Voyages of Delusion: The Search For The Northwest Passage In The Age Of Reason

Glyndwr Williams

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Review

From Dava Sobel’s Longitude pbk £5.99 it is well known that the British Government offered a large prize for the invention of a tool that accurately measured longitude, and that this was eventually claimed by John Harrison.  Less well known is the fact that a prize was also offered for the discovery of the navigable passage that was assumed to exist between the Pacific and Hudson Bay.  The first half of this book describes the expeditions that attempted to find this chimera.  The secretive Hudson’s Bay Company was known to have a monopoly on trade in the vast hinterland and various entrepreneurs believed that the Company protected their interests by preventing the discovery which would surely lead to trade being opened to competitors… The politics are fascinating and superbly described by Williams – and everything underwritten by the belief, in the teeth of all evidence to the contrary, that the passage existed.

The second half of the book takes up the attempt to find the passage from the other direction, when a land journey to the Arctic made it plain that Hudson Bay really had no outlet to the west, and the terms of the prize were altered to allow for the passage to run into Baffin Bay.  But though the story is driven by a more ordered quest for enlightenment than by political machinations of interested parties, it is, if anything, more amazing.  Two stories, in particular, sustained the belief in a passage, both without foundation but with a peculiar tenacity on the minds of intelligent men.  One was the story of de la Fuca, who was said to have found a passage in the 16th century; the other was a letter by a gentleman called Fonte asserting that he had found a passage in which he had met a ship coming from Boston, in the opposite direction.  It wasn’t until Cook’s encounter with the pack ice north of the Bering Straits on his third voyage that Fonte’s claims were discredited; and while Cook demonstrated that de la Fuca’s straits must be unlikely, it took Vancouver’s painstaking survey a few years later to dislodge at last the myth of the straits’ existence.

The complex material in this book is presented intelligibly; the writing is lively and sophisticated.  The result is a deeply fascinating work on different levels.  As a work of maritime history, or the history of exploration, it is valuable because it makes sense of disparate ventures and voyages; it is also an intriguing sideline on 18th century politics.  But it is also utterly compelling as a story about the influence of received opinions, how much more powerful myths can be than empirical evidence, and the difficult business of acquiring knowledge.  A splendid companion to Williams’s marvellous The Prize Of All The Oceans . - review by Johnny de Falbe