Author - George Malcolm Thomson
Publisher - Secker & Warburg
A good hardcover book in a good dustjacket.
Gift inscription to front end-paper.
Pages ix + 288 including index with some illustrations and a map detailing the various attempts to find the North West Passage.
The vision was clear: a trading route across the top of the world, a shipping lane north of America to the fabulous riches of Cathay.
The way was unknown, unmapped, and its defences were formidable. But for centuries men were to argue, to search, to suffer and to die in the attempt to trace this route that was known only as an idea, a mythology, a potent name: the North-West Passage.
The search led them into unsuspected terrors, into seas and lands of a hostility beyond belief. Seas in which mountains of ice swung irresistibly; shores where towering cliffs of ice could entomb men and ships in their sudden thunderous collapse; lands so barren that it seemed nothing could endure but perpetual ice itself. But men did endure.
The hardships were awesome. Expeditions whose vessels lay splintered fought their way back overland, scraping meagre lichen from the snowbound rocks, chewing leather, fighting the beasts for carrion, surviving in cold so extreme that axe-heads shattered on trees frozen to granite.
Against the elements at their most vicious they pitted human endurance and a ruthless ingenuity. In the teeth of disaster the search went on. George Malcolm Thomson tells the story of that search, from the birth of the idea to the final unexpected triumph.
It is a panorama that encompasses five centuries, that links immortal names: Cabot, Frobisher, Hudson, Ross, Champlain, Franklin, Parry, Amundsen-in a saga of unequalled endurance.
It is a story of feats of navigation, of exploration, of speculation, of heroism, of greed, of survival. But above all it is the story of an idea that possessed the mind of man and outlived all the tragedies, the torments and the ironies of the long quest.
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