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Welcome! We are an encyclopedia project, and more. We are a different sort of Web 2.0 project: We aim at credibility and quality, not just quantity. We offer gentle expert oversight. We use our real names, not pseudonyms. We're collegial. We have added over 2,500 articles since Nov. 2006. Join us! Regular smart folks and experts—welcome! Response within 24 hours, guaranteed. Learn about us For readers: About the Citizendium For contributors: How to get started as an author Project Home Support us We're a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and we need your support. If you shop at Amazon or Barnes & Noble and you access these sites by the links provided here, we'll be getting donations at no cost to you (read more) - Search All Products		Some of our finest [ about ] Approved Articles Developed Articles (over 500) Article of the Week [ about ] The Northwest Passage is a long-sought water route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans north of the North American mainland. Between the 16th and 19th centuries, European explorers, particularly the British, made numerous attempts to discover such a route north and west, through (by river) or around (by sea) North America. Captain John Smith, for example, sailed up the Chesapeake Bay from Jamestown in the early 1600s looking for a river that led to the Passage, but by the early 1800s expeditions by Samuel Hearne and Lewis and Clark had proved there was no navigable water route through the continent of North America, so the theory was shifted northward, to be an all-sea route through the Arctic Archipelago around the north of Canada. The earliest of the explorations were based on a mixture of legend, conjecture, and wishful thinking, but later expeditions built on what was learned and gradually extended their maps, at first of North America itself and then of Arctic America in particular. [ more... ]