Qualla: Vitiaz Strait

Vitiaz Strait: Introduction

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The strait is named for a Russian warship, which is odd enough on its own. In October 1870 a young Russian naturalist named Nicholai Nicholaievich Mikluho-Maklai sailed from Kronstadt on the Imperial Russian corvette Vitiaz, rounded the tip of South America, crossed the Pacific Islands, and reached Astrolabe Bay on the north coast of New Guinea in September 1871. He would spend the rest of his short life studying the peoples of this coast. The strait he named for his ship runs between New Britain and the Huon Peninsula - a 1,200-meter-deep channel where the Solomon Sea pours into the Bismarck Sea, and where currents reverse with the monsoons. Abel Tasman sailed past it in 1643 without realizing he had. William Dampier finally charted the neighboring Dampier Strait in 1700. A Russian corvette gave Vitiaz its name in the 1870s. And in 1942, the whole Pacific War crashed through it.

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Vitiaz Strait: A Corridor of Deep Water

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Vitiaz Strait is young geology in slow motion. Two great landmasses - the New Guinea mainland and the arc of New Britain - do not quite meet, and between them runs a trench 1,200 meters deep. Through this gap flows the New Guinea Coastal Undercurrent, a subsurface river of hi...

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Vitiaz Strait: What Tasman Missed

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Abel Tasman sailed into these waters in 1643 as one of the great Dutch navigators, already famous for finding Tasmania and New Zealand. He saw Umboi Island in the Vitiaz Strait and wrote it down. But he did not realize the island was separated from New Guinea by a navigable chann...

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Vitiaz Strait: Maclay on the Coast

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Nicholai Mikluho-Maklai - who often signed himself simply Maclay - was not a conventional colonial explorer. The Russian naturalist arrived on the north coast of New Guinea in 1871 and made his camp at a place the Bongu people called Garagasi, on Astrolabe Bay. He lived among the...

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Vitiaz Strait: Japan's Corridor, and Its Loss

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On 8 March 1942 the Imperial Japanese Army landed two battalions at Lae and Salamaua on the Huon Gulf. With those landings Japan held both ends of the Vitiaz and Dampier Straits, and for eighteen months the corridor between Rabaul and the New Guinea coast was theirs. Japanese bar...

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Vitiaz Strait: What the Water Carries Now

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The strait today is quiet in the way the ocean is ever quiet. Container ships sometimes transit between the Solomon Sea and the Bismarck Sea, though most traffic prefers the broader and safer Dampier Strait to the south. Fishing boats from coastal villages work the edges. The New...

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