Cruises visiting Devon Island, Nunavut

Located in Baffin Bay, Devon Island is part of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Anchored on the Arctic Cordillera, its rocky surface, similar to that of Mars, is of great interest to scientists. Robert Bylot and William Baffin were the first Europeans to sight Devon Island in 1616 but it would be mapped two centuries later by the British sailor William E. Parry, who named it after the eponymous English region. Around 1920, the Hudson's Bay Company set up a fur-trading outpost there, until the departure of the Inuits in 1936. A new attempt to populate it was made at the beginning of the 1950s. Only a few buildings in ruins, vestiges of that time, remain today.