Voyages in Search of the North-West Passage — Reading Notes

Ice, Gold, and the Unicorn's Horn

The excerpts reveal a persistent tension between material desire and environmental resistance. Mariners note stones that 'sparkled and glister in the sun like gold,' yet immediately undercut the promise with the proverb 'All is not gold that glistereth.' This scepticism coexists with a willingness to believe in wonders: a dead fish with a two-yard horn is taken for a 'sea unicorn,' and the horn's hollow tip is tested by feeding spiders, which 'presently died.' The passage blends empirical observation with folklore, showing how the explorers' worldview accommodated both evidence and legend.

Ice itself becomes an active antagonist. The ship at anchor requires constant watch, with men ready to 'knit fast unto such ice' and haul it away with oars. The harbour is a battlefield where the tide flings ice floes against the hull. These details ground the narrative in physical struggle, contrasting with the glittering promises of ore and passage.

Encounters on the Shore

When the explorers land on the 'supposed continent with America,' they find seal-skin tents and fleeing inhabitants. Their response is a mix of diplomacy and coercion: they leave 'trifles'—glasses, bells, knives—and a letter, hoping to contact men lost the previous year. But they also plan to 'take some of them' to gain information. The asymmetry is clear—the Europeans have writing, metal, and a sense of entitlement to the land.

The subsequent confrontation is violent and tragic. The indigenous people, 'altogether void' of trust, leap into the sea and drown rather than submit. The narrator insists they would have saved and healed them, but the account reveals a fatal misunderstanding. The people's swift boats and desperate resistance underscore their agency, even as the text frames them as obstacles. This episode crystallises the ethical ambiguity of exploration: the search for passage becomes a collision of worlds, with casualties on both sides.

The Phantom Ship and the Frozen Crew

Morley's preface introduces a recurring motif: the ship as a vessel of death. Willoughby's crew is found frozen, 'seventy dead men,' and the ships themselves sink 'with their dead, and them also that brought them.' This image haunts the collection, reminding readers that the Arctic does not yield its secrets cheaply. The phantom ship, a 'little bote' from Chaucer, becomes a metaphor for the entire enterprise—a fragile craft navigating an indifferent sea.

The preface also sketches the history of Spitzbergen whaling, where 'coppers and boilers were fitted on the island' and whales were towed in 'as fast as they were wanted.' This extractive frenzy, with nations partitioning bays, mirrors the later search for a passage. Both are driven by the same hunger for resources, whether oil or a route to Cathay. The bay named 'Sorrow,' with its graves, stands as a quiet counterpoint to the boasts of discovery.

Readers should attend to the gaps in these accounts—the silences of the indigenous people, the lost men never found, the ships that never returned. Hakluyt's collection is not a single story but a mosaic of voices, each straining against the ice and the unknown. The editorial framing by Morley adds a layer of retrospective melancholy, inviting us to see the voyages as both heroic and doomed. Approach these pages as you would a logbook: fragmentary, urgent, and haunted by what it cannot tell.

Reading these Elizabethan sailors’ desperate journals, I recalled my own younger self, dog-eared pages of The Naturalist on the River Amazons — A Reader’s Guide in my lap, feeling the same vast, patient isolation. Both books whisper that the truest discovery is how small one becomes—a quiet humbling I keep returning to, like a stone worn smooth by water.