On June 23, 1940, a 100-foot-long patrol boat named the St. Roch slipped out of its dock in Vancouver, British Columbia, on a mission that would secure a place in history. By the time it returned four years later, it had completed both the second and third transits of the fabled Northwest Passage through Canada’s Arctic islands. It was the first ship to do so traveling from west to east and, on the return voyage, the first to complete the journey in a single season.
But the record-making transits of the Passage, while significant in the annals of polar exploration, were in fact a cover story. Many decades later, it was revealed that the St. Roch was on a cloak-and-dagger wartime mission and that its actual destination was Greenland.