In Manhattan’s Wake

At the time, prices were kept under control only by tapping spare capacity in the US, but the event raised the spectre of a broader and more coordinated embargo with more serious repercussions,3 given that the American ability to expand production in the face of an emergency was running out.4 The discoveries at Prudhoe Bay in northern Alaska were game-changing for the North American oil market. [...] Since at least the 1950s, Canada and the United States had disagreed over the legal status of the waters of the Northwest Passage.14 For Canada, the waters in its Arctic Archipelago were historic internal waters over which the country enjoyed complete sovereignty. [...] In the lead up to the mission Canadian officials worked closely with the American oil companies to plan the pilot project – cooperation that led the ACND to assume that Canadian sovereignty was not at stake and that the optics of Canadian control were adequately protected through its participation and presence (including the assistance provided by Captain Thomas C. Pullen, the former commander of [...] These incidents came in quick succession and, in the case of the Arrow, in Canadian waters in the midst of the controversy over the Manhattan. [...] Congressman Howard Pollack, Alaska’s only member in the US House of Representatives at the time, deemed it “unacceptable to our national pride to discover that the U. S. icebreaker [Northwind] could not keep up to a commercial tanker and had to let the Canadians do the job alone.”88 The Manhattan voyages also led the Government of Canada to rearrange the traditional order of its maritime prioritie