St. Roch Circles North America: First Vessel Through Arctic

A wooden schooner completed a journey that no vessel had ever made: all the way around North America. On May 29, 1950, the RCMP schooner St. Roch arrived in Halifax, Nova Scotia, completing the first circumnavigation of the North American continent after a career of Arctic voyages that had already made it one of the most accomplished ships in maritime history. The St. Roch was built in 1928 for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to patrol Canada's Arctic waters and resupply remote detachments. The 104-foot wooden vessel, reinforced with Australian ironbark to withstand ice pressure, spent years at a time in the Arctic, often deliberately frozen into the pack ice for winter. Her Norwegian-born captain, Henry Larsen, developed an intimate knowledge of Arctic navigation that no other mariner of his era matched. In 1940-42, Larsen sailed the St. Roch from Vancouver to Halifax through the Northwest Passage, becoming the first vessel to transit the passage from west to east. The voyage took 28 months, with two winters locked in ice. In 1944, Larsen made the return trip in just 86 days, becoming the first vessel to complete the Northwest Passage in a single season and the first to transit it in both directions. The 1950 circumnavigation completed the loop. The St. Roch sailed from Halifax south through the Panama Canal and up the Pacific coast to Vancouver, connecting her earlier Arctic transits into a continuous circuit around the continent. The total distance covered across her voyages exceeded the circumference of the globe. The St. Roch was retired from service in 1954 and is now preserved at the Vancouver Maritime Museum. She remains the only vessel to have circumnavigated North America, a feat unlikely to be repeated in the age of icebreakers and GPS precisely because no one has a reason to do it the hard way again.