DCHP-1 Online
Northwest passage † 
1 Hist. the long-sought route through or round North America to the Orient; a navigable passage connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans.
- 1555 (1869) [For beinge in Englande in the dayes of Kyng Henry the Seventh, he furnysshed two shipper at his owne charges, (as sum say) at the kynges, whom he persuaded that a passage might bee fownde to Cathay, by the north seas, and that spices might bee brought from thense soner by that way, then by the vyage the Portugales use by the sea of Sur.]
- 1576 (1889) To proue by experience of sundry mens trauiles the opening of this Northwest passage, whereby good hope remaineth of the rest.
- 1748 Surely I need not tell you from hence what is said here with great Joy, of the Discovery of a North West Passage, made by two English and one Frenchman lately represented by them to his Majesty at Oxford, and answered by a Royal Grant of a Vessel to sail into Hudson's-Bay, and thence into the South-Sea.
- 1801 The first voyage has settled the dubious point of an practicable North West passage; and I trust, that it has set that long agitated question at rest, and extinguished the disputes respecting it forever.
- 1963 The term North-West Passage . . . had now assumed the meaning it was henceforth to bear, of a way around or through the continent of North America.
2 the route round the north of Canada through the Arctic seas.
- 1921 The crew, however, traveled over the ice and joined an eastern searching party and thus made the Northwest Passage, though not all of it by ship.
- 1954 No record of exploration in the north, however brief, would be complete without a mention of the first successful voyage through the Northwest Passage by Amundsen in 1903-06, or of Larsen's passage in a single season in 1944 in the R.C.M. Police Schooner, "St. Roch".
- 1961 He was the first man to physically explore the commercial potential of the Northwest Passage. . . .
- 1555 (1869) [For beinge in Englande in the dayes of Kyng Henry the Seventh, he furnysshed two shipper at his owne charges, (as sum say) at the kynges, whom he persuaded that a passage might bee fownde to Cathay, by the north seas, and that spices might bee brought from thense soner by that way, then by the vyage the Portugales use by the sea of Sur.]