Exploring the Northwest Passage: Amundsen vs Franklin and the Inuit Keys to Survival

On the 19th of May 1845, Sir John Franklin, an experienced 59-year-old Arctic explorer, set sail from Greenhithe, England. Under his command was the nineteenth British expedition attempting to traverse the fabled Northwest Passage, seeking a shorter route to Asia. Franklin was leading two modified warships, the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror, on what would ultimately become the greatest disaster in 300 years of British exploration.

Almost sixty years after Franklin’s expedition, in the summer of 1903, a small 45-ton fishing vessel named the Gjøa (pronounced “joa” in North America) set sail from Oslo under the midnight sun, in another attempt to finally traverse the Northwest Passage. The tall Norwegian captain of this vessel was Roald Amundsen.