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Review
| Voyages of Delusion: The Quest for the Northwest Passage, by Glyn Williams. New Haven, Yale. 2003. 467 pages. $29.95, hard cover.
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| Today, our students are faced with the problem of too much information. The internet provides a vast quantity of information that requires our students to sift through and to evaluate. While they take for granted that almost limitless information is readily available for them to use at the click of a mouse, they may not realize how little information people had when making important decisions in the past. Glyn Williams' book Voyages of Delusion: The Quest for the Northwest Passage would certainly enlighten them about the trials and tribulations in the 18th century of searching for the fabled water route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, searches based on wishful thinking and dubious information in the 18th century. In an absorbing and sometimes dark narrative, Williams recounts not only touching stories of the men who braved the unknown, but also the geopolitical forces that drove them there in the first place. The book skillfully intertwines the trials of sailors with the political and economic motivations which inspired their vain hope of finding what everyone was certain existed. The political forces encouraging the expeditions of the 18th century were personified by Arthur Dobbs, an Irish MP. Dobbs, fervently nationalistic and concerned about the growing geopolitical threat from France and Russia, helped bring the search for the route under government oversight rather than letting private companies, such as the secretive Hudson's Bay Company, lead the way. Dobbs was always confident, basing his beliefs on precarious evidence such as the vague and dubious accounts of Juan de Fuca and Bartholomew de Fonte. Certain a Northwest Passage existed, Dobbd convinced parliament that finding it was in the nation's self-interest. In so doing, he attacked those such as the Hudson's Bay Company, who knew the region best. The Company, according to Dobbs, had not taken the search seriously and he feared that the Company's lethargy would hurt England in a world of growing geopolitical competition. |
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Williams' then recounts, in gripping narrative style, the tribulations of various futile expeditions. With incompetent leadership and after facing freezing conditions, starvation, potential mutiny, and death, the sailors returned home to face disdain and ridicule for not finding what everyone believed but we now know never existed. Officers even faced having their pay withheld pending parliamentary investigations. The certainty of the Northwest Passage never came into doubt, only the skill and character of the sailors. Even the indomitable Captain James Cook, who searched for the passage from the Pacific side, was not above criticism. |
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Diligently researched, Voyages of Delusion is a skillful and well written narrative that incorporates a vast amount of documentary evidence and in-depth analysis. It carefully integrates the accounts of the many expeditions with the political forces driving them. Using archaeological evidence from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, Williams is able to reconstruct a poignant tale of Hudson Bay Company Captain James Knight's lost expedition of 1719, stranded on Marble Island over the harsh arctic winter. In addition, the book is adorned with some excellent illustrations and maps, many from the 18th century. The maps would be particularly useful to enlighten students about how little knowledge these explorers had when they set out. |
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Thugh well written and engaging, the book's length (410 pages of narrative) probably precludes its use in a high school or college survey class. However, it provides quite a bit of information for teachers to use in creating lectures on the topic or classroom exercises. Useful maps compliment the appendices that excerpt the journals of de Fonte and de Fuce. Presenting these primary sources to students and asking them to organize an expedition based on only this information would demonstrate the amount of wishful thinking the Northwest Passage elicited during the "age of reason." Students in upper division college classes in British politics or Atlantic Studies would benefit directly from the text itself since it fills a gap between the well document explorations of the 17th and 19th centuries. On the whole, the book is not only informative but also an excellent read. |
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| Montana State University |
Thomas C. Rust |
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