Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - The Northwest Passage

Episode Date: May 5, 2025

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why the Northwest Passage is secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

The Northwest Passage, known for being geography, famous for being sailing over Canada, eee, nobody thinks much about it so let's have some fun. Let's find out why the Northwest Passage is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt. I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host, Katie Golden. Katie, what is your relationship to or opinion of the Northwest Passage?

I know so little about it that I would say this is truly secretly incredibly fascinating because she said the title. I said the title because it's so it's uh I don't really I figure it's somewhere boats and whales go and that's about all I know about it. That's it. Yeah especially our numbers right away will like define it a lot but the basic idea it was sort of a European concept, but it was how do we sail from Europe to Asia and back by going over North America to the north? Yeah, which I get how you do that with planes because they're up in the sky, but with a

boat best down in the water. From what I understand, the north is pretty cold and there's a lot of ice there. So I don't know much about it. Actually, my dad is an oceanographer. So he's been to the Arctic a few times for research. Perhaps they even used the Northwest Passage. I do not know. I myself have never been in a ship to go study

things. I get horribly seasick. Oh, that's too bad. Yeah. Yeah. And I had basically heard of this route from like age of sail history stuff and otherwise did not know much else about it before researching. So it was exciting to learn its whole deal. Yeah, I feel like I'm about, it feels like I'm about to play one of those 90s where in the world is Carmen Sandiego games, where they teach you about history by having Carmen Sandiego steal key items

from world history and like, could she steal a passage though with it? Because that doesn't seem like she could. It seems like this would be an arrangement of ice and landmass and not thievable. But I feel like Carmen Sandiego is wily enough she would find a way. It's like a story of stealing the top of Canada or something. Right, right, right. And thank you to The Dan on the Discord for supporting this. Head support from PK, support from Chris and other people too,

because it is a thing either people have heard of or have been impacted by, but we never think about it much. So very CIF. Yeah. Very the title. I would say in my entire life I've spent maybe a total of 65 seconds thinking about the Northwest Passage. Are you looking at the little clock on your recorder or something? Right. Now 66, 67, 68, 69. It's a record, people. And on every episode we leave with a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics.

This week that's in a segment called Ah, for one more time, let's talk numbers and statistics To find the stats and numbers reaching on to takeaways Tracing our outline through this topic picked by listeners And make a Northwest Passage episode I'm golf clapping. I'm not sure if the gating in my microwave microphone picks up the golf clap, but there's a golf clap happening. It's very good. Beautiful. Thank you. Yeah, I had never heard of the song Northwest Passage by Stan Rogers, but thank you to Alex G on the Discord and the Dan on the Discord for suggesting that. So it's a song about the Northwest Passage.

Yeah, it's like a folk song about the era of people trying to find a Northwest Passage. I see. That's interesting. There's a whole culture around this. So people do care about ships and boats and getting them through places. It turns out, yeah.

And we fly, we don't think about it. We're plain people, but. Yeah, and we have. We don't think about it. We're plain people. But yeah, and we have a new name for this segment every week. Please make them as silly and wacky and bad as possible. Submit through Discord or to siftpot at gmail.com. And the first number this week is 1906, the year 1906. That is when Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen completed a sea voyage through the Northwest Passage. Oh! We think he's the first person to sail through it.

Rold Amundsen? Yeah. I hope I pronounced the Norwegian name good, but we'll see. The entire country of Norway will be so upset with you. So was he the first guy on a boat to go through the Northwest Passage? Yeah, the first person to sail entirely through one boat across the entire passage. It took from 1903 all the way to 1906 because it freezes for most of the year. Oh no. Well, wait.

So okay. He sailed and then it just froze his boat and he was just like, well, and he stays on his boat. Yeah, and like made camp. Yeah. Whoa. So they actually, they were only sailing for like several months of time and the rest of the time he was camping. Yeah. Camping and because look, I have learned that when you have old timey people in cold weather, they often gotta eat each other.

And that's not a good situation. So how did he manage to do that without sort of having a Donner party situation? That's a great question. The short version is that he had a boat with a gas powered, like petroleum powered engine. And he also planned very effectively and learned from native people. I see.

And so our whole last takeaway will be the details, but that's how. I see. Yeah, that does, it is helpful when you actually listen to people who live in the area that you're going to. Yeah, how about that? Because people live in northern Canada. Like, as far as political territory goes, we're basically talking about Canada this week. The top of Canada is what people are sailing through.

The other key number with the challenge he faced is more than 36,000 islands. That's the number of separate islands, more than 36,000 in what's called the Arctic archipelago. That is a baffling number of islands. When we're saying islands, do we mean like, you know, sort of one little mound with like a frozen palm tree on it that you'd see in a New Yorker cartoon? What is the scale of these islands? I love the cartoon I like as a, it's all sizes, yeah. And the source here is an amazing book called The Last Viking, The Life of Roald Amundsen.

And that's by award-winning nonfiction writer Stephen R. Bown. He says 94 of the islands are considered major and locations like Baffin Island are some of the largest islands in the world. But then there's many, many thousands of tiny one frozen palm tree islands. And the navigation challenges, most of them have very jagged coastlines, you'd say, with like lots of back and forth. So when sailors initially said, I'll just follow the coastline, they wasted a lot of time and got cold.

In terms of these islands, are they mostly made out of rock? Are they kind of frozen? What is the terrain? Great question, mostly rock. We have like solid islands in the Arctic archipelago and Greenland and so on. And then the actual North Pole and the Arctic, that's just ice on top of sea. There's no northern version of Antarctica. I guess you'd call it arctica. There's not like a piece of land at the North Pole. It's just ice that

is always frozen. Right, right. There's a passive about Antarctica at the South Pole there. And then South Pole totally different. It's an entire continent of land. Right. But within the Arctic Circle, there are plenty of landmasses. Yeah, exactly. You're dealing with just frozen ice at the top and then land plus ice below that.

It's like ice cream on a brownie. Oh, that's such an inviting description. Listeners, don't go there right now without preparing. Don't rush there. Yeah. Don't get out of your boat. Get out of your boat. Hey, stop.

Get out of your boat. I'm going to make a dessert with ice cream on a brownie with like a little chocolate boat on it and call it the rolled almonds in. And the next number here is the year 1496. So 410 years earlier, 1496. That's kind of earlier. We didn't have any steam powered engines back then. No, and that's the year when a mysterious person named Giovanni Caboto began the search

for a Northwest Passage. Ah, Giovanni Caboto! He goes and he tries to make the pasta in the Northwest Passage. Giovanni Caboto, he was born in Genoa in 1450 and extremely similar to another Italian navigator born in Genoa named Cristoforo Colombo. Hey, that, I was about to swear. He's not a nice person. He was not a nice person. Yeah. And the main difference is Caboto did not enslave people so much, but their names got anglicized to Christopher Columbus and John Cabot. So people might have heard of John Cabot rather than Giovanni Caboto. I feel like Giovanni Caboto is better because Boat's in the name.

So I feel like, you know. Navnet of determinism strikes again. Right. So he focused his sights more on the northerly regions of the globe. Kisar's here, the Royal Museum's Greenwich and the Canadian Encyclopedia and also the New York Times. And they talk about how both Cristoforo Colombo and Giovanni Caboto were basically bouncing around late 1400s Europe, trying to get money to sail west from Europe and go straight to Asia. And Columbus got a gig first from Spain and sailed to the Caribbean and enslaved people.

Cabotos said, hey, King of England, King Henry VII, can I do something similar but north of Columbus? And he was like, only if you have a good name like John Cabot. Almost, yeah. Or George Turnip. And he's like, only if you have a good name like John Cabot. Almost yeah. Or George Turnip. Oh, that's such a good name. And so I want to call him George Turnip, but John Cabot in 1496, he tries to sail west.

He doesn't even get to the Americas because he's not that good at sailing and he has to turn for storms. But he tries again the next year and sails to Labrador and to Newfoundland in what's now Canada. He makes a bunch of wild claims that he either reached Japan or Brazil or a fictional place called the Isle of Seven Cities, and other people make these claims too. Much like Columbus, he didn't realize he had kind of sparked a new question. He didn't get to Asia. He said, how do we get around this Americas to get to Asia?

Yeah, yeah. Just like, yes, it might be Brazil, it might be Japan. Either way, the people here do appear to be large bears who love eating my men. Right, he found a much colder place than Columbus did. So he was like, is it Japan? And didn't ask a lot more questions. Went home. And the other weird thing about Cabot is that unlike Columbus, we don't quite know what

happened next. There are not clear records about his next voyage the next year, 1498. Did he like, was it an ill-fated voyage? That's one theory. He might have died trying to find a Northwest Passage. And while being really the first person to ask this question, because Native people simply lived in North America, they didn't try to sail a Northwest Passage. They might have been able to, but why would they bother? Another theory says that Cabot went south of Newfoundland and explored what later became the Thirteen Colonies.

Another theory says that Giovanni Caboto snuck a bunch of Italian monks onto his ship to build a Catholic monastery in Newfoundland. And then there's another theory that Cabot took one of his set of ships to sneak back to Europe and just live quietly in Europe instead of dealing with all this. He may have either decided to live among the native peoples of what is now Canada or joined a pod of narwhal.

Equally likely, basically. Right, right. Columbus stayed very famous and charged with crimes the rest of his life, and Caboto was like Homer into the hedge. I don't know, man. Forget this. Yeah. The right choice, I think.

Yeah, for sure. And so whatever happened to him, he sparked 410 years of efforts by Europeans to say, how do I sail either over or through Canada to get to Asia? Right. And it took until a Norwegian guy. So that's the timeline of our entire topic, basically. It does seem really cold and I kind of get it. Like if you go out there like really determined you are going to make history and then you're there and but it is just really cold. You're like, damn, this is actually really cold. I think I'm going to go home.

Yeah. That's what a lot of people said. The other guys who found a passage around the bottom of South America and stuff, they were like, this weather's all right. And then Northwest Passage people were like, this is very hard. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, literally, it's hard to survive in the cold. The people who live there live in that area. They have developed specialized techniques over thousands of years to be able to live there without dying of vitamin deficiencies.

Exactly. Yeah. And most of the guys who went were like a venture capitalist who hung out in the courts of Spain or something. And so they didn't know anything about that. Yeah. They might not have the humility to listen to native people who warn them that, hey, there's like no fresh vegetables up here. You might have to eat some raw meat in order to get those vitamins and then they just get scurvy and, you know, perish. Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah. Amundsen made a lot of seal, like on purpose. He was like, seal will keep me alive and you guys alive. Yeah. Yeah. Because I learned that from the Inuit people and the Sami people as well. The last numbers for this topic are 2016 and 2017. Because in those two years, 2016 and 2017, a cruise ship went through the Northwest Passage. On porpoise? Fun and yes. Yeah, thanks to technological advances and melting sea ice, a company called Crystal Cruises said, we can sell a tourist experience by being the first luxury cruise ship to go

through the Northwest Passage route. Is the idea the novelty or is it actually scenic? Kind of both, but more the novelty. More to say like you are like an Ombudsen, but you're also on a cruise ship and there's three meals a day and stuff. Are ya? Are ya though? And they did it twice, then they canceled it in 2018, and then that line went through

bankruptcy and COVID, in the COVID pandemic. But they set a bunch of records. It was easily the biggest ship to have ever gone through the passage. Capacity for 1,070 passengers and a crew of 655. They also charged $120,000 US dollars per passenger for being on the boat. $120,000 per person. Yeah. People have a, I, there's too much money that some people have, I think.

Yeah, I agree. I guess this is one of the less evil ways to spend it. Yeah, you're not like doing the worst things we can think of. But you're not eating, you're not eating like panda burgers, but it still seems kind of silly. What like, so, because I know that cruise ships can be damaging to areas that are more delicate. So for instance, there's an effort to make sure that cruise ships don't dock close to Venice

because every time they do, they send like waves of seawater into Venice and it damages the pilings underneath the city. The city is not a natural occurring city. I guess there are no natural occurring cities, but it is built on wooden struts to keep it above water. And then the cruise ships come in and then they cause damage to these struts.

So they've banned that. And so my question is, are there delicate aspects of this area in terms of the environment that maybe it's a good thing that cruise ships aren't going in or is it pretty tough? In general, it's good they're not going in. Yeah, the main injury to nature is sound. Apparently, especially animals like narwhals and whales, it's disruptive to them psychologically and also for mating if there's a lot of ocean noise from our big ships.

Yeah, yeah. When they hear Dua Lipa playing from the cruise ship, it turns them off. They are no longer in the mood. Also with this trip, the vice-commandant of the US Coast Guard, he told reporters they'd been planning around the clock to protect the cruise ship from various icebergs because quote, I don't want a repeat of the Titanic. And then they made all the passengers take out policies for $50,000 worth of evacuation insurance to fund the rescue if necessary.

But passenger Sue Pendleton told the New York Times, quote, there are plenty of lifeboats on board and that she wasn't concerned. And the ship did twice in a row get through without an accident. I guess that's fair enough. It is a different situation from the Titanic though, because for the Titanic they did not, it was actually, I was kind of surprised to learn that it was not this exclusive luxury travel for rich people. And then a bunch of people thrown into crates and steerage. It was actually designed to be somewhat affordable for,

I mean, there were certainly the first class passengers that had it really good, but it was also meant to be somewhat comfortable and affordable for lower class passengers. And so I found that interesting. So this does not seem like the Titanic basically in any respect, especially in the fact that it didn't sink, which I guess is good. Yeah, that too. Yeah, this is overly luxurious and the goal was to do something nobody had

ever done before in terms of a route, not the size of the ship. But it was possible partly due to sea ice melting. Oh, good. And that brings us into takeaway number one. Earth has a northwest passage and a northeast passage, which we are filling with ships and possibly invasive species. Invasive species, you say. So yeah, and that part, it's mostly theoretical and needing to be measured more because we're only about 10 years into an era when ships are commonly going through both a Northwest

Passage and also what's called the Northeast Passage. The Northeast Passage is basically you sail from Scandinavia over Russia into the Pacific. And we'll have a map of both routes. You can basically do a little donut around the Arctic if you want to now. Ships bringing in invasive species in ruining islands has been a classic tradition, I think, originated by the Dutch, but it is, the famous extinction of the dodo

is mostly attributed to ships bringing in dogs and rats and the invasive species that came onto the island are what really did the dodo in because they just, animals that evolve in regions that are quite isolated like an island or a landmass that's isolated by some other geographical feature will develop extremely specific adaptations. And when you introduce one of the most intrepid animals on the planet the rat it just

Goes to town on that island and can I'm on rat talk. I know I know I follow their hustle videos And I respect them for it, but they we got to keep them away from Delicate ecosystems. I'm squeezing under doors now because I learned from rat time. If your skull can fit, the rest of you can fit too. They're right, they're right. Like, repost. Yeah, and this invasive species thing, it's ocean to ocean. We are just concerned that the North Atlantic and the North Pacific will mix species in

a way they couldn't before. Oh, interesting. Because they'll either attach to our ships or follow them. Like barnacles. It's concern that the North Atlantic and the North Pacific will mix species in a way they couldn't before. Oh, interesting. Because they'll either attach to our ships or follow them. Like barnacles. That is actually a huge concern for bringing in barnacles to local ecosystems because they can reproduce fairly quickly. That makes sense.

That's how we have to see because the key sources here are an amazing piece of science writing on theconversation.com. It's co-written by scientists from the University of Washington and the University of Alaska Fairbanks and then also linking studies from 2015 in conservation biology and 2014 in nature climate change. Because yeah, these routes, there might have been a way to find them before the truly modern era, but more melted sea ice and also like pictures from space has helped us find both routes. You can take the Northwest passage from Europe

through the top of Canada to Asia. You can take the Northeast passage from Europe through the top of Russia to Asia. And modern ships can do both routes mainly because we have gas and gases, both letting the ship pilot itself easily and melting ice all over the world. Yeah, through greenhouse gases. Yeah. And so since the late 1900s, we've been able to monitor that ice shrinking. Since the late 1900s, we've been able to monitor that ice shrinking. We used satellites starting in 1979 to take pictures of it. And in a four-decade period from 1979 to 2018, the ice coverage blocking the Northwest Passage route shrank by about 30%. And as we've noticed that commercial shipping has started to go through.

That's not great, I would say. Yeah, and usually there would be kind of a peak around late September of what navigators call open sea navigation in the Arctic, where there's still ice, but it's less icy than usual. That was just an annual thing all the time. And these teams at Washington and Alaska Fairbanks say that the open sea navigation time is now two months longer. Navigators think, oh, there's

a lot more of the year where we can put a cargo ship through this if we want to. Which increases fuel usage, which increases greenhouse gases, which increases the rate at which ice melts, which then people will go like, hey, great, we got more melted ice. Let's put even more ships up there because we don't as I would say, like as a species, our ability to have foresight is sometimes limited. Yeah. And we're really starting that trend around 2014 was apparently the turning point. A large ore-hulling ship went from Quebec to China through the Northwest Passage. The advantages for business are that the trip took 26 days. It would have taken 41 days to go down to the Panama Canal.

And then also, because it's just a sea passage rather than a relatively limited canal, it can fit bigger ships than Northwest Passage. It's interesting because in theory, you could use this to reduce the amount of fuel usage, right? If it takes less time, you could just, instead of having your ships go down the longer route, you have them go the shorter route. But that's not really how profit maximizing works because then if it takes less time you fit more ships into

it rather than say, hey we'll keep our profits as they are but we'll just be more fuel efficient for the environment. That's not how companies work unfortunately. Yeah exactly it's like when a city builds a larger highway and then there are more cars on it because there's a larger highway now. Yeah. If we add another lane though, one more lane, that'll solve traffic. Just one more lane. That's all I'm asking for. One more lane. And then this could specifically change the marine ecology of the world because the Smithsonian says that in a lot of our warm water international shipping routes, like the Panama Canal and the Suez Canal, the water's too warm for any of the cold

water ocean species to go through that. And also apparently the Panama Canal puts any species through a shift between salt water and freshwater in the locks. Oh, that's really interesting. Yes. So it's actually really protective to invasive ocean kind of stuff. Right. The Northeast and Northwest passages are both just cold salty water the whole way.

And so as we open up the ice and as we send ships through, there's just more opportunity for animals. We haven't documented a lot of specific effects like that, but the North Pacific and North Atlantic could start trading species in a new way. Right. And it's hard to, even if you do something like scraping barnacles off your ship, it's really hard to detect some of the little passengers you'd have on your whole, in some areas where there are really delicate ecosystems. people have trained dogs to smell invasive species so that when the ship, when the boat or the ship comes in and with potentially

invasive snails or barnacles, the dog is like on it as if it's searching for drugs and then it finds a little baggy of snails being smuggled and now just like attached to the ship. So it's very interesting, these techniques. But again, somehow I don't think that necessarily people are, who are very driven by profit maximizing are going to be particularly interested in making sure that they aren't also pressuring an invasive species. And the other weird reason we know this is possible is, and this was a long ago past bonus show

about the topic of rubber ducks long ago, but back in 1992, hello duck. But back in 1992, Hello, duck. But back in 1992, a container ship in the North Pacific spilled more than 28,000 plastic bath toys. They were Yellow Ducks, Red Beavers, Blue Turtles, and Green Frogs from a brand called Friendly Floaties. It's like a little package of the four. And then after that 1992 spill, oceanographers noticed the animals washing up on shores in a way that indicated the Northwest Passage was more accessible to trash than we realized.

And so that was another early sign. They spilled in the North Pacific and then they found them places like Scotland. And they said, oh, okay, so this is possible in the 90s. Okay. Yeah, just through passive currents, which is important because a lot of life actually travels through currents. Yeah, and so we may be more than a decade into a lot of little species doing this and it'll take more study to find out. Yeah. Well, ominous.

That's the amazing geography and climate of this lately. And then speaking of understanding the ocean, another weird Northwest Passage thing is takeaway number two. One obstacle to Europe's search for a Northwest Passage was a guy repeatedly deciding water was land. There was a really key bad navigator. It can be confusing because when you look at it, when you have a globe of the earth and you put your finger on the water, it's solid. So I'm like, well, what's water and what's land?

Like I can touch all of it. I haven't thought about that game in a long time. And I'm going to live in the North Pacific, but it's land I guess, so I'm going. I gotta go there now. Spinning globes. I'm going to do that. I'm going to find a globe. Our bonus show this week is Entirely Stupid European Navigators.

It's really fun. But this takeaway is about one of the last ones. He made some of the biggest psychological and personal errors in navigation history pretty late in the history of trying to find a Northwest passage. He wasn't one of these early guys who knew nothing. He still messed up. European navigators will become desperately lost at sea rather than going to therapy. Almost. The key sources here, there's digital resources from the Royal Museum's Greenwich and then also a piece for Alice Obscuria by Cara Giaimo.

And this is the story of John Ross, an English navigator who was very foolish. Because in the early 1800s, so you know, like 300 years into trying, in the early 1800s, Europeans began to correctly guess that you could go through the Arctic archipelago for a northwest passage. There were other wrong theories about like a river straight across North America, east to west, or like some kind of inland sea you could skip over. After they worked out those theories they said, it's probably the icy islands up top of Canada. That's probably

it. Okay. So, so far we're on the right track. Yeah. And so then the year 1818, kind of repeats. In 1818, John Ross approaches a place called Lancaster Sound. He is searching for the eastern entrance to the Northwest Passage, which is Lancaster Sound. He has found it. And is he British? Yeah, British.

Okay. And John Ross sees the waters of Lancaster Sound, which almost a hundred years later Roll Domminson will sail through to do a Northwest Passage. And when Ross sees water, he says, quote, I distinctly saw the land round the bottom of the bay forming a connected chain of mountains. With those which extended along the north and south sides, it appears perfectly certain that the land is here continuous, end quote. He decided an open sound is a mountain range. So he saw it in person though?

And he still thought it was land? Yeah, with his eyes and with his spyglass and stuff. Yeah, yeah. Huh. So, but it was blue, right? Yeah, it was water. And this was August, so it's one of the times when the ice is relatively melted. It was like navigable, yeah.

Okay, okay. So he's like looking at ocean and he's going, yeah, it's land because you can see birds sitting on it. This was so wrong to the rest of his crew that Ross turns around, goes home, and one of his crew becomes a captain of his own ship and returns as soon as possible the next year and sails through it and says, like, see, I was right on the boat last year and this guy was wrong. That's one of those really satisfying things when your manager is not very smart and but they're smarter

than you and then you get your own boat and you actually sail through what they told you was for sure land. Yeah. And we only have like guesses why Ross was so wildly wrong. And the guesses include everything from optical illusions to stubbornness. Like there's some kind of psychology here. He could be stupid. Yes, stupidity.

I'm throwing that hat into the ring. Definitely part of the recipe. Initially experts thought he saw a mirage or what could be called a phatomorgana. Because they said, and he must have just been fooled by the land on the islands near it and the steep mountains and ice of the land that you can sail between and then fog and so on. But other experts dispute that and say that, you know, if you just look at the weather there in August, the available visual information, it doesn't cause a mirage.

You can just tell there's a route. So they think that it was a combination of something he saw plus a very preconceived notion of the area. Like he must have had a preconceived notion that there's simply too much land and ice. So his notion overrode his eyes and he said, mountain range, turn around. Notion overrode his eyes and he said mountain range turned around so Could he have also been lazy because maybe he just didn't want to go through it Because otherwise I would think that he would have a big motive if he really wanted to make a way through He would have the motivation to almost be wrong in the other direction of no we can make it we can go

for it lads and then accidentally Run ashore. But it seems very strange for him to be there for the whole purpose of potentially finding this passage and going, I don't know, that blue stuff could be land. Let's go. Yeah, it could have been laziness or like a wise cowardice where he's like, I don't

want to die. So it seems hard, you know, like there's a lot of reasons. Then why did he go there in the first place? Because you could get like paid to do it and like fill time with a job is the other possibility. Yeah, I see. I see. But unfortunately for Ross, his subordinate proved he was wildly wrong the following year. He gets lambasted in the British press. But it doesn't totally ruin his career as a navigator, and that allows him to make a second major mistake.

Oh boy. Twelve years later in 1830, he does a new voyage. And he goes through the sound this time, but he says, I'm going to helpfully map three islands of the Arctic archipelago and we have better maps now. I'm just imagining this guy with like one eye looking straight down, the other eye looking straight up with cartography equipment in his hands going, time to map these islands. Yeah, very like Marty Feldman character that cross-eyed Igor from Young Frankenstein. Yes.

So what he does is he's like, okay, okay, I'm still good at this, I'm gonna map some islands to understand this better. But the trouble is he mapped three real islands and six additional false islands and landmarks. So he drew a lot more land than there is. He's still thinking there's more land. This guy is obsessed with there being land where there's not land. And this time there's a clearer theory. We think that he was playing politics in the British royal court and he

needed to name more things after more nobles. So he drew additional features to include more people in curry. More favor. shaped like a gentleman's crotch. Yeah, and so then Ross's 1830 map further confused more Northwest Passage explorers. It made all further voyages harder. Why was anyone paying attention to him though? He already made such a huge mistake. Why would anyone listen to him after that? Yeah, there just were so few people who had the opportunity to do one of these voyages. He was getting to do this partly because he played politics with rich British people well, and other people didn't. It's not meritocratic. It's oligarchical kind of thing.

Man, the world really was your oyster if you were a white, relatively wealthy British man in the mid-1800s. Just you could do anything. Big time, yeah. And yeah, the other weird thing is his 1830 voyage he brought along his nephew. And his nephew was not able to correct these errors, but his nephew, James Ross, from that experience became a very significant and effective polar explorer.

So stuff like the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica is named after this better nephew who mapped it in 1841. So there's also a lot of polar features named Ross because that guy's nephew did a good job. So if you see Ross on maps, that's why. Was Bob Ross related to him at all? Oh, I wish. Because he could paint water really well.

And he knew how to make the distinction between land and water in his paintings, unless he made a mistake. But then that was a happy accident and he could turn it into a bush. Right? Like, John Ross is a very no long-term memory Bob Ross. He knows it's a happy accident at the time and then just forgets and doesn't tell anybody. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, that's two takeaways in a lot of numbers and we've got two more takeaways about the eventually successful mapping of a Northwest Passage.

Folks, as you know, we are always looking for perfect partners to support our show, on top of the listener support that is the only reason we can exist. The vast majority of the funding that makes the entire show possible is members of Maximum Fun. It's people who show up for us. On top of that, this week we have a few partners that make actual perfect sense, such as Game Show Network. I don't know if you know about me being on trivia shows, but I love doing that.

I also love watching them. I want to see what's new, what's fresh in terms of a trivia game, something to see. I'm sure you feel the same. You'll listen to Secretly Incredibly Fascinating and Game Show Network has two new trivia shows that you'll love. One of them is Tic Tac Toe. It's hosted by Brooke Burns.

That has two contestants not just playing Tic Tac Toe. There is also a trivia element for each of the squares on the board. The other new show is Bingo Blitz that's hosted by Valerie Bertinelli that's based on a very popular app and it's a game where contestants answer trivia to earn bingo balls and earn points. And I like that these shows are all ages. They're for everybody from 1 to 99. As I say that I'm realizing I skipped over people who are 100 and up. It's

truly for everyone you folks are invited to. I feel like a few game shows kind of hit that perfect sweet spot of being something for everybody. Your friends and then especially family of all sorts of ages and situations, you all can watch these kinds of shows together. So like something like Bingo Blitz, your people understand bingo. Something like Tic Tac Toe,

your people understand Tic Tac Toe. So there's that new element that adds chance, also adds trivia to those games that don't have that in the first place. It's on TV. Be like me. Play along at home. Watch tic-tac-toe, followed by bingo blitz, weeknights starting at 7 Eastern on Game Show Network. Alex, I want to frame this episode in more monetary terms. Did you know that we are getting supported by Aura Frames? Oh, how about that? Yeah. What a lovely use of the word frame. And what a good thing that I have in my home. You two have an Aura Frame?

Well, this is a coincidence, Alex. Yeah, they're a digital picture frame and they let us try it and we both really like it a whole lot, because you can send it to someone or have one and either way you can put pictures into it digitally to show each other in like a very low key and joyful way, right? Like it's hard to straight up text someone something. It's easy to like add the picture

to their life and their frame. With a smooth transition between images. Yeah, very helpful. Not jarring. I love it. So they'll be sitting, having a meal, and then suddenly they see you like pretending to hold up the Tower of Pisa and they'll all think it's the most hilarious thing they've ever seen. Every city in Italy has a tarot piece, right? So you can do that everywhere. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Everywhere, anywhere. So many of our pictures are like joyful and silly and not quite something to post on Instagram or devote a whole text message and notification to. Aura is in that perfect zone in the middle. Yeah. Where you can just gift it casually. I love it. And that's why Aura Frames were named the best digital photo frame by Wirecutter and featured in 495 gift guides last year, 2024. So the next time you want to like be

in touch with somebody, you can send, say, your mom, a new pic of you holding up the Leaning Tower piece of Turin instead of, you know, only calling her. Yeah, a quick tip. Like it could be a straight building, but if you tilt the camera, now it's another tower of Pisa. That's why New York City has a freedom tower of Pisa. It just tilts when I do it. Yeah. Tower of Pisa, am I right? Tarant pizza, am I right? So Aura has a great deal for Mother's Day. For a limited time, listeners can save on the perfect gift by visiting AuraFrames.com to get $35 off, plus free shipping on the best-selling Carver Mat Frame.

That is AuraFrames.com, promo code SIF. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. And we're back and we've got takeaway number three. One widow funded a series of rescue operations that accidentally achieved a version of a Northwest Passage. Hmm. So was this to try to rescue... based on the fact you called her a widow, I think

I have an idea of how that rescue went. Yeah, she couldn't save her husband who died trying to find the Northwest Passage. But she sent a whole bunch of further missions to find him that ended up making a lot of progress. Well, that's sweet. Yeah, and she seems cool. Her name is Lady Jane Franklin, and she did all this. Lady Jane Franklin! Yes. Sorry.

That just came out unbidden from my soul. Yeah, this story is British noble heavy, So that's just going to happen, folks. Oh, husband, must you go on your little expedition to the ice areas of the globe? Because the British were the colonizers of what's now Canada, they took a lot of early interest in the Northwest Passage. With the whole story of it, there's a shift from early people wondering if there was a business opportunity to later people being sort of like Mount Everest climbers

or polar explorers. Just like, this is an adventure that's dangerous, and I know there's no money in it for business. Right. Which, as someone who I really enjoy naps and safety, I don't really understand. Me too. Yeah, I don't do any of that stuff. The sources here include the Canadian Encyclopedia. I've been seeing the Royal Museum's granite a lot. It's an amazing maritime museum in the UK. But this starts in the 1840s. So shortly after that, John Ross, James Ross story.

So, shortly after that, John Ross, James Ross story. In 1845, Sir John Franklin leads a large crew on two ships called HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. Oh, that's a great name for a ship. Yeah, and there's like a fictional and fantastical version of them getting stranded called The Terror. It was a novel by Dan Simmons and then a TV show. So people might have seen the monster movie version or read it. But John Franklin was sort of an Amelia Earhart before that time because they get lost in 1845 and then divers found the ships in 2014 and 2016. People just wondered exactly what happened to them for more than a century.

Right. It had to be demons, man. It couldn't have been starvation or they ran into a chunk of ice or basically anything else. It had to be demons. Exactly. There's no way a bunch of British Fops would die in the Arctic if there weren't demons involved. Yeah. And also John and Jane were both sort of celebrities for being adventurous British people because Jane was an adventurer too. She was born to a rich family that traveled from North America to Asia to New Zealand.

She was one of the most well-traveled women in the world. And in adulthood, she climbed into the crater of a Hawaiian volcano. She was the first woman known to climb Kunani, which is the tallest mountain in Tasmania. She could ride camels. She faced starvation at sea at one point. She was an actual adventurer.

Jonathan, I want a camel. It's an amazing wondrous animal! Glad we could play that clip of her. So unfortunately when John disappears she's in her 50s and just not up to adventuring even with gender norms if she overcame that. She's like I'm in my 50s I'm not gonna explore the Arctic. Right, when that one camel tossed her off his back, she got like hip problems after that. But so she was incredibly rich and wanted to find her husband. So she recruits explorers

all over Britain and Scandinavia and the sort of new United States to do new missions into the Arctic, either to find John or find his notes or just explore it better. And according to NYU professor Douglas Kanziolka, this was like the primary driver of about 15 years of further Arctic exploration. Wow. Was Jane Franklin funding, like funding all sorts of people to do it and also getting countries like Norway and the US interested in a way they weren't before. I mean it does sound that she probably accepted that her husband was most likely dead, but

that she wanted there to be something made of his voyage there, right? That's how I'm interpreting this. Yeah, especially because she got solid evidence he died in 1859 and kept funding more than a decade of voyages. So it became about more than that. What was the solid evidence? An Irish explorer named Francis McClintock recovered a note. Apparently Franklin's crew-

Did you just say, I died, sorry. Essentially like the combined group of Franklin's crew wrote a note in six languages to say that John died in 1846 and the rest of us are starving. And like, it was like legit. Now I feel bad. Now I feel bad about joking about it because that is pretty heart wrenching.

Yeah, it's part of why it was big news. Like the whole world was following this story. I see. Okay. All these voyages she funded helped find new pieces of geography and fix John Ross areas and stuff. And also, one of the people who did a voyage accidentally crossed North America successfully. Oh.

It seems like a weird thing to do on accident. He was trying to do it and he got lucky. What happened is in 1852 an Irish navigator named Robert McClure tried to go from west to east. He started in the Bering Strait and went east. And his ship gets trapped in ice in 1853. After many months and after getting scurvy, they say, we got to just start walking. They start walking east across land. And then after they hit another coast, they find another British ship that is also stuck in the ice, and those combined

crews wait for it to melt free and then sail east the rest of the way. Whoa. And so Robert McClure became the first person to just do that trip in a combination of boats and walking. That must have been, can you imagine your ship gets stuck in ice? You've all got scurvy, so you're not doing well, your gums are just a mess, and then you are on foot, and then you see a bunch of other scruffy looking guys. and then you see a bunch of other scruffy looking guys. And you would either be like really happy or like, oh damn, we're screwed. Our ship is stuck in the ice, ours too.

Is this good? Do we eat each other? Like, I don't know what we do next. High five or we eat each other. The goal was always to just sail a boat the whole way, but Robert McClure did a chuck together partly walking version in the 1850s. And then that also raised people's expectation

that sailing was possible. Cause they were like, if we just solve the party walks, you know. Right. And they also were able to see, hey, if we can just hold out long enough that the ice melts, then it's walk like traversable this gap between where each of the ships got frozen. Yeah. Yeah. Like, yeah, that ship that rescued them, they were able to do their chunk of it out in bed. So that was helpful. Yeah. All of that attempting to do their chunk of it out in bad. Yeah, so that was helpful. Yeah All of that attempting to do this brings us to our last takeaway number four

Rolled Amundsen sailed the Northwest Passage by stealing his own ship and Listening to the wisdom of two native nations Hmm. How do you steal your own ship? This seems philosophical. Or did he steal it and then it became his own ship? He was funded by creditors and they got mad and threatened to seize his stuff and so he just started sailing. Perfect. So the first person to sail the passage dramatically fled the bank on the way out of the port. Ah, fantastic. I like this guy so much. It's really cool. He listens, he actually listens to native people and he is basically a bank heist, but with a ship that he stole from the bank.

Yeah, yeah. It's great. Fantastic. Yeah, this last takeaway, it's also, it's about a guy people might have heard of because Roald Amundsen was the first human to reach the South Pole. He's kind of more famous for that. And then this Northwest Passage trip was before that and helped him gain skills to do it. I actually have not heard of them, but now I'm all about them. And I really am serious about now creating like a dessert.

Like maybe with a brownie, maybe some almonds involved and call it like rolled almonds and then call it the rolled almondson sundae. Yeah, the rocky road rolled almondson. Yeah. Yeah. There's something here. And you put it on top of the brownie. Marshmallows. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ooh, yeah. Ooh, this is good. There's something here. And you put it on top of the brownie.

Marshmallows. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, this is good. We're onto something. Rocky Road on top of brownie. He sailed around Alaska, baked Alaska as a dessert. There's so many ways to go.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a lot of ways to go. So he managed to make it to the South Pole as well. Yeah, a few years later. Yeah. And that was a race for the North Pole and the South Pole. He did not win a race for the North Pole. And then he switched to the South Pole and defeated a British crew to get there first.

Great. But before all that, he, in his early 30s, says, I'm going to sail a boat through the Northwest Passage. And this had been his dream since childhood. Apparently as a child in Norway, he would leave his bedroom window open all night in the winter to toughen himself up for polar and Northwest exploration. Man, his mom must have been pissed. Yeah, and also his mom wanted him to be a doctor.

Out of love for his mom, he started going to medical school. And then when she passed away, he left school and got straight to exploring. He was like, I love my mom so much, I'll do it. But if you're no longer alive, I'm out. I'm going to go to the polls. I wonder if his medical school training helped him at all though, because maybe understanding the importance of, you know, keeping his body

alive during the expedition and how to do that with like vitamins. It probably did. Yeah, he was really self-sufficient and he did this with a crew of just six other people. Wow. We'll link a lot of art of like age of sail guys trying to do this and it's a lot of paintings of like a giant wooden sailing ship stuck in ice Amundsen basically custom designed a boat for it. He bought an old boat for catching herring a fishing boat

It was named it's pronounced like Joe. It's GJ oh with a line through it a It was named after the owner's wife. Oh, sweet. As it's a lady's name. But he painstakingly turned this old fishing boat into reinforced hull, gas powered engine, like a custom built small maneuverable exploration boat.

I'm kind of looking at pictures of him. All the pictures I can find, he's an old guy, but I would assume maybe at the time of this expedition he was younger. He was in his early 30s, but also allegedly his hair turned white and fell out from the stress of preparing this. His hair receded and whitened. Wow. He also spent about half a year just putting his crew through

test voyages and training. This was a massive undertaking. So that was just from the preparation, not even just from the expedition itself. Yes. Yeah. And then one day in June 1903, his creditor said, you have run out of money. In 24. I'm seizing the boat it was a stormy night Amundsen rallies his crew sneaks onto the ship and Casts off into a storm a few hours before the creditors guys like stormed the pier to take the boat Well now he's now now they can't reach him because of maritime law Yeah, he like fled the bank in the process of essentially like going to the moon or something, you know?

Like this was an astounding exploration feat of an enormous danger. Right. I love that. I love that about this guy. Yeah. And his other awesome thing is he listened to two different groups of native people.

In Northern Scandinavia, there's a native group called the Sami, who are known for herding reindeer. Herding, not hurting. I would... Yeah, thank you. Herding, yeah. And apparently, pretty much all previous European adventurers in the Northwest Passage wore a lot of wool.

And that leads your body to sweat and get moist that can freeze. It's just generally uncomfortable, leads to like foot funguses and stuff. Gross. Amundsen treated the Sami as human beings and learned that you could make your clothes and sleeping bags and gear out of reindeer skin. Interesting. It is windproof, it doesn't cause the sweating. It's great. And more, maybe more maybe more like breathable, because it's like based on an animal that is designed for that area. Yeah, that too. Those people live up there, so they knew how to do it.

And he was like, I'm not racist, and so let's learn this. Great. And then the other thing he did is the central element of his plan on previous explorers was that they would sail partway while the ice was most melted, let themselves get frozen in because you can't make it in one month, and then connect within you with people for resources and for the psychology of someone else to talk to and also to learn stuff. Wow. That's, hey, you know what? That's like this guy was going to therapy instead of getting himself frozen in a block of ice.

That's great. Yeah. And apparently the 1800s were a peak of Europeans and especially British people demonizing the Inuit. The problem is that previous John Franklin voyage in the 1840s where he dies and his wife looks for him, most experts now agree that as Franklin's expedition starved, they started eating each other. Cannibalism. As people found their remains, they said, yeah, there's signs of cannibalism.

But British people just were like too British to admit that British people would eat each other. Oh, no. And so they said clearly the voyage was going awesome. And then the Inuits hunted and ate them. Right. Like clearly they were not stuck at all. Quick question for the British people. How do you think Inuits survive when there's not a bunch of poorly prepared white people on a boat? Like, do you think they just- Oh, who would think about this? All your questions are distracting us.

He's just waiting around. Like, man, I'm really hungry. I sure hope some British people come by on a boat so we can eat them. Like what? Yeah, yeah. The probability of that versus a bunch of guys running out of food and dying and then having to resort to cannibalism. Right and so like people as famous as Charles Dickens were saying this. Oh Charles. And then meanwhile Amundsen said this voyage depends on

us connecting with the Inuit and having a relationship with them. Yeah. British explorers will dehumanize an entire people leading to fatal excursions rather than going to therapy. Yep. And then our Norwegian guy, so their plan was we're going to start in 1903 and we're going to get frozen in probably twice, maybe three times.

So they get stuck in 1903, they set up camp, and after some weeks they're overjoyed to be approached by five Inuit men from the Netsilik band. And Amundsen had coached his crew carefully beforehand to make that a positive interaction. Stephen R. Bound says, quote, as word of the friendly encounter spread throughout the region, various groups of Inuit came to Johavn. Johavn is the name of his camp. For short periods, departing as the urge arose. Meanwhile, Amundsen and his men met several other groups of people and found clusters of snow houses on their forays into the wintry wilds." And Bounds says Amundsen not only traded with the Inuit, learned how to survive in the Arctic

from them, he also just took a ton of notes on them as human beings. Just learned about their culture because he was interested and wrote about them as specific people. So did a bit of anthropology while he was there. Yeah, yeah, like some of the first really rich contacts by Europeans with these people instead of just saying, ah, they're up there. I don't know. Like, saw them as fellow people.

Which is so uncurious because it should, to me, you learn that there are human beings living in a very hostile environment, very cold. You can't grow things up there. It should be an inspiration to investigate. How are people doing that? How do they live in such a cold area and thrive there? That should be fascinating and it shouldn't be a secret. You're right. It's like more interesting than another European white person or something.

Like, I don't know, I'm Norwegian, I can live in Belgium or whatever, but like an Inuit, how do they do it? Yeah. Right. Right. And so, yeah, so they spend that winter frozen there. After two years of winters, mostly camping, living with the Inuit, they do enough sailing to get to what's now Canada's Northwest Territory. And from the coast of that, they can travel overland to Alaska and send messages in 1905 to their families and say, we're alive, we're

making the trip. Oh, fantastic. And then the following open sailing time 1906 they get to Nome Alaska and then on to San Francisco And so it's three years of not sailing very much but always the boats in the water. So it is a water route They did it right, right, but they are not trying to blow through it and Right. But they are not trying to blow through it and smash their ship into land. But most importantly, realizing we do need food and shelter and should probably listen to people who have both of those things and know how to do that. So that's, you know, it's a little surprising it hadn't occurred to anyone else to do that before then, but I guess racism is a powerful drug. Yeah, yeah.

And it is worth saying that the other key tool was a gas-powered engine. These previous voyages didn't have that. Even if they hadn't, they could have either not died or gotten further if they talked to people. Yeah, yeah. Amundsen continued to use these reindeer skin clothes and skills he learned from the Inuit. And he only didn't go to the North Pole because somebody else got there first. But five years after this Northwest Territory trip, he's the first human to reach the South Pole in 1911.

And plants the Norwegian flag as a world hero. But all of that hinged on this Northwest Passage and doing it. Yeah. Amazing. This guy is very, like he's, he kind of looks like a librarian. He does not look like a Viking or super rugged explorer. He looks more like a nice librarian guy. And so that makes it even more fun that he did this. Yeah. And he apparently like made sure to stock books and like he did a lot of just recording like Inuit religion language, like stuff that is not a tool of survival. He just like likes to know about the world. This is like a high INT, high WIS build for an explorer. And then Giovanni Coboto is high Italian.

I don't know. I don't know what the skill is. High ITA build. And John Ross was the one with the very low int, very high charisma. Yeah, Bob Ross, high hair. High hair, huge hair. Folk says the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro with fun features for you such as help remembering this episode with a run back through the big takeaways.

Takeaway number one, Earth has a northwest passage and a northeast passage which we are filling with ships and invasive species. Takeaway number two, one obstacle to the search for a northwest passage was explorer John Ross repeatedly claiming that water was land. Takeaway number three, one widow, Lady Jane Franklin, funded a series of rescue operations that accidentally achieved a version of a Northwest Passage trip. Takeaway number four, Roald Amundsen was the first person to sail the Northwest Passage

because he stole his own ship and listened to the wisdom of Inuit and Sami peoples. And then a set of numbers at the top of the show about Amundsen's voyage, Giovanni Caboto's failed voyage, and the cruise ship that tooled around in the Northwest Passage about a decade ago. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at MaximumFun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists. So members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly

fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is five significant doofuses in the history of mismapping North America. Five different people who decreased Europe's understanding of the history of mismapping North America. Five different people who decreased Europe's understanding of the shape of North America. Visit sifpod.fund for that bonus show, for a library of more than 20 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows, and a catalog of all sorts of Max Fund bonus shows. It is special audio, it's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at MaximumFun.org.

Key sources this week include a ton of digital museum resources, in particular from the Smithsonian and also from the Royal Museum's Greenwich, which is an amazing maritime museum in the UK. Also, a lot of science writing, in particular an essay on the conversation.com that's co-written by scientists Donna Hauser of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Harry Stern of the University of Washington, and Kristen Lydre of the University of Washington. We also cited Lydre's work on the past episode about narwhals. And then a key book for Amundsen's story but also the broader Northwest Passage story is an amazing piece of nonfiction by Stephen R. Bowne.

It's the book The Last Viking, The Life of Rolled Amundsen. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenapehoking, the traditional land of the Munsee Lenape people and the Wapinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skategoak people, and others. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location, in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, Native people are very much still here. Native people still live throughout and near the region where the Northwest Passage route is sailed. That feels worth doing on each episode, and join the free SIFT Discord where we're sharing stories and resources about native people and life.

There is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord, and hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Cause each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 177, that's about the topic of windmills. Fun fact there, the three landmark countries in windmill development are Iran, the Netherlands, and the Western United States.

So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Goldin's weekly podcast, Creature Feature, about animals, science, and more. Our theme music is Unbroken, Unshaven by the BUDOS band. Our show logo is by artist Spertan Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Special thanks to The Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra extra special thanks go to our members

and thank you to all our listeners. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. Maximum Fun, a worker-owned network of artist-owned shows, supported directly by you.