
Nowadays, retreating sea ice has been widely acknowledged as a driving factor for increasing marine traffic in the Arctic. In fact, Arctic commercial shipping has a very long history, encompassing a 500-year period. This blog will provide a brief overview of key historical events that led to shipping in the Canadian Arctic.
In the 1490s, John Cabot, an Italian navigator and explorer, firstly proposed the existence of the Northwest Passage (NWP), as an inter-oceanic passage between Europe and Asia. This hypothesis provoked passion from European explorers and navigators, who spent several centuries attempting to locate Arctic waterways.
From 1576 to 1578, Sir Martin Frobisher, an English explorer, successfully conducted three voyages, discovering Labrador and what is now Iqaluit (previously known as Frobisher’s Bay), in Nunavut. These voyages had significant impacts on Arctic history as they have 1) made some (conflicting) contacts with Inuit; 2) triggered sporadic ore mining activities; and 3) helped European whalers making their way to the Baffin Island.
In 1668, a British trading ship Nonsuch was sent to explore the Hudson Bay. This voyage led to the creation of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), which did the work of territorial exploration, government, knowledge exchange and became a critical enabler of Confederation and Canada as a country.
Throughout the 18th century, HBC established hundreds of trading posts across the Arctic. Inuit started to travel seasonally for hundreds of miles to nearby posts to barter items. HBC also provided annual sea lifts to trading posts (such as James Bay). This is the early form of community re-supply.
Since the 19th century, the invention of steamships had greatly increased whalers’ ability to hunt further north and encouraged a more systematic exploration of the NWP. The expeditions of Sir John Ross (1818) and William Edward Parry (1819) successfully crossed the Baffin Bay and showed whalers the way to the Lancaster Sound. Then, industrial whaling had constituted the largest portion of marine traffic in the Canadian Arctic, and reached the peak from 1820 to 1840.
Perhaps the most significant historic milestone was Sir John Franklin’s lost expedition in 1845. Three months after their departure from the England, Franklin and his crew were last seen in the Baffin Bay. This tragedy provided an excuse or a motivation for numerous search expeditions that eventually ended discovering and mapping out the NWP. Later, the NWP was navigated for the first time by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen (1903-1906).
Types of Arctic commercial shipping activities became most diversified in the 20th century. Commercial whaling continued but in a much smaller scale due to the depletion of Arctic whale populations. Fur trade then took the leadership in attracting marine traffic until the outbreak of World War II. Meanwhile, the mining industry grew rapidly from the 1950s to the 1970s, initiating massive inbound and outbound marine transportation. Marine tourism finally expanded to the Canadian Arctic with M/S Lindblad Explorer’s first expedition visiting the Baffin Bay region in 1984.
In conclusion, commercial shipping has historically been a major way to stimulate the Arctic economy and move people and goods in and out of the Arctic. Nowadays, the NWP is more accessible under the impacts of climate change, attracting more shipping interests and, on the other hand, presenting risks to Canada’s national sovereignty and security. Meanwhile, Inuit, whose voices have been marginalized in Arctic governance, continue to assert their inherent self-determination and self-governance rights in Arctic marine spaces.
Within this socio-political context, Canada is in the process of developing a new governance framework for Arctic shipping. This framework will be able to support sustainable development of the Arctic shipping industry, while fulfilling the federal government’s commitments to reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples.
Photo by Isaac Demeester on Unsplash