The Search for the North West Passage

Amazon.com
After Columbus sailed the ocean blue in search of a trading route to China but found his way blocked by North and South America, Britain and Europe's other colonial powers scrambled to find alternate paths to the Far East. Avoiding the south, dominated by Spain and Portugal after the Pope's 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, the English and the Dutch searched for both a North East Passage, north of Eurasia, and a North West Passage, through the Arctic ice of what is now North America.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The quest for a North West Passage through the Arctic seas to China and the riches of the Orient began as long ago as the sixteenth century when northern Europeans found the southern route around the Cape of Good Hope barred by the Spanish and Portuguese. It took a further 300 years, as well as the extraordinary bravery and resilience of the explorers, for this elusive route to be finally discovered by Franklin during his famous but ill-fated voyage in the 1840s. Not until the twentieth century was the passage finally traversed by ship." "The expeditions which headed north into the unknown wastes of the Arctic did so in defiance of terrible odds, and the names of those who led them - Frobisher, Cook, Hudson, Davis, Baffin, Parry, Ross and Franklin himself - are central to the mythology of European exploration. This new book tells the story of their remarkable feats and describes how the vast tracts of the ice-bound archipelago were slowly and painfully charted. It portrays the encounters with the Esquimaux and examines their vital help; it describes the boats and ships and the food and clothing on which the explorers depended as well as the alien habitat in which they found themselves.

FROM THE CRITICS

Booklist

This is a superb rendering of a series of real-life adventures.

New York Times Book Review

No single volume...covers the history of the elusive stretch of icy water as concisely and comprehensively as this book.

Booknews

A leading British authority on the history of polar exploration chronicles the search for a sea route linking the North Atlantic and North Pacific since Elizabethan times. The volume appends transits of 20th-century North West passage attempts, and a list of relics of Sir John Franklin's disastrous last expedition (1845-48) from the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. Mostly b&w illustrations relating to the voyages and indigenous peoples animate the narrative. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Kirkus Reviews

Savours (The Voyages of Discovery, not reviewed) provides a thorough and transporting survey of North West Passage explorations, drawn, and laced with excerpts, from primary sources. Using original manuscripts, ship's logs, letters, and diaries, Savours recounts, voyage by voyage, the many attempts to discover a sea route from the North Atlantic to the North Pacific. Savours works in strict chronological mode, proceeding from John Cabot, of whom little is known, up to the expeditions of Sir John Franklin and the eventual navigation through the ice and archipelagoes by Amundsen in his herring boat. The series of voyages, mainly from England, in hopes of tapping into the rumored fabulous wealth of Cathay, are understood here to have comprised three epochs. The first, commercially motivated, sought a route around he Americas to the Far East that avoided the waters controlled by the Portuguese and the Spanish to the south; the second was characterized by a bouillabaisse of scientific curiosity, national pride, and imperial hunger; the last was the era of individual ambition, marked by such personalities as Scott, Shackleton, Amundsen, and Peary. In writing that is formal and unembellished, Savours makes judicious selections from her source material to give each voyage a distinct personality, full of the detail and coloration—clothing, food, tools, boas, descriptions of Inuit—that reveal why Hudson's voyage was tragic, Frobisher's misguided, Barrow's endless, Franklin's endlessly popularized. What engages the reader perhaps more than the celebrated voyages of Cook and Davis and Ross are the numerous forgotten sailings by men like George Waymouth, James Knight, Captain Middleton,and Captain Lyon. Savours allows these explorers to rise toward the light, if only briefly, the space they occupy here directly proportional to the paper trail they left in their wake. For so dry a linear narrative, Savours pleasingly manages to summon the atmosphere that attended each phase of the 400-year infatuation with the North West Passage. (85 color and b&w photos and illustrations)