Northwest Passage: Eastern Gateway

Qausuittuq stands on the southern coast of Cornwallis Island, surrounded by gravel plains, raised beaches, and the broad waterways of the Canadian High Arctic. Its Inuktitut name means “place with no dawn,” a reference to the long polar night, although summer brings light that lingers around the clock.

The modern community began in 1953, when the Canadian government relocated Inuit families from Inukjuak and Mittimatalik to the High Arctic. Their descendants, known as Qausuitturmiut, have built a community with its own strong identity. Its strategic location has also made Qausuittuq an important centre for northern research, transportation, and expedition travel.

Arrive by charter flight from Ottawa and transfer by Zodiac to the expedition vessel. From this historic crossroads, the waterways of Tallurutiup Imanga and the eastern gateway to the Northwest Passage open ahead. 

Beechey Island holds one of the most tangible chapters in the history of Northwest Passage exploration. Franklin’s expedition spent the winter of 1845–46 here before sailing onward and disappearing. Three graves, remains of the camp, and stone structures left by later search expeditions still mark its stark shoreline.

Beechey became a gathering point for those who came north in search of Franklin, leaving supplies, messages, and traces of their own journeys. A fourth grave belongs to Thomas Morgan of HMS Investigator, who died during one of these searches. In the decades following Franklin’s disappearance, dozens of expeditions entered the Arctic, charting extensive areas and extending European scientific and imperial attention across Inuit Nunangat.

Inuit testimony proved essential to tracing the expedition’s final movements and, generations later, locating its lost ships. Beechey Island connects Franklin’s failed voyage with its wider legacy, including expanded geographical knowledge, growing colonial ambitions, and an increasingly sustained southern presence in Inuit homelands.

Ikpiarjuk sits within a natural amphitheatre of tall hills at the head of Adams Sound, where cliffs and sculpted rock formations rise above a sheltered harbour. Its Inuktitut name means “the pocket,” a fitting description for a community held between mountains and sea on the northern coast of Baffin Island.

The surrounding waters and lands have drawn people here for generations. Fishing and the harvesting of seal, narwhal, and other wildlife remain important to food, travel, and community life. Inuktitut is widely spoken, carrying knowledge particular to this coast, while carving, sewing, education, local businesses, and other forms of contemporary work reflect a community continually defining its own future.

Ikpiarjuk is one of the communities most closely connected with Tallurutiup Imanga. Its waters provide travel routes and harvesting areas while linking the community with the wider Qikiqtani region. Time shared with residents offers an experience of Tallurutiup Imanga from the shore, expressed through language, creativity, daily life, and the welcome of those who know these waters as home.

Between northern Baffin Island and Devon Island, Tallurutiup Imanga opens westward from Baffin Bay into the waterways of the Northwest Passage. Known on many maps as Lancaster Sound, it is the great eastern gateway through which wildlife, people, ice, and ships have moved for generations. Its name means the waters surrounding Tallurut, the Inuktitut name for Devon Island, whose markings are said to resemble the lines of traditional chin tattoos.

Powerful tides and currents mix nutrients through these waters, sustaining one of the Arctic’s greatest concentrations of marine life. Narwhal, beluga and bowhead whales, walrus, seals, and polar bears move through the region, while immense colonies of seabirds gather along its cliffs and islands. In High Arctic summer, long daylight offers time to watch for wildlife from ship, Zodiac, and shore as sea ice continues to shift through the channels.

Tallurutiup Imanga is also an artery connecting Inuit communities and an important place for travel, harvesting, and cultural practice. Its protection as one of Canada’s largest National Marine Conservation Areas recognizes both its extraordinary ecological value and generations of Inuit knowledge and stewardship. Inuit expedition team members and naturalists interpret how currents, ice, wildlife, and human life interact across this complex marine environment.

Tallurut rises from these waters in broad plateaus, glacial valleys, gravel plains, and polar desert. Known in English as Devon Island, it is the world’s largest island without a permanent population, although archaeological sites attest to a long history of Paleo-Inuit and Inuit presence. Walks and Zodiac explorations bring its immense geological scale and delicate summer tundra into closer view. Across water and land, Tallurutiup Imanga gathers the defining elements of the eastern gateway into one remarkable High Arctic region.

Baffin Bay extends between the Canadian Arctic and Greenland, carrying currents, wildlife, sea ice, and immense drifting icebergs between its coasts. Whales and seals move through this vast marine ecosystem, while northern fulmars, kittiwakes, murres, and dovekies range far from land beneath the long summer light.

A day aboard offers time to experience the scale of the crossing from the decks and observation spaces. Presentations, workshops, and conversations with Inuit cultural educators, naturalists, historians, and other expedition team members explore the wildlife, geography, cultures, and maritime history connecting both sides of the bay.

Beyond the eastern horizon lies northwest Greenland, where mountains, glaciers, islands, and narrow channels rise from waters travelled for generations by Kalaallit and later by whalers and Arctic expeditions.

Northwest Greenland is a far-reaching world of islands, narrow channels, sheltered bays, and deep fjords enclosed by steep mountains. Glaciers descend from the ice sheet, while summer loosens sea ice and opens passages along the coast. The West Greenland Current carries immense icebergs northward, many beginning their journeys in Disko Bay before joining bergs released by glaciers farther north. Together, they form a moving flotilla of towers, arches, and fractured blue faces. During the nineteenth century, European whaling ships pressed through these ice-laden waters and across Melville Bay towards bowhead grounds in northern Baffin Bay and Tallurutiup Imanga.

Small communities occupy rocky islands and natural harbours throughout this intricate seascape. Fishing and hunting remain central to life, while boats connect settlements separated by water and rugged terrain. Explore by ship, Zodiac, and on foot, following shorelines busy with breeding seabirds and walking across tundra brightened by white cottongrass and summer wildflowers. Long hours of daylight illuminate the coast, where every channel offers a different arrangement of rock, water, and drifting ice. 

Ilulissat means “icebergs,” a fitting name for a city beside one of the world’s great moving ice systems. At the head of the UNESCO-listed Ilulissat Icefjord, Sermeq Kujalleq ranks among the fastest and most active glaciers on Earth. Its immense icebergs travel slowly through the fjord before entering Disko Bay, continually transforming the seascape.

The icefjord has shaped human life here for more than four thousand years. That relationship continues in contemporary Ilulissat, a lively Greenlandic city where fishing boats crowd the harbour and the streets bustle with residents and travellers. Restaurants showcase Greenlandic ingredients, while cafés, shops, and the striking Ilulissat Icefjord Centre reflect the city’s growing cultural and creative energy.

Here, deep human history, vibrant city life, and constant environmental change come together at the edge of the ice. 

Greenland’s Sisimiut coast unfolds as a complex meeting of islands, mountains, sheltered waterways, and deep fjords. Late summer brings colour to the tundra, with Arctic cotton, crowberry, dwarf birch, and willow spreading across slopes beneath dark rock. Seabirds are active along the coast, while whales may be encountered in the waters offshore.

Human history here reaches back more than 4,500 years. Archaeological traces left by successive cultures, including Saqqaq, Dorset, and Thule peoples, speak to generations of movement and adaptation along this coast. Zodiac cruises, hikes, and time ashore offer different ways to encounter a landscape where the sea has long connected hunting grounds, settlements, and travel routes. 

Kangerlussuaq lies within a broad glacial valley between the Greenland Ice Sheet and the sea. Its name means “big fjord,” reflecting the immense waterway that reaches nearly two hundred kilometres inland. The surrounding region holds a much longer history of Inuit travel and hunting across a landscape connecting the coast with the ice sheet.

The journey enters Kangerlussuaq Fjord during the long light of mid-August. Mountains and broad glacial valleys rise above pale water coloured by suspended sediment, while the lower evening sun brings depth to the rock and tundra. As the route follows the fjord inland and crosses the Arctic Circle, the maritime world of Baffin Bay gradually gives way to Greenland’s continental interior.

Kangerlussuaq’s dry climate and comparatively stable weather led to the establishment of an American airbase here during the Second World War and continue to make it an important aviation gateway. After disembarkation, transfer to the airport for the charter flight south.