Northeast Passage
The Northeast Passage is the shipping route between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, along the Arctic coasts of Norway and Russia. The western route through the islands of Canada is accordingly called the Northwest Passage.
The NEP traverses the Barents Sea, Kara Sea, Laptev Sea, East Siberian Sea, and Chukchi Sea, and it includes the Northern Sea Route. The Northern Sea Route is a portion of the NEP. It is defined in Russian law and does not include the Barents Sea and therefore does not reach the Atlantic Ocean. However, since the NSR has a significant overlap over the majority of the NEP, the NSR term is often used to refer to the entirety of the Northeast Passage. This practice injects confusion in understanding the specifics of both navigational procedures and jurisdiction.
The Northeast Passage is one of several Arctic maritime routes, the others being the Northwest Passage and the Transpolar Route.
The first confirmed complete passage, from west to east, was made by the Finland-Swedish explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld, with the Swedish ship Vega 1878–79 backed by the royal funding of king Oscar II of Sweden. Nordenskiöld was forced to winter just a few days' sailing distance from the Bering Strait, due to pack ice.
History
11th to 17th centuries
The motivation to navigate the Northeast passage was initially economic. In Russia, the idea of a possible seaway connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans was first proposed by the diplomat Gerasimov in 1525. However, Russian settlers and traders on the coast of the White Sea, the Pomors, had been exploring parts of the route as early as the 11th century. Grigory Istoma wrote about his 1496 voyage along the passage, which was later published by Sigismund von Herberstein and influenced the planning of future expeditions.During a sail across the Barents Sea in search of the Northeast Passage in 1553, English explorer Hugh Willoughby thought he saw islands to the north, and islands called Willoughby's Land were shown on maps published by Plancius and Mercator in the 1590s, and they continued to appear on maps by Jan Janssonius and Willem Blaeu into the 1640s.
By the 17th century, traders had established a continuous sea route from Arkhangelsk to the Yamal Peninsula, where they portaged to the Gulf of Ob. This route, known as the Mangazeya seaway, after its eastern terminus, the trade depot of Mangazeya, was an early precursor to the Northern Sea Route.
East of the Yamal, the route north of the Taimyr Peninsula proved impossible or impractical. East of the Taimyr, from the 1630s, Russians began to sail the Arctic coast from the mouth of the Lena River to a point beyond the mouth of the Kolyma River. Both Vitus Bering and James Cook entered the Bering Strait from the south and sailed some distance northwest, but from 1648 to 1879 no one is recorded as having sailed eastward between the Kolyma and Bering Strait.
File:1601 De Bry and de Veer Map of Nova Zembla and the Northeast Passage - Geographicus - NovaZembla-debry-1601.jpg|thumb|upright=1.6|Map drawn in 1601 by Theodore de Bry to describe the ill-fated third voyage of the Dutch explorer Willem Barentsz in search of the Northeast Passage
The western parts of the passage were explored by northern European countries such as England, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway, looking for an alternative seaway to China and India; had it proved practicable, such a seaway would have had enormous economic and military importance. Although these expeditions failed, new coasts and islands were discovered. The most notable was the 1596 expedition led by Dutch navigator Willem Barentsz, who discovered Spitsbergen and Bear Island, and rounded the north end of Novaya Zemlya.
Fearing English and Dutch penetration into Siberia, Russia closed the Mangazeya seaway in 1619. Pomor activity in Northern Asia declined and most Arctic exploration in the 17th century was carried out by Siberian Cossacks, sailing from one river mouth to another in their Arctic-worthy kochs. In 1648, the most famous of these expeditions, led by Fedot Alekseev and Semyon Dezhnev, sailed east from the mouth of the Kolyma River to the Pacific Ocean, and rounded the Chukchi Peninsula, thus proving that no land connection existed between Asia and North America.
18th and 19th centuries
Eighty years after Dezhnev, in 1728, another Russian explorer, Danish-born Vitus Bering on Svyatoy Gavriil made a similar voyage in reverse, starting in Kamchatka and going north to the passage that now bears his name; the Bering Strait. It was Bering who named the Diomede Islands, which Dezhnev had vaguely mentioned.Bering's explorations of 1725–30 were part of a larger scheme of Peter the Great, known as the Great Northern Expedition.
The Second Kamchatka Expedition took place in 1735–42, with two ships, Svyatoy Pyotr and Svyatoy Pavel, the latter commanded by Bering's deputy in the first expedition, Captain Aleksey Chirikov. During the Second Expedition Bering became the first Westerner to sight the coast of northwestern North America, and Chirikov was the first Westerner to land there. On his return leg, Bering discovered the Aleutian Islands but fell ill, and Svyatoy Pyotr had to take shelter on an island off Kamchatka, where Bering died.
Independent of Bering and Chirikov, other Russian Imperial Navy parties took part in the Second Great Northern Expedition. One of these, led by Semyon Chelyuskin, in May 1742 reached Cape Chelyuskin, the northernmost point of both the Northeast Passage and the Eurasian continent.
Later expeditions to explore the Northeast Passage took place in the 1760s, 1785–95, the 1820s and 1830s. The possibility of navigating the length of the passage was proven by the mid-19th century.
However, it was only in 1878-79 that Fenno-Swedish explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld made the first complete passage of the Northeast Passage, leading the Vega expedition from west to east. The ship's captain on this expedition was Lieutenant Louis Palander of the Swedish Royal Navy.
One year before Nordenskiöld's voyage, commercial exploitation of a section of the route started with the so-called Kara expeditions, exporting Siberian agricultural produce via the Kara Sea. Of 122 convoys between 1877 and 1919 only 75 succeeded, transporting as little as 55 tons of cargo. From 1911 the Kolyma River steamboats ran from Vladivostok to the Kolyma once a year.
File:No-nb bldsa 3f201.jpg|thumb|left|upright=1.4|One of the pictures from Jonas Lied's and Nansen's journey to Siberia. Nansen is the tall man in the centre, number 2 from left hand is Loris-Melikov, number 5 partly concealed is Lied, number 10 is Vostrotin. Fridtjof Nansen started his trans-Siberian travel on a freighter from Oslo to the Yenisei. The journey went through parts of the Northeast Passage, which was to be opened as a shorter trading connection between Western Europe and the Far East. The photograph depicts the encounter of some of the ship's crew with officers from the Russian barges at the mouth of the Yenisei River.
In 1912, two Russian expeditions set out; Captain Georgy Brusilov and the Brusilov Expedition in the Santa Anna, and Captain Alexander Kuchin with Vladimir Rusanov in the Gerkules ; each with a woman on board. Both expeditions were hastily arranged, and both disappeared. The German Arctic Expedition of 1912, led by Herbert Schröder-Stranz, ended disastrously with only 7 of 15 crew members surviving the preliminary expedition to Nordaustlandet.
In 1913 Jonas Lied organized a successful expedition through the Kara Sea to the Yenisei. Explorer and scientist Fridtjof Nansen and Siberian industrialist Stephan Vostrotin were prominent passengers. Lied had founded The Siberian company with the purpose of exporting and importing goods through the great Siberian rivers and the Kara Sea. The 1913 trip is recorded in Nansen's Through Siberia.
In 1915, a Russian expedition led by Boris Vilkitskiy made the passage from east to west with the icebreakers Taymyr and Vaygach.
Nordenskiöld, Nansen, Amundsen, DeLong, Makarov and others also led expeditions, mainly for scientific and cartographic purposes.
After the Russian Revolution
The introduction of radio, steamboats, and icebreakers made running the Northern Sea Route viable. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Soviet Union was isolated from the western powers, which made it imperative to use this route. Besides being the shortest seaway between the western and far eastern USSR, it was the only one that lay completely inside Soviet internal waters and did not impinge on waters of opposing countries.In 1932, a Soviet expedition on the icebreaker A. Sibiryakov led by Professor Otto Yulievich Schmidt was the first to sail all the way from Arkhangelsk to the Bering Strait in the same summer without wintering en route. After trial runs in 1933 and 1934, the Northern Sea Route was officially defined and open and commercial exploitation began in 1935. The next year, part of the Baltic Fleet made the passage to the Pacific where armed conflict with Japan was looming.
A special governing body Glavsevmorput was set up in 1932, with Otto Schmidt as its director. It supervised navigation and built Arctic ports.
During the early part of World War II, the Soviets allowed the German auxiliary cruiser Komet to use the Northern Sea Route in the summer of 1940 to evade the British Royal Navy and break out into the Pacific Ocean. Komet was escorted by Soviet icebreakers during her journey. After the start of the Soviet-German War, the Soviets transferred several destroyers from the Pacific Fleet to the Northern Fleet via the Arctic. The Soviets also used the Northern Sea Route to transfer materials from the Soviet Far East to European Russia, and the Germans launched Operation Wunderland to interdict this traffic.
A convoy of seven brand-new merchant vessels built for the People's Republic of China but sailing under the Polish flag from Gdynia, reached the port of Pevek, two days of navigation before the Bering Strait in 1956.
In July 1965, USCGC Northwind, commanded by Captain Kingdrel N. Ayers USCG, conducted an oceanographic survey between Greenland, Iceland, and Scotland and was the first western vessel to operate in the Kara Sea of the Soviet Union, for which she received the Coast Guard Unit Commendation with Operational Distinguishing Device. The real mission of Northwind was to attempt a transit of the "Northeast Passage". The effort was not successful due to diplomatic reasons and caused an international incident between the U.S.S.R. and U.S.A.