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Reviews
Voyages of Delusion: The Quest for the Northwest Passage
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By Glyn Williams
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Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., 2002. Illustrations, photographs, maps, index. 487 pages. $29.95 cloth.
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Reviewed by Derek Hayes
Vancouver, British Columbia
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| Publishers love, it seems, to play around with book titles. A case in point is Glyn Williams's new book, which was published last year in Britain with the title Voyages of Delusion: The Search for the Northwest Passage in the Age of Reason and this year by Yale University Press with the apparently far more inclusive title Voyages of Delusion: The Quest for the Northwest Passage. Did the publisher think that no one in North America would know what the Age of Reason was? Or was this an attempt to broaden the audience? The problem here is that the introduction launches into an explanation of the Age of Reason, noting the paradox that the period saw a less-than-reasonable revival of hopes for finding a Northwest Passage, and so the new subtitle makes little sense. The narrative is confined to the eighteenth century and will disappoint anyone wanting an account of the nearly four hundred years during which a passage was sought. That said, it should be emphasized that these shenanigans are beyond the control of the author and do not in the least bit detract from the quality of Williams's text, which is certainly up to his normal informed and erudite standard. |
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During the first half of the eighteenth century — the Age of Reason — British promoters, especially the indomitable Irish squire Arthur Dobbs, managed to persuade the British Admiralty to sponsor a new attempt to discover a navigable passage, which they were convinced must lead westward from Hudson Bay. The Hudson's Bay Company, Dobbs believed, was sitting on its laurels on the edge of the bay, doing nothing that might reduce the regular dividends it was paying its stockholders. The book details the backroom maneuvering that led to the 1741–1742 venture under Christopher Middleton and, after its failure, the attempts to hold Middleton and others accountable for not finding the elusive — not to say delusive — passage. This was followed by further attempts to interest private investors in risking their money on a new attempt, that of William Moor and Francis Smith in 1746–1747. Dobbs was never one to give up or to let fact get in the way of his fancy, even in the face of what now seems to be overwhelming evidence that there was no passage to be found. |
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The book then details the reaction of the Hudson's Bay Company to the results of these voyages and considers some of the hoaxes that were perpetrated at this time, especially that of the De Fonte letter, an account of a Spanish admiral's transit of a Northwest Passage at a navigable latitude. Williams also introduces us to the exploits of one Alexander Cluny, who claimed, in a book published in 1769, to have traveled across an isthmus connecting Hudson Bay with the "Icy Sea" north of what is now Alaska and even provided a map and illustration to lend authority to his fiction. |
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Finally, the book considers James Cook's third voyage, in which he traveled to the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, and George Vancouver's detailed survey fifteen years later to show how the dream of finding a navigable passage was at last put to rest. |
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The book is a thoroughly updated and augmented rewrite of one of Williams's early books, The British Search for the Northwest Passage in the Eighteenth Century, published in 1962. Much research has been done since that time, and so this new book is a welcome addition. There is a detailed and highly useful appendix containing sources and bibliography chapter by chapter. The book is meticulously researched and documented, well-written and authoritative, and thoroughly recommended. |
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