Voyages of Delusion: the Quest for the Northwest Passage

Natural History, May, 2003 by Laurence A. Marschall

by Glyn Williams Yale University Press, 2003; $29.95

In this age of technical marvels, when satellite images of the globe are only a mouse click away (see, for instance, terraserver.microsoft.com), it comes as a shock to see how sketchy are the outlines of continents on maps of the 1700s. More than two centuries had passed since Columbus's voyages, but so little of the world had been charted that geography was more a matter of speculation than of science. Western sailors knew about just a few islands in the Pacific, had a passing idea of the location of Australia, and only half-believed the rumors of a giant continent in the remote south and an ice-free ocean around the North Pole (only one of which, of course, turned out to be true).

As for the New World itself, a vast northwestern quadrant remained unexplored. Some maps--if they showed anything at all west of the Great Lakes--placed the "Isle of California" off the western coast of North America. Others charted Alaska as the largest island in the Aleutian Islands chain.

The speculative European and American geography of the eighteenth century, according to maritime historian Glyn Williams, was guided by a seductive assumption: an easy, ice-free passage connected the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. But the evidence was scanty; the vastness of the North American continent hindered overland exploration, and ice seemed to block all the sea routes around the continent to the north.

One exception seemed to be Hudson Bay, accessible from the Atlantic Ocean by a strait that, in a good year, remained open throughout July and August. There was tantalizing evidence that beyond the bay was a passage to the Pacific Ocean. Whales, earnestly believed to have swum from the Pacific, had been sighted along the bay's western shores, and some reports of the height and direction of its tides seemed to indicate its connection to a larger body of water.

If you read those signs optimistically, as did the Irish legislator Arthur Dobbs (an ardent advocate of a Northwest Passage), all you needed was persistence. Follow the indented western shoreline of Hudson Bay and an inlet would soon be found that led, after at most a few hundred miles, into the balmy Pacific. Dobbs, who never came anywhere near Hudson Bay, managed to persuade the British government that his fantasy was a worthwhile enterprise, and two small ships, under the command of Christopher Middleton, set sail in early June 1741. With an optimism typical of the age, they carried orders not only to find the passage but also to negotiate treaties with the "populous Nations" of the Pacific.

Middleton's expedition, and all others to Hudson Bay in the decades that followed, came to naught. Promising inlets always ended abruptly, ships got stuck in the ice, and men froze, starved, and died of scurvy. It was no better for explorers who, trying a different tack, sought the outlet of the Northwest Passage on the Pacific side. James Cook, on his last voyage around the world, followed numerous fjords into the deeply indented Alaskan coast, meeting nothing but frustration.

Williams's history stops in the 1790s, but, as he notes in his final pages, the disastrous Arctic voyages continued for another hundred years. During that time, however, all the poking and prodding had some effect on geographic knowledge. When Lewis and Clark set out to explore the Louisiana Territory in 1803, the true extent of the North American monolith was beginning to appear on maps, and the hope of the mercantile world for a shortcut through the continent had faded. The dream of an open polar sea replaced the dream of a channel through the continent.

It was not until 1906, by drifting for four years among crushing pack ice, that the Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen managed to navigate an arduous northern route from the Atlantic to the Pacific. By then, Arctic travel was regarded as an expensive and heroic stunt, and the search for a Northwest Passage had become a lesson in the folly of wishful thinking.

Laurence A. Marschall, author of The Supernova Story, is the W.K.T. Sahm professor of physics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, and director of Project CLEA, which produces widely used simulation software for education in astronomy.