Sailors generally did not try to traverse frozen passages.

Only explorers, driven to discovery and occasionally whalers, driven by greed, really ventured into dangerously ice prone waters. Sometimes they perished, or their ships did.

In 1871, 32 whaling ships were trapped by ice off the coast of Alaska, 1219 men women and children escaped over the ice and the icy seas in whaleboats, and miraculously all survived. Only one of the ships was salvaged and sailed again.

http://sanctuaries.noaa.gov/whalingfleet/disaster1871.html

Many explorer's ships were also lost to ice. In 1845, Sir John Franklin's expedition of two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, searched for the Northwest Passage. They were steam powered ships, re-inforced with iron. They were trapped in the ice and the entire expedition perished.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin%27s_lost_expedition

In 1878, the US Jeanette expedition, commanded by Captain George W. DeLong, tried to break through the ice to the (incorrectly theorized) "ice free polar sea", and reach the North Pole.

The Jeanette was captured (deliberately) by the ice North of Siberia, near Wrangle Island. She drifted in the grip of the ice for 21 months, without ever reaching the speculated (but non-existent) ice free zone, before the ship was crushed and the crew had to evacuate with sleds and boats and try to find safety in Siberia. Only 13 of the 30 crew managed to survive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Jeannette_(1878)

In 1893, Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen, tried to reach the North Pole by using the same technique as that employed by the Jeannette (further emboldened by the fact that wreckage from the Jeannette had eventually been found washed ashore on the East coast of Greenland). He determined to deliberately put an extremely strongly built wooden ship into the ice near the Bering Sea, north of Siberia, and see if she would drift close to the North Pole and eventually emerge from the ice near Spitsbergen.

The ship was the Fram, designed by famous naval architect Colin Archer. She was very strongly built and designed to withstand the crushing grip of the ice.

In October 1893 she was put into the ice north of Siberia. By March, 1895. after drifting with the ice for 17 months, Nansen deduced that the drift of the ship would not take them as far north as the pole, so, with one companion, he set off with sleds and kayaks towards the Pole.

They got to 86 degrees 13.6 minutes north before deciding to turn back and miraculously making it safely to Franz Josef Land. Nansen made it back to Norway in August 1896 only two days before the Fram, which had finally broken free from the ice.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nansen%27s_Fram_expedition

The Fram later went on to be Amundsen's expedition ship for the first successful expedition to the South Pole.

You can see her today at the Fram Museum in Oslo, Norway.

Most sailors would not risk frozen passages in the days of wooden ships (or even today with steel ships), but if the ship was very strongly built, and cleverly designed to be pushed up, rather than crushed by the pressure of the ice, like the Fram then a wooden ship could survive in the ice.