ARCTIC HAZARDS

Hokitika Guardian, 9 December 1929, Page 3

ARCTIC HAZARDS

PRISONERS IN A WORLD OF ICE. LONDON, Oct. 17. News reached London yesterday of a wonderful feat which has been accomplished by three ships engaged in the fur trade and owned by the Hudson’s Bay Company. These ships—Baychimo, Fort James and Fort Macpherson—have between them forced the dreaded North-West Passage, the perilous channel which links the Atlantic and Pacific oceans at the extreme north of America. The North-West Passage was, in the Kith century, thought to lead to China. Attempts to find it were made by such great sailors as Frobisher, Gilbert Baffin, Hudson and John and Sebastian Cabot. All failed.

During 1903-1905, however, the explorer Amundsen made a complete voyage through the Passage. The steamer Baychimo set out from Vancouver for her share of the great ad venture last July. She sailed through the dangerous Bering Strait and leached Point Barrow on July 24, and Cambridge Bay, south of Victoria Island, on August 29. Last year the schooner Fort James under the command of Captain Bush, sailed from Montreal and having wintered in the ice began, with the coming of spring, a fight to reach King William Land. She made the hazardous voyage and was joined there eventually by tho Fort Macpherson, which cruises within the Arctic Circle as a supply ship for the fur posts and for exploration purposes. The Fort Macpherson had sailed from Cambridge Bay, the farthest point reached by the Baychimo. Tn this way the three vessels contrived to do what any one of them alone would have found insuperable. During their winter in the iee those aboard Fort James endured great hardships. Most of the time they were actually prisoners in a world of ice. It is thought that the success of the

attempt to force the Passage may mean that skins will he brought to this country more quickly than in the past. “Tt remains to he seen, though” an oflieial of the Hudson’s Hay Company said, “whether it is a commercial proposition. If it is, then we shall he saved the dangerous voyage from Vancouver through the Bering Strait.”