Ice Queen
Photo: national Archives of Canada--PA206274
HMCS Labrador smashes through sea ice during her 1954 voyage.
When the icebreaker Her Majesty’s Canadian Ship Labrador steamed out of Halifax on July 23, 1954, nobody was predicting it was the start of one of the most momentous voyages in Canadian maritime history. Yet that is exactly what would come to pass four months later when Labrador became the first ship to complete a continuous circumnavigation of North America.
The search for a sea route around the north of the Canadian mainland was an elusive goal not realized for more than 400 years, consuming and frustrating generations of explorers and leading to the death of many of them. A Northwest Passage was seen as a direct route from the trading centres of Europe to the ...