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.
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 high-salinity, low-tritium, high-oxygen, low-nutrient water that carries the signature of the Solomon Sea northwestward along the coast of Papua New Guinea. Oceanographers from Australia and the United States ran expedition after expedition through here during the Western Equatorial Pacific Ocean Circulation Study (WEPOCS) in 1985, 1986, 1988, 1991, and 1992, trying to understand what these waters were doing and where they were going. The surface current is stranger still - it reverses with the season. In northern hemisphere summer, the southeasterly monsoon drives the water westward. In northern hemisphere winter, the northwesterly monsoon reverses it. What flows through Vitiaz depends on what month you ask.
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 channel, and he did not map the passage. That distinction fell to William Dampier, the English privateer-turned-explorer whose 1700 voyage through the neighboring Dampier Strait established New Britain as an island rather than a peninsula of New Guinea. As Dampier sailed northwesterly through the passage that now bears his name, he charted and named islands that dotted the waters between his strait and Vitiaz: Sir George Rook's Island (later called Rooke, and now Umboi), Long Island (also called Arop), and Crown Island. His names stuck. The strait beside his was waiting for a Russian corvette still decades in the future.
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 them, learned their language, studied their customs, and returned twice more in the 1870s and 1880s. He opposed the European annexation of New Guinea. He wrote to Russian and British governments arguing that the Bongu people had the right to govern themselves. He failed. By 1884 the Germans had claimed the coast. But when he named the strait for his ship Vitiaz, he was honoring a vessel that had carried him to people he came to respect and try to protect. The name is a small counterweight to the usual conquest names that dot Pacific charts.
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 barges ran these waters by night, ferrying troops and supplies to the fighting fronts. American and Australian aircraft hunted them by day. The turning point came in 1943. Australian troops captured Finschhafen on the Huon Peninsula in October. American forces landed at Cape Gloucester on New Britain in December. When General Douglas MacArthur announced on Saturday, 12 February 1944, that American forces had occupied Rooke Island - the old Umboi, Dampier's island - the garrison met no opposition. The Japanese had already gone. On 29 February 1944 the Allies landed in the Admiralty Islands, and the corridor Japan had opened in March 1942 was sealed shut behind them.
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 Guinea Coastal Undercurrent still flows through the deep, delivering its distinctive Solomon Sea water to the western Pacific. Oceanographers still come. The currents still reverse with the monsoons. Somewhere on the seabed 1,200 meters down lie wrecks from the 1942-1944 campaign - barges, landing craft, aircraft that did not make it back. Umboi Island, Crown Island, and Long Island still ring the strait's northern end. The naturalist who named this passage after his ship died in 1888 at the age of 41, convinced to the last that the coastal peoples of New Guinea deserved their independence. He got his strait. They eventually got theirs.
The Vitiaz Strait is centered near 5.58 degrees south, 147.0 degrees east, running roughly northwest-southeast between the Huon Peninsula of mainland Papua New Guinea and the west end of New Britain. Recommended viewing altitude: 6,000-10,000 feet to appreciate both coastlines and the scatter of islands - Umboi, Crown, Long - that separate the Vitiaz from the neighboring Dampier Strait. Nearest sizable airports: Nadzab/Lae (AYNZ) to the southwest, Hoskins (AYHK) on New Britain's southern coast, and Madang (AYMD) to the west. Tropical cumulus builds rapidly throughout the day, and the Intertropical Convergence Zone produces frequent heavy rain year-round, with peak wet season December-March.