Arctic Archipelago

North of the Canadian mainland stretches a vast archipelago of tundra, rocky islands and ice-choked channels. Its shores were inhabited long before Europeans sought a passage through the Arctic. The Thule, ancestors of the Inuit, spread east from the Bering Strait region and hunted bowhead whales in these waters. On Banks Island, at the western edge of the archipelago, archaeological remains attest to Thule occupation into the late medieval centuries. In 1819 and 1820 William Edward Parry sailed through Lancaster Sound and wintered on Melville Island, the first European ships to push this far west through the archipelago.