Madness, Betrayal, and the Lash: The Epic Voyage of Captain George Vancouver

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

By the age of 23, George Vancouver had been at sea for nearly eight and a half years, almost all of that time under the mentorship of history’s greatest navigator-explorer, James Cook, whose murder in Hawaii Vancouver witnessed. At 33, he was given command of his own voyage of Pacific exploration with a mandate that included charting the west coast of North America. An account of this incredible journey of four and a half years forms the greater part of this engaging narrative by Stephen Bown, whose previous books include Scurvy—a history of the disease in the Age of Sail. This work does not clam to shed new light on Vancouver; Bown did not go “through archives scouring for new documentary evidence,” but used already published sources.

Although Vancouver and his voyage “deserve to be remembered …as one of the greatest naval adventures of the Age of Sail and as a testament of human perseverance in the face of almost insurmountable odds,” Vancouver returned to England not to celebrity as had Cook, but to ignominy and obscurity, partly because the public was absorbed in a war that had broken out with France during his voyage, and partly because Vancouver had become an object of derision in the popular press due to occasional harsh and autocratic command decisions, some maliciously distorted by a man who had sailed under him as a young midshipman but far exceeded Vancouver in social rank. It was a time when power and influence came with birth, and not from ability or accomplishment, and the wretched last years of Vancouver’s life make for sad reading.

Although his achievements went unheralded, they were many, as Brown clearly shows. In a brief essay on sources, he writes that the “job of a popular historian and biographer is to blend scholarship and storytelling, to provide solid historical context as well as a strong narrative.” By that standard, he has written an enthralling book about a man who changed “the histories and geographies of Spain, Russia, Britain, Hawaii, the new Republic of the United States of America, the yet-to-exist country of Canada and dozens of First Nations.”