Overview

Europeans searched for 400 years for a passage through North America that would take them to the fabled lands of the Orient. Their searches met with little success. The first man to take a sailing ship from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean through this fabled passage was Roald Amundsen (1872-1928) of Norway in 1903-06. By then, Europeans had found other ways to get to China and southeast Asia, and entrepreneurs and traders were no longer interested in this passage. Nonetheless, Amundsen's voyage was a culmination of human effort as well as a signal of the new understanding of the lands at the northern end of the earth.

Background

The 1492 discovery by Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) of...