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A List of the Full Transits of the Canadian Northwest Passage 1903 to 2006

by John MacFarlane (1990 – Revised 1995, 2011 & 2012)

The RCMP schooner St. Roch and HMCS Labrador together in Esquimalt Harbour after each had made successful transits of the Northwest Passage - 10 years apart.

Transiting the North West Passage: Any vessel crossing both the entry to the Bering Strait and Davis Strait (or vice versa) is deemed to have made a full transit of the Northwest Passage.

Souvenir watch from the 1993 west to east transit of the North West Passage by the Russian icebreaker Kapitan Khlebnikov carrying passengers. (Photo courtesy of Jeff Field.)

Sources:

• J.M. MacFarlane (1992) Northwest Passage Challengers. In Resolution. Spring Issue. Maritime Museum of British Columbia;
• Sale, Richard (2002);
• Vaughan, Richard (1994);
• Lalor, William G. (1959) Submarine Through The North Pole. In The National Geographic. Vol. CXV, No. 1 January 1959;
• Sven Johansson Victoria BC;
• Struzik, Edward. (1991);
• Storrs, A.H.G. and T.C. Pullen. (1970);
• Smith, William D. (1970);
• Robinson, J. Lewis. (1945);
• Robertson, O.C.S. (1964);
• Rasmussen, Knud (1927);
• Pullen, T.C. & C. Swithenbank (1990);
• Pharand, D. (1984);
• Nuligak (1966);
• McKinlay, William Laird. (1976);
• McGrath, Robin (1989);
• Marshall, C.J. (1958);
• MacInnis, Jeff (1989);
• Larsen, Henry A. (1954);
• Larsen, Henry A., Frank Sheer & Edward Omholt-Jensen (1967);
• Kemp, Peter (Ed.) (1976);
• Keating, Bern (1970);
• Harding, Les (1991);
• Hancock, Lyn, (1974);
• French, Alice (1976);
• Fillmore, Stanley and R.W. Sandilands (1983);
• de Roos, Willy (1977);
• de Poncins, Gontrans (1954);
• Coast Guard Northern Arctic Operations Division (1991)

To quote from this article please cite:

MacFarlane, John M. (1990 – Revised 1995, 2011 & 2012) Full Transits of the Canadian Northwest Passage. Nauticapedia.ca 2012. http://nauticapedia.ca/Articles/NWP_Fulltransits.php

Site News: December 16, 2024

The vessel database has been updated and is now holding 94,774 vessel histories (with 16,266 images and 13,928 records of ship wrecks and marine disasters).

Vessel records are currently being reviewed and updated with more than 45,000 processed so far this year (2024).

The mariner and naval biography database has also been updated and now contains 58,599 entries (with 3996 images).

Thanks to Ray Warren who is beginning a long process of filling gaps in the photo record of vessel histories in the database. Ray has been documenting the ships of Vancouver Harbour for more than 60 years.

Thanks to contributor Mike Rydqvist McCammon for the hundreds of photos he has contributed to illustrate British Columbia’s floating heritage.

My very special thanks to our volunteer IT adviser, John Eyre, who (since 2021) has modernized, simplified and improved the update process for the databases into semi–automated processes. His participation has been vital to keeping the Nauticapedia available to our netizens.

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