Glyn Williams’s Voyages of Delusion caught my eye at Half Price Books a few years ago. A beautiful blue book with a tall ship navigating an icy sea superimposed over an eighteenth century map of North America most of which was still terra incognita, I had to buy it.
Sometimes it pays to judge a book by its cover when the cover is so striking. Of course, it still took two years to get around to reading it.
Voyages of Delusion tells the story of the eighteenth century quest for a navigable northwest passage between Hudson’s Bay and the Pacific. Despite the fact that there was almost no evidence to suggest that such a passage existed, discovery expeditions were organized by armchair geographers and endured by the crews of ships who suffered unimaginable hardships in their quest to find what wasn’t there.
Williams opens with accounts of the expeditions from Hudson’s Bay where explorers invariably had to deal not just with the cold, but with the Hudson’s Bay Company which didn’t want potential rivals encroaching on their monopoly over trade in the Hudson’s Bay drainage (almost all of Canada east of the Rockies, though they didn’t know there was that much of it). Between expeditions, he tells the stories of the battles of competing maps of North America, most of which were entirely speculative, representing more the hopes of the geographers than the actual outlines of the coasts.
The second half of the book tells of the search from the Pacific side, including the third voyage of Captain Cook in which he “discovered” Hawaii on his way to the Bering Strait where he and his men charted much of the Alaskan coast, bridging the maps of the Russians in the north with the Spanish in the south.
It was the tales of the competing maps – some of which were based on completely fictional voyages – that I found particularly interesting. Having a lifelong love of maps and geography it was quite enlightening to learn about how the map of North America ultimately came to be through speculation, intrigue, lies and fantasy mixed with real exploration. It is ironic of course how much nonsense was published and accepted by various geographers in the Age of Reason, but then that irony along with the many reproductions of various speculative maps that Williams includes work to make the book so enjoyable.
By the end of the book, one feels great empathy for Captain Vancouver who after years of searching for a passage from the Pacific apparently took great satisfaction in finally proving that there was no navigable northwest passage, thus turning his failure to find the fabled passage into a triumph of exploration and experiment over wishful thinking.
Of course, due to global warming, there is one now.
James Brush is a teacher and writer who lives in Austin, TX. He tries to get outside as much as possible.
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