Victoria Island (Canada)

The Victoria Island (English Victoria Iceland ) is the second largest island in Canada and the ninth largest island in the world (according to other counts of the eight or tenth largest ). It is located in the Arctic Ocean in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, and has a size of 217,291 km ². The western part of the island belongs politically to the Northwest Territories, the eastern part, and thus about two thirds of the area, the territory of Nunavut.

Geography

The Victoria Island is located in east -west direction approximately 750 km long, in north-south direction up to 625 km wide and reaches into the Shaler Mountains a height of up to 665 m above sea level. West separated from it only by the narrow Prince of Wales Road, lies the island bank, north of the Melville Island and east, separated by the McClintock Channel, the Prince of Wales Island. Another larger neighboring island to the southeast is the King William Island. From the southern North American mainland, Victoria Island is separated by a strait consisting of Amundsen Gulf, Dolphin and Union Strait, Coronation Gulf, Dease Strait, Queen Maud Gulf and Victoria Street.

The two settlements on the island are Cambridge Bay (1477 inhabitants) in the south, the site of a Canadian weather station, and Ulukhaktok (formerly Holman, 398 inhabitants ) located on the west coast at the entrance of Prince Albert Sound.

History

The island has long been inhabited by Inuit when she was spotted in 1826 during the second expedition John Franklin. It was named in 1839 after the British Queen Victoria, and in the late 1830s by the British researchers Thomas Simpson ( 1808-1840 ) and Peter Warren Dease ( 1788-1863 ) and in 1851 by John Rae explored. Richard Collinson 1851-1953 wintered twice in the shelter of the island. Large parts of the coastal progression have been elucidated only by the expeditions of Roald Amundsen 1903-1906 and 1915-1917 Vilhjálmur Stefansson.

1923 erected the Hudson 's Bay Company trading post their Cambridge Bay and Port Brabant (1939 moved to Holman ). Followed in 1926, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police with a station in Cambridge Bay.

On the first crossing of the Northwest Passage from west to east Henry Larsen wintered with the St. Roch 1940-1941 in Walker Bay in the west of the island.