Voyages in Search of the North-West Passage

For three centuries, European powers were consumed by a single obsession: finding a route through the frozen wilderness above North America to the wealth of China and the Spice Islands. This volume gathers the extraordinary testimonies of mariners who ventured into waters where ice crushed ships and starvation awaited. We encounter Hugh Willoughby's doomed fleet, the phantom ship whose crew vanished without trace, and the grim chronicles of men who watched their companions die by degrees in the endless cold. Hakluyt, the great chronicler of English voyages, assembles these accounts not as adventure tales but asDocuments of obsession - men who knew the Arctic might kill them but sailed anyway because the promise of a shorter route to oriental wealth proved impossible to resist. The prose is of its era: formal, digressive, occasionallyBloodless. But beneath the antiquated diction lies something raw and true about what exploration cost in an age before survival gear existed.