Jane Maufe - Northwest Passage: Polar Bound through the Northwest Passage

To my parents, Commander and Mrs Conrad Franklin Rawnsley, and to Rear-Admiral Sir John Franklin RN, my four-times great-uncle, for giving us a lead in the right direction

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Please note that this is not intended to be a scientific treatise of Arctic conditions, global warming or the lack of it and such like. Nor is it a monologue of dreary course alterations, wind directions, sail changes, reefing points and compass bearings (True or Magnetic, Real or Imagined). In fact, the greatest magnetism around is that between the captain and his crew, and so it is a personal account of our experiences voyaging together through these frozen wastes in the hope that we and our hull would still be intact when we came out the other end.

In December 2011 I received a Christmas card from David Scott Cowper, a man who had once kissed me over forty years earlier. In it, he asked me to accompany him on his next expedition to the High Arctic to transit the Northwest Passage, departing at the end of July 2012. His ambition was to attempt the most northerly route, via the frozen McClure Strait north of Banks Island, and, if successful, his would be the first private vessel ever to make the passage, a goal that had been eagerly sought for more than four hundred years.

I was hesitant. Did he really want his bachelor stronghold invaded by a woman? I had not been in touch with David since I was about twenty-nine, so there had been a lot of water under the bridge. He thought that since I am the four-times great-niece of Rear Admiral Sir John Franklin I might like to see the area in which, back in 1848, he and his two ships, the Erebus and the Terror , and their entire crew a complement of 129 men were engulfed by ice and perished from cold and from rotten tinned food. Had they survived being iced in during that winter, they were on track to unveil the secrets of the Northwest Passage the following summer.

My life had come to something of a standstill following the death of my husband from Alzheimers after twelve years of deterioration. This would be a new challenge and a big adventure. I did not sit on the fence for long.

The full transit of the Northwest Passage is acknowledged by the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, England, who monitor all transits, to be from the Davis Strait in the east through to the Bering Strait in the west on the 66 and a half degree latitude of the Arctic Circle. Sometimes people say they have been through the Northwest Passage, and while they may indeed have journeyed through the myriad islands scattered throughout this area, most of them have not made the entire transit, as many have flown out to Greenland to avoid crossing the North Atlantic, and will have boarded their vessel north of the Arctic Circle.

David had a great desire to add another first to his already impressive list of transits of the Northwest Passage. He had only two more to win to have completed all seven possible transits (see ), and to be the first to do so. All his earlier records had been made solo, and it didnt stop with the Arctic; he was the first to sail solo around the world in both directions, and the first to motor around the world alone. In all, he had completed six solo circumnavigations of the globe, two under sail and four under motor no mean achievement.

This time the goal was to be the first vessel ever to pass through the Northwest Passage by the most northerly, most ice-bound route, the McClure Strait, and quite possibly we might even have been the first vessel of any description to have transited the entire Northwest Passage by this route. The ice in the strait makes the passage fickle and uncertain. For most of the year its dense layer of ice is ventured upon solely by polar bears and seals, and accessed only by the occasional icebreaker. In late summer, the grip of the ice might weaken enough for the passage to open up for a few hours. It did, so in 2011, but only for a matter of hours. We hoped for the same in 2012.

Davids custom-built 30 ton aluminium, self-righting, all-weather vessel, Polar Bound (50 tons burthen with fuel & stores aboard) is twelve times the required Lloyds specification and regarded as the strongest surface vessel for her size in the world.