's ill-fated 1845 expedition to find the Northwest Passage: a British voyage that set out to establish a sailing route through the Arctic and ended with the untimely, mysterious deaths of its two ship crews.

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At a time when discrimination against aboriginal peoples was common, Amundsen was a devoted student of the lessons of the Netsilik Eskimos, who lived in the Canadian arctic, and with whom Amundsen had spent substantial time studying their diets, their clothes, and their survival skills, while on the first successful expedition to discover and traverse the Northwest Passage.

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In fact, PANGAEA had just arrived in Annapolis after completing a traverse of the Northwest Passage from the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia, and is on her way to Florida to explore the Everglades before an expedition next year far up the Amazon River.

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