A hundred and sixty years after Sir John Franklin made headlines around the world by getting ice-locked, then lost, and finally dying in Canada’s Northwest Passage, the fabled waterway is back in the news. Prime Minister Stephen Harper flew this month to the eastern entrance to the treacherous Passage to announce that Canada would defend its claim that the passage is an internal waterway by building a seaport and military camp where he stood at Resolute Bay.

He should be careful he doesn’t get frozen in by that policy, that his government doesn’t get lost in the bewildering archipelago up there, and that his ministers don’t start eating each other the way Franklin’s boys did.

I went through the Northwest Passage by ship twenty-two years ago and though I understand there is less ice now due to global warming, I can also personally attest to the remaining hazards that make it unlikely this will ever be a cheaper route through the “New World” to Asia than the Panama Canal is, especially when one throws in the costs of insurance to all the other costs of shipping.

Pictures in July of Lewis Gordon Pugh swimming in open waters at the North Pole and stories of all the polar bears unable to get around might lead people to believe the ice up there is soon to be all gone. But the size of the permanent ice cap is about equivalent to all of BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Yukon, and mainland Northwest Territories, combined. And global warming, while it may be thinning the cap in places and breaking it off in others leaving parts of the Northwest Passage to appear as temptingly open water, the deterioration of the cap also means more icebergs spreading silently through more channels and potentially plugging up critical passages that are typically navigable even now.

I have personal knowledge of how fast, extensive and thick the ice can come to plug a critical channel with a slight shift in winds. My ship, the Canadian Coast Guard Ship Nahidik, traversed the Passage in 1985, going from Inuvik, in the Mackenzie River delta, to Spence Bay, at the bottom of Boothia Peninnsula. From there it’s no problem sailing north to Resolute Bay and east out into Baffin Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. There’s also no problem going west from Inuvik into the Arctic Ocean, through the Berring Straight and into the Pacific Ocean. All the action lies in between Inuvik and Spence Bay.

We got from Inuvik to Spence Bay just fine, but on our way back west through the passage, we got trapped in the ice pack and were frozen in for the better part of a week awaiting rescue by a Class 8 ice breaker and a helicopter racing up the Mackenzie valley in case our hull was crushed before we got broken out.

We were stuck with two other ships, a northern community supply vessel and a small Norwegian cruise ship. On the trip east, we meandered in to most communities along the way like Cambridge Bay and Coppermine. But on the way back west, the captain put us on a 24-hour-a-day sailing schedule. I was one of four deckhands who were taken off our usual routines of ship maintenance to take six hour shifts at the wheel in pairs of two, spelling each other off each hour to get coffee and rest our eyes.

I was on the wheel when we emerged from Coronation Gulf and met the first signs of the onrushing Arctic ice pack. At first there were small ice bergs we steered around. One mate had his face glued to the radar and another mate was poring over the latest satellite images coming in every half hour while the Chief Engineer kept watch out with binoculars. The Captain took in all the information everyone called out to him and he gave new bearings to the bosun standing beside me, who repeated them to me and watched my compass and wheel to make sure I was hitting them.

Very quickly there were more ice bergs than we could steer around even at dead slow speed and the Captain began choosing which ones we would run over. The colour of the ice mattered now: was it blue and therefore old and hard-as-cement multiyear ice, or was it white and newer and softer ice? The shapes mattered too: if a berg was taller, it would have more to it under the surface.

Soon the ship began heaving and scraping along harder and bigger bergs. Where only moments before it was mostly open water filled about 20% with ice, now it was mostly ice and only about 20% open water. The usual banter of the wheelhouse fell silent. There was no talking besides the calling out of important information. I saw a large blue berg dead ahead and elbowed the bosun who quickly shook his head and whispered “He sees it.” We rammed it jolting the ship like a plane in turbulence and rode up onto it before it cracked down the middle and opened up for us. The Chief Engineer looked back at the Captain and said he didn’t like the idea of doing that too many more times. The Captain didn’t even flinch but kept his expressionless stare straight ahead. The mate on the radar finally looked up and announced there was no path he could see anymore. I kept steering the ship in an increasingly zig-zag fashion through the whitening seascape while terrible sounds of creaking and grinding metal erupted from the hull below. One last satellite picture emitted from the printer: there were no more shapes of white and dark, only solid white. In little more than two hours, the open sea turned into a solid-rock landscape.

The Captain gave his final bearings: straight north. I turned around unsure if I heard correctly but I was shouted at to keep my eyes on the compass and turn the ship to the bearing I was given. A mate came over and quietly explained: we’re going to be locked in any minute and we needed to get locked in as far from the rocky and treacherous shore as possible, so the ice pack doesn’t grind us up into metal filings against the land.

The Captain ordered the engines turned up and we ploughed mercilessly into harder and harder ice and the ship leaned and groaned and fell dead stop for minutes at a time against unmovable ice before edging more inches north. The shoreline that had always been barely visible to our left had now disappeared behind us. When the ship stopped moving altogether despite the Captain himself taking hold of the throttles and shoving them all the way forward and all the way back, sending terrifying shudders throughout the ship, he finally announced that that was that. He told the mate to radio headquarters in Inuvik and tell them where we were. Then he told the Chief Engineer to shut the engines down, and he left the wheelhouse.

I was still standing stock still with my white-knuckled hands gripped on the dead ship’s wheel until the bosun, the only one left in the wheelhouse with me, told me I could let go. My job now was to go on watch duty and keep the hourly log book with the other deckhands, just like we did when we were tied up at wharf in some town. Only this was no town and we weren’t tied up. I went out on the observation deck. All around was a mountain terrain and everything was more still and quiet than I had ever experienced—except for the occasional rumble in a frequency deeper than human hearing. I looked at a distant jagged ridge through the binoculars trying to figure out how high it was. An hour latter, I looked again and it was totally gone and another in a different place had been thrust up, the second one a lot closer than the first. We could be sitting on top of, or more to the point, under, the next upheaval.

For three long days we sat silently and still in the ice. In previous years, working up and down the Mackenzie River, one of our jobs was to drop off barrels of helicopter fuel in various caches spread along the river. It seemed at the time another of the useless jobs we had to do. It now became deadly clear why we had to do that: a helicopter was rushing up the valley to reach us before we sank, flying as far as a tank full would take it before landing at the next cache to refuel.

On the fourth day the ice breaker finally appeared on the horizon. We had to wait while it struggled around the ice-scape to find the two other ships also locked in elsewhere before escorting them in its broken-up wake to us, and breaking us out. We took up the rear in the convoy. Several times the broken channel closed in on us again and the ice breaker would have to turn around, come back and break us out and then break the others out that got locked in again in the meantime, and try to lead the procession a little more west.

We finally got back to Inuvik safely and packed away the ship for another winter. I learned that this had been the one year in about ten that it was even possible to contemplate traversing the Passage. Nobody expected the ice to come flooding down the channels of the archipelago like that, but our experience was how it normally goes the other nine years in the rough cycle.

I also learned that our ship’s dangerous journey fulfilled no practical purpose. Earlier that year, the Americans drove their Polar Sea Class 8 icebreaker through the Passage without asking permission as would normally be the case to traverse anyone’s national waterway. The government learned that to press its case in the international courts, Canada would have to prove that it sailed a Canadian flagged vessel through the passage at some point. The whole purpose of our journey was contained on the six-inch-by-four-inch piece of cloth that flew the whole time on the top of our masthead, the one with the maple leaf printed on it.

Our troubles began with a slight and ordinary shift in the weather. The winds changed unpredictably as they do up there, and a floating continent half the size of Australia came barging down upon our 100-foot ship nearly crushing our hull and shredding us to ribbons along the rocks. Shipping is hazardous in many places, but up there, rescue is thousands of miles and many days away, if it’s able to arrive at all.

Global warming is taking its toll on the Arctic ice cap, but only to produce more ice bergs that come faster down the channels in increasingly erratic patterns. Looking down on the scene with Google Earth or at pictures in atlases, its easy to see the Passage and where you might easily steer a ship through it. But even on the very detailed satellite pictures of the moving ice pack that we studied in the wheelhouse, our fairly big ship didn’t even show up as a speck of dust. From sea level, even a modern oil tanker would be nothing more than a fruit fly if the ice pack decided one summer day to come down and run riot in the Passage. And for the next hundred years at least, open water tempting such oil tankers would only open up for a few weeks in summer at best. No one is even talking about shipping in the Passage the other ten months of the year, ever.

The government talked 22 years ago about building a Passage-capable ice breaker to protect Canadian sovereignty against unannounced shipping, until the costs of operating the ship plus all the infrastructure required for it were figured out, whereupon the plan was dropped. Harper isn’t even talking about a Passage-capable ice breaker. The ships he is talking about to protect Canadian sovereignty are as useless in the Passage as my ship was. And if the Passage were ever equipped with the necessary and expensive infrastructure for cargo ships, like beacons, radio stations, safe harbours, satellite maps, rescue and salvage stations, and pilots with their own ships and crews, operators of the Panama Canal would simply cut their fees and keep them coming through their passage instead.

The truth is, there is no Northwest Passage, if by passage is meant a waterway that can be safely and effectively navigated by cargo ships. The ice pack is as hard and dry as land, and if there is a route occasionally through it for a few weeks every odd summer, it shifts daily and closes up as fast as it opens. There will never be a reliable chart showing the way because the way, when there is one, shifts daily. The existence of an effective Northwest Passage is as much a fable today as it was a century and a half ago and calling it an international or a national waterway makes no difference to its status as merely a dream. Harper will only do what Franklin and countless expeditions before and after him did: foolishly lose a bunch of money if not lives in the dream-world of the Arctic chasing a badly-written fable.