Opening the Northwest Passage: the Manhattan, the Macdonald and McLure

The increasing prospect of a commercial shipping route through the Northwest Passage renews interest in the 1969 voyage of the supertanker SS Manhattan, assisted by the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker John A. MacDonald. The 500-year-old quest for a polar route between Europe and Asia, and development of Arctic resources, might at least be a consolation prize from the threatening catastrophe of global warming.

In McClure Strait, the Manhattan was gripped fast in ice for 34 hours, until freed by the Macdonald. Twenty-eight miles away, at Mercy Bay, Captain Robert McClure and his 60 men of HMS Investigator, one of the many ships searching for the lost Franklin expedition, were trapped by ice not for hours, but for 18 months in 1852-53.

From the bridge of the Manhattan, while reading McClure’s journal, I could see much of the route they followed in completing the first known crossing of the Passage, a crossing made by walking 170 miles across polar ice to be rescued by another ship searching for Franklin.

Read this 11-page, first-hand account of the Manhattan and Macdonald voyage, adapted from my 1969 articles published in Oilweek.