Trevor Lloyd
Essay
Jul
1970
The far north has been slow in joining the modern world. It is just three hundred years since the Hudson's Bay Company was granted a charter in London to "trade into Hudson's Bay" and the Muscovy Company had been active in northern Russia even earlier. Both were incidental dividends of the search for a practicable direct sea route from western Europe to the Orient This objective has still not been achieved, for there is as yet no normally operating international seaway either by way of the Northwest Passage across the top of North America or through the Northeast Passage north of the U.S.S.R., although the latter is used fairly regularly in summer by Soviet vessels. The 1969 voyage of the U.S. tanker Manhattan from the Atlantic to the north coast of Alaska and back dramatized the persisting need for such a short northerly passage. It also emphasized that ice, which made the route impassable for centuries, remains a formidable obstacle.
Essay
Jan
1964
"The war and the aeroplane have driven home to Canadians the importance of their Northland, in strategy, in resources and in communications," Lester B. Pearson wrote in these pages some years ago.[i] They have learned, he said, that the earth is still round and that the shortest routes between many important spots in it lie over the North Pole.
