Showing The Search for the North West Passage by Ann Savours

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