Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #772926 in Books
• Published on: 2003-07-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
In 1580 the Elizabethan magician and geographer John Dee cheerfully dispatched a group of English seamen on a voyage into the polar regions, confidently predicting that they would be able to navigate a much shorter route to China than that already used via the Cape of Good Hope. Most of the crew vanished in the freezing polar ice, but Dee and the Elizabethan fascination with sailing northwards to reach the other side of the world remained intact. So began the long and complex history of the attempt to sail from the northern Atlantic into the Pacific Ocean, vividly captured in Ann Savour's comprehensive book The Search for the North West Passage, which charts the peculiarly English obsession with sailing into ice and temperatures which often plummeted to minus sixty degrees.

Savours follows the geographical and exploratory twists and turns of the North West passage, which "extends from Baffin Bay (between West Greenland and Baffin Island) to Bering Strait (between Alaska and Siberia), through the Canadian Arctic archipelago. In the 16th and 17th centuries it was sought as a way to get round America to the riches of China and the Far East. By the beginning of the 19th century the search had become in part a geographical challenge, to understand and map the wide blank spaces in the Arctic regions of North America." In retelling the story of the ultimate discovery of the passage in the mid-19th century, Savours wonderfully captures and carefully documents the often reckless heroism and remarkable endurance of a series of explorers who quite literally sailed off into darkness. From the early Elizabethan voyages of Frobisher and David, to Sir John Franklin's fateful and mysterious final expedition between1845-48, and the subsequent final discovery of the North West passage, Savours' book emphasises the extent to which the search for the passage was an important chapter in the wider history of global exploration. Explorers of the stature of Captain James Cook and Roald Amundsen cut their teeth on the North West passage, and it was only Amundsen in 1905 who finally fully circumnavigated the torturous route. Writing about his momentous achievement, Amundsen exclaimed, The North West Passage had been accomplished--my dream from childhood.; Ann Savours' The Search for the North West Passagevividly catches the romantic desire, but also perils and pitfalls of polar exploration. --Jerry Brotton

Synopsis
The search for the North West Passage to the Far East was the main driving force behind British arctic exploration from the 16th to the mid-19th century, culminating in the famous and ill-fated Franklin expedition, the disappearance of which and the resulting search for the missing crews is one of the great tragic stories of the history of exploration. This account covers the early history of this great quest including the voyages of Frobisher, Hudson and Captain Cook, and all of Franklin's expeditions. After the disappearance of his ships Erebus and Terror, his wife galvanised the Governement to mount a search for her husband and his men and these expeditions are also vividly described. It examines the British encounters with the indigenous people of the Arctic and their vital help in charting the Arctic archipelago, the way the variations in the ice from year to year affected the results of each expedition, and the ships, boats, diet and clothing of the early explorers.