In the long history of the colonial quest to discover the Northwest Passage – the ‘Strait of Anian’ or the route to the ‘Sea of the West’ in some earlier versions – Alexander Mackenzie's two expeditions in 1789 and 1793 come at a pivotal time and play a significant role. They also exemplify in an extreme form one crucial aspect of the search from the start: the economic impetus. In this chapter I will argue that while other explorations associated with the search were often impelled by multiple motivations – of which the economic one had more or less weight in different instances – Mackenzie's participation in the quest was driven by a thoroughly commercial imperative. I will also attempt to demonstrate how an entrepreneurial mentality pervades the account of his trips in search of the Passage.

Mackenzie's Expeditions in Context

After the initial explorations of the Hudson Bay area by the English, and of Baja California northwards by the Spanish, for a long period much of the pursuit of a practicable route across North America that would give easier access to the Orient came from the French. Starting in the late seventeenth century, coureurs de bois, adventurers and officially-sponsored leaders of expeditions attempted to penetrate beyond the Mississippi; one of their goals was to reach the Pacific, and China beyond.

At the beginning of 1854, the British Admiralty came to a difficult decision. Eight years earlier, on 19 May 1845, the Erebus and Terror had left the Thames under the command of Sir John Franklin to commence an Arctic voyage in search of the Northwest Passage. They had been glimpsed by whalers a couple of months later in Baffin Bay, but since then, European eyes had seen nothing of the ships or their crews. It was not for want of searching: since 1848 a dozen expeditions had been conducted, by sea and land, in an attempt to rescue the missing men. But the searchers had found very little – only the remains of the expedition's first winter camp on Beechey Island, including three graves. This was forlorn proof that most of the ships’ company had been alive in the spring of 1846, but no information had been left there to show where the ships might have gone next. So in 1854 the fate of the Franklin expedition remained a mystery, and most people in Britain had given up hope that rescue might still be possible. Almost nine years after the ships had departed, stocked with provisions for just three years, the Admiralty judged it time to call a halt. On 20 January the London Gazette announced that unless news of their safety arrived before the end of March, the missing officers and men would be considered to have died in Her Majesty's service.

Compared to other Elizabethan mariners who also engaged in exploratory voyages and maritime expeditions, such as Martin Frobisher, Sir Francis Drake or Sir Walter Ralegh, John Davis has received surprisingly little attention in recent years. In her recent book about early modern voyages and English travel narratives, Mary Fuller devotes ample space to Frobisher's voyages but makes only two passing remarks about John Davis, whose name features only once in her introductory chapter about ‘the English Worthies’ in a similar fashion, Robert McGhee acknowledges that Davis outmatched Frobisher in terms of both his sailing and cartographic skills, and yet his brief comments on Davis's three expeditions are confined to the end of his chapter on ‘Martin Frobisher's Gold Mines’. If, as Fuller explains, ‘the celebration of a “heroic Age of Discovery” depends on a number of deliberate and specific omissions – in other words on remembering some things and forgetting others’, then it seems fair to say that John Davis's early contribution to the discovery of the Northwest Passage has often been ‘forgotten’ by the historians of the field. Fuller goes on to remind her readers that:

In the summer of 1849, an English clergyman travelling by rail happened to share a carriage with a middle-aged woman who had beside her a luxuriantly blossoming houseplant. Both he and the other passengers made polite comments on the size and beauty of the plant and on the unusual care with which the woman guarded it. In response, she revealed that it had been a parting gift from her husband, an officer on Sir John Franklin's missing Arctic expedition. Overcome with despair at the thought that she would never see him again, she had left her ‘now desolate home’ and was going to live with her sister. The vigorous growth and rich blossoms of the plant showed that she had lavished ‘the full force of her womanly love’ upon it; indeed, the clergyman concluded that it ‘was to her the only living symbol and memento of him whom she mourned as for ever lost to her’. Yet, the woman recounted, ‘as it daily flourished and … brightly flowered from season to season, it seemed to revive and renew her perishing hopes’. The ‘tones of suppressed emotion’ in which she spoke, and her ‘air of sadness, tinged with a gleam of wifely pride’, immediately won the sympathy of her fellow passengers. Looking back on the incident two years later, the clergyman recalled their intense interest in the woman's story as his first indication of just how deep national feeling on the subject of Franklin's lost expedition ran.

The Northwest Passage in Nineteenth-Century Britain, 1818–74

Although this collective work can certainly be read as a self-contained book, it may also be considered as a sequel to our first volume, also edited by Frédéric Regard, The Quest for the Northwest Passage: Knowledge, Nation and Empire, 1576–1806, published in 2012 by Pickering & Chatto. That volume, dealing with early discovery missions and eighteenth-century innovations (overland expeditions, conducted mainly by men working for the Hudson's Bay Company), was more historical, insisting in particular on the role of the Northwest Passage in Britain's imperial project and colonial discourse. As its title indicates, this second volume deals solely with the nineteenth century. This was the period during which the Northwest Passage was finally discovered and – perhaps more importantly – the period during which the quest reached an unprecedented level of intensity in Britain. In Sir John Barrow's – the powerful Second Secretary to the Admiralty's – view of Britain's military, commercial and spiritual leadership in the world, the Arctic remained indeed the only geographical discovery worthy of the Earth's most powerful nation. But the Passage had also come to feature an inaccessible ideal, with Arctic landscapes and seascapes typifying sublime nature, in particular since Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein (1818).