Silk, Spices, and Glory: In Search of the Northwest Passage

William A. Waiser is a professor of history at the University of
Saskatchewan. He is the author of Saskatchewan’s Playground: A History
of Prince Albert National Park and Park Prisoners: The Untold Story of
Western Canada’s National Parks, 1915–1946

Silk, Spices, and Glory recounts the 500-year search for the elusive
Northwest Passage. Believing that a sea route across the top of Canada
offered the shortest and most direct way to the riches of the Orient,
northern European countries (mostly Great Britain) sent several
expeditions to Canadian Arctic waters, beginning in the late 16th
century. There they found disappointment, hardship, disaster—and in
all but one case—failure.

Margaret Macpherson seeks to tell this story through the exploits of 11
Arctic explorers. She examines how Elizabethan Martin Frobisher,
following in the wake of the Norse half a millennium earlier, was
blinded by prospect of instant wealth and extracted tons of worthless
pyrite on Baffin Island in the 1570s. She also describes the so-called
black winter of Jens Munk in 1619–20, when an expedition from Denmark
was caught in the ice off present-day Churchill, Manitoba, and succumbed
to scurvy. And she documents the folly of the now-famous Franklin
expedition, which tried to dominate the unfamiliar environment in 1845,
but managed only to get lost, prompting the greatest search in Arctic
history and the unraveling of the geography of the archipelago.

The ultimate irony in the story was that the passage was completed in
the early 20th century by Norwegian Roald Amundsen with a handful of men
and a small ship, the Gjoa. Amundsen succeeded in his quest by adopting
Inuit methods that previous explorers had scorned.

Macpherson has an eye for a good anecdote and tells the stories of the
men and the expeditions in a lively, accessible style. Indeed, Silk,
Spices, and Glory serves as good general introduction to the exploration
history of the region; it provides the reader with an appreciation and
understanding of what the men experienced and why most of them failed.