ones had persisted on the right track then sheer cumulative effort would have seen them through. Of course with the fall of Spain (the supremacy of Spain in the South Atlantic had been one of the main incentives to hunt for the passage) and the increasing power of the Royal Navy the passage as a viable trade route concept became increasingly obsolete
Very true. All fascinating for us studying it after the fact nonetheless!
