Canada at War: THE ARCTIC: Northwest Passage, 1944

For days the ship crept along an invisible coast. A leather-faced man with icy blue eyes and a perpetual squint strained for the leadsman’s cry. Out of the fog that shrouded the Arctic sea, the muffled call came back: “Seven fathoms. …” Suddenly the leadsman’s cry changed: “The bottom has gone away.”

Master Mariner Henry Asbjorn Larsen knew then that he had turned Point Barrow into the Bering Sea. He knew that he had done what no other man had done: navigated the legendary Northwest Passage from west to east and back again. Last week Staff Sergeant Larsen piloted the weather-beaten 80-ton Royal Canadian Mounted Police ship, St. Roch, into Vancouver Harbor. She was just 86 days out of Halifax, had sailed on a 7,500-mile trip around the top of North America.

On Hudson’s Course. Henry Hudson and Sir John Franklin, great explorers, had perished trying to do what Larsen had done. The only man to make the east-west passage before him was Roald Amundsen. Larsen, too, was a Norwegian, born some nine miles from Amundsen’s birthplace in Borge, Norway. As Amundsen’s ambition to conquer the Arctic had been fired by Franklin’s exploits, so Larsen had been kindled by what Amundsen had done.

Larsen joined the R.C.M.P., not to be a policeman but to become an Arctic mariner for the force. His ship, the St. Roch, was specially built for Arctic voyaging. A diesel-powered schooner, she was built of timbers two-thirds heavier than those used in any ordinary craft. Her hull is sheathed in Australian ironbark—the only wood that can stand the grinding pressure of the pack ice.

In June 1940, Larsen set out from Vancouver on his west-east passage. It took him 28 months (TIME, Oct. 26, 1942). When he started back for Vancouver from Halifax last July, he had two veterans of his first cruise in his hand-picked crew of ten. They were provisioned for three years. Larsen and his men sailed in part by old admiralty charts prepared by the 19th-Century explorers, in part on their own, as when they crossed Viscount Melville Sound, never traversed before by any white man.

Northwest Passengers. The St. Roch picked up some passengers on the way. She ferried an Eskimo family from Baffin Island to Herschel. Island, not far from the mouth of the Mackenzie River. Mother, father, grandmother, five children and 17 dogs insisted on staying topside, pitched their pup tent on the open deck.

At one point the St. Roch broke out the blue ensign to signal a settlement of Aleuts. The Aleuts refused to answer until the St. Rock ran up the Stars & Stripes. They thought their visitor was a Jap ship.

The St. Roch’s voyages are patrols to assert Canadian sovereignty over the Artic.