Nicandri, David L.
Discovering Nothing. In Pursuit of an Elusive Northwest Passage.
University of British Columbia Press.
2024.
322 pages.
ISBN 9780774868884.
David Nicandri is an American historian from the state of Washington, where he served for many years as Executive Director of the Washington State Historical Society. An able storyteller with a passion for detailed research, he has published a number of books centred on the history of Northwest America, among them books on the explorations and careers of Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, John Meares, as well as a book about Cook’s unsuccessful attempt to find the Northwest Passage across the top of North America.1
In his latest work, Nicandri brings the impressive impact of his intense research to a revisiting of the whole question of the hunt for the Northwest Passage that baffled Cook.
Nicandri adopts a chronological approach in eleven tightly detailed chapters, supported by a prologue and epilogue. In part, it is an attempt to weave together the exploratory efforts of British and British colonial individuals, like Alexander Mackenzie and George Vancouver, with the American countering efforts, notably the Lewis and Clark expedition. His command of the minutiae of land explorations is impressive as he outlines what would prove to be a failed attempt by all of the actors in this great drama to find an easy and uncomplicated navigation route between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans: the “Sea route to the Orient / For which so many died”, as sung by Canadian folksinger Stan Rogers.
Nicandri paints a different, perhaps continentalist, picture of Cook’s own Arctic efforts, claiming that “The mistake historians have made is failing to see that Cook’s third voyage was not a continuation of his earlier explorations in the Pacific, but rather the first step in Great Britain’s assault on the Northwest Passage, an effort that the Admiralty was able to sustain continuously after the defeat of Napoleon”.
For Nicandri, his book completes the story of the efforts that Cook initiated, although it is possible to look back further in time to the eras of John Davis, William Baffin and even Francis Drake, and see the hunt for the Northwest Passage as a dream and goal alive even then. Nicandri’s book focuses on the Pacific side of the efforts, and hence becomes a study of not only seaborne efforts, but also the long treks across “a land so wide and savage” (Stan Rogers again) by men of the great fur trade companies to seek a safe east-west passage.
Nicandri’s conclusion, once the reader emerges from the thicket of his intense concentration of historical data, is that a practicable Northwest Passage was never discovered, in the true sense of the word, but was finally built in the form of the American and Canadian transcontinental railroads. It has in fact, through the process of climate change, become evident that within decades an open-water sea route from the Atlantic through the Canadian archipelago to the Beaufort Sea and the Pacific will finally exist for part, if not all, of the year
Nicandri’s historical self-assuredness rarely slips, but does so when he refers to Alexander Dalrymple, the geographical theorist, as a legitimate candidate to lead what became Cook’s first voyage to the South Pacific. Dalrymple was not a qualified mariner of any degree, and the Admiralty had made it quite clear it was not about to turn the command of a King’s ship over to him. That insistence would open the door of opportunity to James Cook, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Victor Suthren
References
- Nicandri, David. Captain Cook Rediscovered: Voyaging to the Icy Latitudes. University of British Columbia Press. 2020. Reviewed in Cook’s Log. 2021. Vol. 44, no. 2. Pages 40–41.
Originally published in Cook's Log, page 28, volume 47, number 4 (2024).