 Ian, the Northwest Passage has been myth, legend, holy grail for explorers for a thousand years. Tell us about your exhibit. The new exhibit that we have up here at the Osher Map Library is called the Northwest Passage, Navigating Old Beliefs and New Realities. And through this exhibit, what we want to show is not only the history of the Northwest Passage from its beginning as sort of a mythological goal through exploration into the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, and then its kind of demise in the early 20th century and then its revival due to human effects of climate change much recently. And historically what were the reasons people sought the Northwest Passage? The real reason that it was sought is primarily by the French, the English and the Dutch was that the Spanish and the Portuguese had a stranglehold on the southern shipping routes to the east. And so all of the riches from the Spice Islands and those sorts of things were really kind of monopolized by those two nations. So it was thought that by seeking either a northeast or a northwest passage that those other nations could break into the eastern markets and start to revive their economies. And did they have any knowledge and where did their knowledge come from at the time initially? Their knowledge initially came from kind of what we would call hoax sources. One of those primarily was the story of the Zeno brothers who were Venetian sailors in the 14th century. And a lot of it was based off conjecture. People were making world maps that showed these passages based on absolutely no knowledge at all. A lot of it actually goes back to a Ptolemaic belief from the second century that the world needed to be balanced with two kind of polar continents, one on the north and one on the south, with a waterway between them. And so you kind of have these ideas coming through and making their way onto maps and being presented as fact. So our first stop here is a map. Most people think that maps are reflective reality, but this one is just totally made up. Pretty much. It's a little bit of geographic certainty, but 90% of it's made up. This is a 1598 map showing the voyage of the Zeno brothers, which as I mentioned were Venetian sea explorers who supposedly in 1398 reached the new world before Columbus. That story is entirely false. And the map, which was produced in 1598, shows a number of extremely erroneous geographic areas. For example, all of these islands on the bottom here are completely made up. You have Greenland connected to mainland Europe. And over here on the left-hand side you have what looks like an open sea. And this is based off the made up travel narrative that was done on behalf of the Zeno brothers. This map would be reproduced by both Mercator and Ortelius, Martin Frobisher and Davis, who were two of the first English explorers into the Northwest Passage, actually used this map on their boats as part of their navigational inventory. So as I like to say, this is the map that led to the deaths of hundreds of Europeans in the Arctic. And why would people make up a map like that? A lot of people did. So there's a numerous maps. This one below it also is made up. This shows a Strait of Aenean with the Bering Strait now before any Europeans had ever been there. And maps were not only commercial. They were also meant to project an ideology. So with these two maps you kind of have countries, especially Venice, claiming things for them for their own right and their own triumph when it turned out not to be true. So they were political documents as much as anything else. Exactly. So the next map is mostly correct, but somewhat made up in the middle. Is that right? That's right. This is Gerhard Mercator's 1633 map of the Arctic. This is a very famous and important map. This is actually the first map of the Arctic ever to exist independently. And as you can see, we have Europe, Asia, America around the edges of the map, which is good geography. This is one of the first polar projection maps that was widely produced. But when you get to the actual pole, things get a little tricky. So up here you have an Iron Mountain, which is supposedly where Magnetic North came from. This was a wide-held belief. And then surrounding it are these four distinct islands. This idea actually comes from antiquity. It's mass-produced for centuries. And then around it you can see this wonderfully open sea with no current free of ice. And so this map would be reproduced for hundreds of years and would influence and be used as a document to go to kings and queens and say, look, we can do this. We can be the first to traverse the passage and make riches for our country. Unfortunately, as we know now, that's not true. And this was actually informed by a lot of the early English voyages, Frobisher, Davis, among others, who the Dutch were in contact with. So while it does have some basis on actual exploration, most of it's made from myth. And how many explorations were done? Is it known? How many people tried over these couple of centuries here? Yes. There were a lot. Looking at just the 16th century alone, the English sent eight significant voyages over. Names that you would know, Baffin, Hudson, Davis, Boothia, who was a gin magnet, has a number of lands in Canada named for him. He sponsored many voyages. And that's just the beginning. When you get into the 17th and 18th century, we're really talking about hundreds, both for the search of the northeast and northwest passage. And were these one group of people on one boat, or were these significant large expeditions with many young people? It varied. For existence, for example, Martin Frobisher's third voyage involved five ships. They brought back over 1,300 tons of rock to be a say that they thought had gold. And then Rold Amundsen went through on a six-man crew in a herring boat. So you had everything from fleets to small vessels going through. We've come into 1784, and we're going to be comparing two maps here. What's the first one? The first one is a map that was produced for the French Academy of Sciences. And this was based off the work of numerous cartographers, Delisle, Buache. This is actually a map by Santini. And what you can see here is we have Asia extremely well-defined. Delisle actually worked for the Russians for a while for their academy and brought back excellent information. But when you get over here to the west coast of America, we have Baffins Bay and Hudson's Bay very nicely defined, but then the rest of it where Alaska would be kind of looks like somebody popped a giant potato right here on the map. And so you can see how this would lead people to think that if you just sail up here, you'd be able to make it over to Europe. Captain Cook in the same year would prove this map to be disasterously wrong. And what happened to him? Cook actually made it. He travels up into this area, maps the coast of Alaska, and then unfortunately makes a decision that the winner is too harsh in the Arctic and goes down to Hawaii where he's killed. And this is the second 1784 map. What is this? So this is actually Cook's chart from his voyage. And so you can see, again, we have a very nice coast of Asia here, which is actually taken from a Russian manuscript map. But what's new and important about this chart is he's actually mapped pretty much the entire Western coast of Alaska. And if you think back to the previous map where you kind of have that ambiguous coastline that looks very inviting, here we get bearing straight. We get the actual soundings and tracks of Cook's voyages. And you can see just how difficult and how much more impassable the Northwest passage is becoming with further exploration. So the more information they have, the less likely it seemed that they can do it. Yes. Unfortunately, for a number of explorers, including Franklin, the belief was stronger than the facts. And so even though you have Cook exploring from the West, numerous Dutch and French voyages exploring from the East, and finding nothing, the belief of a passage and the belief of an over-the-pole route still exist and still will launch hundreds more explorations into this area. We're in the middle of the 19th century and the myths still persist. Tell us about this map. That's true. So the maps in this case represent two myths. And this is about three to five years after McClure becomes the first person to traverse the Northwest passage. And two of these myths are the open polar sea and then also that Greenland extended by land over the pole. And even though we have tons of exploration, tons of scientific data coming back, they still believe in these things. The open polar sea was thought to exist because of the warm currents off the coast of Japan that had been observed by German publisher, Augustus Petermann. And he thought that those currents went up and then circled around in the North Arctic and that once you got past a little strip of ice, you would make it into a warm open polar sea that then you could traverse over the top of the globe and to the other side. This persisted long after many explorations made it to the North Pole and proved it not to be true. They would just keep tweaking the idea so that it fit what they wanted to believe as opposed to what was actually being shown. All these previous explorations found all of this pack ice and yet they still believe that it was somehow warm water up there. Yeah, and it's interesting because all of the explorations that we've been talking about took place during what is known as the Little Ice Age. And so it was an area of extreme cold and above seasonal levels of pack ice. But they still believe that if they pushed a little bit further or a little bit further, they would make it into the supposed open polar sea, which unfortunately now did climate change as something that might actually exist. Flash forward another 100 years and we finally have somebody who made it. We do. We have the SS Manhattan, which was a oil tanker developed after the discovery of oil in Pudho Bay, Alaska. Part of the ship was actually built at Bath Ironworks here in Maine. I do believe it's still one of the most expensive ships ever constructed. In 1969, it, along with four ice breakers to Canadian and to American, actually traversed the Northwest Passage, making it the first commercial vessel to ever do so. It came back with a single barrel of oil as kind of a token. But what it proved at this point in time in 1969 was that the Northwest Passage was just too economically unfeasible and too slow. So the result of that was that they built the Alaska pipeline. What's interesting is that in the year 2000, the Canadian government sent a ceremonial ship, the St. Roke II, to attempt the Northwest Passage from the Pacific to the Atlantic. And it made it through without any problems and sent an ice breaker home because there was no ice. So from 1969 to 2000, we have a vast, vast loss of ice in the Northwest Passage. As all of the explorers tried to find an Northwest Passage and made their treks, there was a lot of information about possible routes there. And this map shows sort of a summary of those routes. That's correct. This map is from 1760. It's called a map of the Great ICC. And what we have on it is both the Northeast and Northwest Passages depicted, as well as this red line, which is the course over the pole from Japan to Europe. What's interesting about this map is while it combines a lot of information from previous map makers and explorers, it also right in the middle here says Great Icy North Sea. So it's not pretending that this is possible. It's just saying that if it were, this is the way that it would go. This is 1760. What's remarkable about this map is if you look at maps that are produced this decade, these are the routes that are actually possible. They are actually very close. We're now 450 years perhaps since the first map that we saw. This is a 2016 map showing the Northwest Passages. Tell us about this. This is a map from Hofstra University that they made available to us. And what this shows is the blue lines here are the mean pack ice, which flow in and out. And then here we have the various routes. So here we have a route below Greenland. We have the Northwest Passage here through Canada. We have the Northeast Passage going over Siberia and Russia. And then this dazzling magenta line is the over the polar sea route, much mythicized, much thought about in the 18th and 17th century and now becoming a reality. And the reasons for the Northwest Passage today are the same as they were 450 years ago. That's right. It's thought that if the Northwest Passage is possible and it can be done consistently, it would shave off 10 to 15 days off of a voyage as opposed to going through the Panama Canal, which can be much slower. And we're talking here at the beginning of October and in Portland there is an Arctic conference going on. That's correct. For this very, throughout this very issue. Yes, there's actually two. There's actually one hosted by the University of Main School of Law and then one that's sponsored by the State Department both happening this week. So we're very excited to have this exhibit up and it's gotten a great amount of attention and respect from all of the delegates. And how long will the exhibit be up for? It'll be up until March 11th. And where can people get more information about it? More information gonna be found on our website, www.oshermaps.org.