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From the top deck of the ship, on the sixth day of a recent Arctic voyage, ecologist Jack Seigel stood peering shoreward through binoculars at a polar bear. This magnificent creature, an adult male weighing at least 1,000 pounds and standing nearly 10 feet tall, gazed back, interested but unconcerned. Then it swung off along the rocky coast.

"He's scavenging," Seigel said, handing the glasses to a passenger on the Adventure Canada cruise. "That's all he can do right now. But judging from the fat on him, this guy is in good shape to survive the next couple of months. Then the ice will return."

Later, speaking to a full house in the ship's theatre-style lecture hall, Seigel would explain that the polar bear, a "vulnerable species" nearing endangered status, lives mostly on ringed seals but will eat anything it can kill. It ranges, necessarily, over hundreds of square kilometres of sea ice - and every year, because of global warming, that sea ice is arriving later and melting earlier.

The change is affecting more than polar bears. Recent satellite images from the European Space Agency show that, for the first time in recorded history, the Northwest Passage is clear to maritime traffic. The receding ice is opening up a navigable sea route from Europe to Asia that is 7,000 kilometres shorter than the 23,000-kilometre voyage via the Panama Canal. Commercial interests are anticipating a navigable Northwest Passage - not to transport real gold from Cathay, as they did four centuries ago, but black gold from the Alaskan oil fields and possibly other minerals.

During the next couple of decades, maritime traffic will increase dramatically. And that is raising urgent questions. On the M/S Explorer, during a spirited discussion of sovereignty and the Northwest Passage, passengers articulated most of them. The Northwest Passage runs through an archipelago of islands that clearly belong to Canada. Are these, then, Canadian internal waters, as our governments have always argued? Or is this channel an international waterway, as Americans, Japanese and Europeans contend. Can anybody send tankers through here? Given the potential for environmental disasters, who will monitor and control traffic? And what about the Inuit, who have lived in this region by hunting and fishing for more than 5,000 years? Do they have no rights?

Nobody had any answers, but judging from the emotions expressed, this discussion resonated with the 96 passengers who had signed on for the 12-day Baffin Explorer cruise - one of several active-adventure excursions conducted each year by Adventure Canada, a Mississauga-based travel company. Mostly Canadian professionals in their 50s and 60s, though with a sprinkling of people both older and younger and also a smattering of Americans, they had travelled from as far away as California, Vancouver and Whitehorse to board a charter flight in Ottawa and fly north to Resolute Bay in Nunavut. There, they had boarded the Explorer, a purpose-built expeditionary vessel that can put 10 Zodiacs into the water, each carrying 10 people, so that everyone can go cruising at the same time.

Besides Seigel, a recently retired professor of environmental studies who has guided expeditions around the world, the ship carried more than a dozen resource people. They included Pakak Innukshuk, an Inuit drum dancer who took leading roles in the films Atanarjuat and The Journals of Knud Rasmussen; Bill Lishman, an ornithologist famous for flying with geese and whooping cranes (captured in Fly Away Home); and Mike Beedell, an award-winning photographer who once traversed the Northwest Passage in a catamaran. The resource staff also featured an archeologist, a sea-mammal expert and an exploration historian best-known as the author of Fatal Passage, Ancient Mariner and Lady Franklin's Revenge (yours truly).

Each staff member offered two or three presentations but still found time to go hiking, rock scrambling and Zodiac cruising among the icebergs. What with exploring archeological and historical sites, eating three gourmet meals a day, attending a daily "recap" in the lounge on the forward deck and juggling special events like the polar-bear swim, the whisky-label contest, the costume party and the variety show, nobody had a dull moment.

On this voyage, which enjoyed sunshine and calm seas for eight days out of 10, the Explorer sailed south from Resolute down Peel Sound, following the route taken in 1846 by Sir John Franklin on his disastrous final expedition. Unlike Franklin, we encountered shockingly little ice. The ship travelled east through Bellot Strait and, still unimpeded, swung north up Prince Regent Inlet. For those steeped in the history of the quest for the Northwest Passage, the iceless reality of the Arctic waters seemed surreal. In this region, John and James Clark Ross spent four winters trapped in the pack ice; and here, where the channel lay completely open, heavy ice drove Edward Parry's Fury onto the rocky shore and wrecked it.

For history buffs, Beechey Island provided an unforgettable highlight as passengers visited the graves of the first three sailors to die during the Franklin expedition. This was a couple of years before cannibalism among the final survivors turned that disaster into the central event of exploration history. In the 1980s, two Canadians - John Geiger and Owen Beattie - did a forensic analysis on the three dead sailors and concluded, in the book Frozen in Time, that lead poisoning played a major role in the disintegration of the expedition.

But if politics and history gave the voyage currency and dimension, nature provided the dazzle. One morning, we took a 90-minute Zodiac cruise through a breathtaking maze of icebergs in Croker Bay. As the clouds cleared off and the sun came out, we coasted along the front of a glacier, weaving through icebergs that soared 10 metres or higher into the air, some of them assuming the fantastical shapes of futuristic sculptures. Another morning, we glided along the rough, craggy cliffs of Bylot Island. We arrived too late in the year (early September) to witness the departure of fledgling birds, but off Cape Graham Moore, we marvelled at the raucous cacophony of tens of thousands of chattering murres and kittiwakes.

A few days later, at Isabella Bay, passengers in Zodiacs got an exciting, up-close look at another polar bear as it suddenly raced along the rocks, plunged into the water and began furiously swimming toward Greenland. This unusual behaviour probably arose, the experts surmised, as the result of stress caused by the lack of pack ice, which to the bears constitutes a necessary extension of hunting grounds.

As the bear swam into the distance, we spotted a trio of 2,000-pound walruses lolling about on the rocks. Before we could react, we realized that we had come within 100 metres of 15 or 20 bowhead whales, sporadically huffing and blowing. Fully grown adults are 20 metres long, weigh 50 tons and can smash through two feet of ice with their heads.

We cut the engines and drifted, and two of these leviathans came within 15 metres of one Zodiac. For the better part of a minute, clearly curious, they floated near the surface. Then somebody spotted a white bowhead - a creature so rare that our marine-mammal expert, Natalie Asselin, subsequently e-mailed colleagues around the world. She learned that this white bowhead, either an albino or else an extremely aged specimen, possibly more than 150 years old, has been making cameo appearances in Isabella Bay for decades and was last seen six years ago.

Before leaving the north coast of Baffin Island, the Explorer called in at Clyde River, a settlement of 850 Inuit. Here, an articulate 20-year-old, Clark Kalluk, led a small group around town. He described how, earlier this year, during the long, dark polar night, he was walking home from a friend's house when he came face to face with a polar bear. "I turned and ran to the nearest house," he said. "And the bear followed me to the door." Gesturing toward a husky dog tied up in a yard, Kalluk added: "Dogs like that one are not just pets - they're security guards against the 30 or 40 polar bears that will soon come roaming through town."

Kalluk led the way to the community centre, where he picked up a microphone and served as master of ceremonies for a display of Inuit sports and cultural activities. Adventure Canada responded by inviting a dozen locals back to the ship, Kalluk among them, and a few of us toured them around.

After crossing the Davis Strait to Greenland in calm seas, a rare stroke of luck, we went cruising among the icebergs off the coast of that island, which is four times the size of France. Many of those bergs loomed over us like preposterous apartment blocks. Gliding into Ilullisat, home to 4,000 people and 6,000 sled dogs, we admired the colourfully painted houses scattered over the treeless hills and felt we could have been approaching a Newfoundland outpost.

Once ashore, more than half of us hiked several kilometres to the cliffs at the far end of town, where we stood looking out over an astonishing vista of icebergs spawned by the Greenland Ice Cap. We were gazing at the Jakobshavn Isbrae, a river of ice that flows slowly down the fjord. In the decade beginning in 1992, according to scientists, and again as a result of global warming, this river more than doubled in speed, from about 5.5 kilometres a year to 12.5. During that same period, the calving front of the glacier, where icebergs break off, retreated many kilometres upriver. Back in town, we had just enough time to visit the house in which anthropologist and explorer Knud Rasmussen (1879-1929) was born and raised. It is now a museum celebrating both him and local culture.

After regaining the ship, and with the air temperature standing at 5 C and the water three degrees lower, passengers were invited to take a dip. Fifteen people, including two over the age of 70, plunged off the ship's loading dock. Afterward, during lunch, the loudest hurrahs went to Doug Wishart, a Toronto firefighter who trotted down the gangway, stepped onto the tiny metal platform and turned around to face the ship. Wishart then performed an elegant back flip into those freezing cold waters and surfaced wearing a look that encapsulated the experience of the entire voyage - an expression combining shock, wonder and exhilaration.

Toronto author Ken McGoogan, who won the 2006 Pierre Berton Award for History, is writing Race to the Open Polar Sea and Conquest of the Northwest Passage.

Pack your bags

Getting there

Space is limited, so the earlier you book, the better. High Arctic cruises run in August and September.

Adventure Canada 1-800-363-7566; http://www.adventurecanada.com. Mississauga-based company offers a changing slate of Arctic expeditions.

Cruise North Expeditions

1-866-263-3220; http://www.cruisenorthexpeditions.com. Toronto-based company offers High Arctic and Baffin adventures.

The Great Canadian Adventure Company 1-888-285-1676; http://www.adventures.ca. Edmonton-based company will begin offering Northwest Passage cruises in 2008.

STRESS FACTOR

Flying into or out of the Arctic is fraught with uncertainty. Our own departure from Greenland was delayed by three hours. Best strategy: Expect problems and rejoice when they don't arise.

SOUVENIRS

Inuit carvings are available at virtually every stop on Baffin Island. One passenger bought a narwhal tusk.