Sure, I would love to be a passenger on this voyage but it is not what they say it is. The organizers are shilling for Anthropogenic Global Warming. From some lucky sod at the UK Telegraph:
The world's most dangerous cruise? 1,070-capacity ship takes on the Northwest Passage
Anchorage, Alaska, and I’m about to embark on arguably the world’s greatest sea voyage. There’s an obvious buzz of excitement among the 1,070 cruise passengers but also – and I don’t think I’m imagining this – a faint air of trepidation.
Trepidation, because Crystal Serenity is about to become the largest ship ever to attempt the Northwest Passage. At 9pm this evening the ship will set sail from Seward, Alaska, on a 32-day, near 1,000-mile journey via Canada and Greenland to New York.
A bit more:
There have been around 240 transits in the 110 years since Roald Amundsen made the first successful crossing in 1906. Amundsen’s trip took three years. Serenity's voyage is scheduled to take eight days, part of a 32-day cruise that will see it arrive in New York on September 16.
Most of those 240 transits, including 17 last year, have occurred since 2007, the first time in recorded history the Passage was considered “ice free” in summer, a result of ocean warming.
Bingo - "ice free" in summer. Nasty old global warming. People = bad
No mention of the St. Roch. From the WikiPedia article:
RCMPV St. Roch is a Royal Canadian Mounted Police schooner, the first ship to completely circumnavigate North America, and the second sailing vessel to complete a voyage through the Northwest Passage. She was the first ship to complete the Northwest Passage in the direction west to east (Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean), going the same route that Amundsen on the sailing vessel Gjøa went east to west, 38 years earlier.
She is a National Historic Site of Canada and you can walk her decks in Vancouver, B.C. Her chronology (including several traverses of the Northwest Passage) can be found at the website for the Vancouver Maritime Museum. More information about this wonderful ship can be found here, here and here.
A lot of other ships have made this passage - none of them mentioned in The Telegraph news piece above. Here is a good place to start: Arctic Northwest Passage
Finally, temperature is just one factor controlling the behavior of the ice pack. Wind and currents play a huge role as well. There was that 2013 Russian exploration ship that got stuck in the ice at Commonwealth Bay and had to be rescued (this happened in Antarctica). Here is a film of the same bay in 1912 shot by the Douglas Mawson expedition:
Choked with ice.
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