The Resolute Desk and the Northwest Passage

The history of the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office is rooted in the Canadian North. The desk upon which President Obama was criticized for resting his feet was given by Prince Charles's ancestor Queen Victoria to then U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880. Two desks in Buckingham Palace were made from the same wood.

This is how the story came about. In 1845, Sir John Franklin set out from England with two ships in search of the Northwest Passage. In those days, it was normal for an Arctic expedition to take three or four years. There was no Panama Canal, so Franklin had to sail around Cape Horn. He restocked his ships with water and supplies in Hawaii before turning north toward the hoped-for passage. Though years passed with no word, confirmation that all the men had perished was a long time in coming.

Meanwhile, many ships sailed out to try to learn the fate of the Franklin expedition. In 1852, HMS Resolute was one of a group of five sent out on this quest. Four of these ships, including the Resolute, froze into the ice north of 74 degrees latitude and had to be abandoned.

A year later, an American whaler from Connecticut came upon HMS Resolute off Baffin Island. The ship had come free of the ice and drifted 1200 miles. Seeiing that it had been abandoned, Captain Buddington towed it back to New York. The U.S. government had it refitted at a Brooklyn shipyard, and in a sensational gesture of respect between seafaring nations, the Americans sailed it across the Atlantic and returned it to the British Crown.

Back in Britain, HMS Resolute returned to regular naval service. In 1879, it was finally decommissioned and broken up. Queen Victoria had three desks made from the ship's timbers. One of these was given to the U.S. President as a memorial to the "courtesy and loving kindness" of America's return of the ship twenty years earlier.

The small Canadian settlement of Resolute, in Nunavut, was named in honour of the ship. For his 2010 book The Ice Passage, author Brian Payton studied the naval records at Greenwich and uncovered more of the related history of the search for the Northwest Passage. The book’s publication sparked new interest in the old story, and the remains of the Investigator were found off Banks Island, now nearly bare of snow and ice. Royal Naval records at Greenwich reveal that in 1845, the ship was frozen in place at a 45 degree angle for many months. The Investigator’s log and other records report that in the mid 1800s, open water came only for a few brief weeks each August.

At the recent SFU Community Summit, Nunavut native and spokeswoman for polar peoples, Sheila Watt-Cloutier expressed concern that in the rush to use the opening Northwest Passage to move oil tankers and exploit the mineral wealth of the melting north, the Inuit people and culture should not be forgotten and dismissed yet again.