0Transcription: "Marie-Ève Thibault, first woman to cross the Northwest Passage"
This page includes the written transcript of this podcast, translated into English.
I met Marie-Eve Thibault for the first time in February 2022, in a café in the Centre-Sud district of Montreal.
At that time I knew very little about the J. E. Bernier II expedition or the history of the Northwest Passage. We chatted for almost two hours without her mentioning a crucial piece of information: she, Marie-Eve Thibault, was the first woman in history to have completed the mythical Northwest Passage, one of the most difficult navigation routes on the planet. Imagine my surprise when, while preparing the circuit you are taking today, I stumbled upon this information! I should say this extraordinary event! If Marie-Eve had been American or British, there would already be two films and three books dedicated to her!
I’ll share with you here a part of our interview so that her feat will be engraved in our memories. Do spread her story far and wide! Here I will give voice to Marie-Eve, who will speak about her experience in the first person.
"Depending on the year, there were different crews on the J. E. Bernier II. In '76 and '77, the first and second seasons, I was on board from beginning to end. As the only woman on board, it was established from the start that the relationship with my partner Réal Bouvier, the captain, was to be put on the back burner while on the boat. Throughout the expedition, I was a member of the crew with its responsibilities and shifts. I did what had to be done, which was everything. There were many problems, because we, like the boat, were not really prepared to face the challenges of the Arctic. Without radar, before the era of GPS, difficulties arose all along the way: mechanical problems, radio problems, and many more besides. We had not yet left the St. Lawrence estuary when one of the four crew members left for Montreal. A second would do the same once in Greenland, which left us with only two people to sail up 650 kilometres of dangerous coastline in an under-equipped boat. The second season, there were icebergs to avoid, and pack ice, which threatened at any moment to crush our boat by enclosing it in ice formed in just a few hours.
In spite of all this, the feeling of freedom remains inexplicable, the experiences of mutual aid, prodigious, and what to say about the beauty of the North?
How to explain the sensation of crossing islands that have no name? It’s the kind of experience that deeply transforms who you are, a kind of rite of passage.
You know, the resilience that we develop in life and death circumstances is simply amazing. It still serves me today.
On August 9, 1977, while passing Cape Perry during the second season of the expedition, the amateur radio correspondents announced that we’d pulled it off; we’d crossed the Northwest Passage in a small sailboat! But the journey was far from over. Because, you see, I'm still telling you about it today. "
