Direct Route

The legendary Northwest Passage, a direct water route across the top of North America, has been the goal of navigators since Explorer Henry Hudson perished trying to find it in 1611. Norway's famed Roald Amundsen made a trip across in the 47-ton yacht Gjoea in 1905; the 80-ton Royal Canadian Mounted Police schooner St. Roch (TIME, Aug. 2), commanded by Mountie Superintendent Henry A. Larsen, in 1942 became the first vessel to make the passage from west to east. But both Amundsen and Larsen sailed through Prince of Wales Strait, detouring around the broader, more direct but more northerly western exit: fog-shrouded, ice-choked McClure Strait.

Last week the U.S. Navy announced that two U.S. icebreakers, the Navy's Burton Island and the Coast Guard's Northwind, had successfully cut their way through McClure on a joint U.S.Canadian expedition. Neither ship made a complete passage from the Arctic to the Atlantic Ocean; the Burton Island sailed through the Prince of Wales Strait from the west and turned around Banks Island to push westward again through McClure Strait (see map); the Northwind pushed eastward from the Arctic Ocean. Both ships used helicopters to scout the best passage through the ice. Unusually heavy melting of barrier ice eased the passage; even so, the big 269-ft. icebreakers cut and crushed their way through ice four to ten feet thick.

Although the new shortcut made the headlines, Canadian and U.S. scientists aboard the expedition had a more important mission: taking soundings and recording data on the Arctic seas. With accurate charts, an atomic submarine, such as the U.S.S. Nautilus (TIME, Jan. 11), could cruise from the Atlantic to the Pacific under the Arctic icepack, virtually invulnerable to search and counterattack.

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