The search for the North West Passage

About this book

"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."--Jacket.