Disappointment River
Finding and Losing the Northwest Passage
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
In 1789, Alexander Mackenzie traveled 1200 miles on the immense river in Canada that now bears his name, in search of the fabled Northwest Passage that had eluded mariners for hundreds of years. In 2016, the acclaimed memoirist Brian Castner retraced Mackenzie's route by canoe in a grueling journey -- and discovered the Passage he could not find.
Disappointment River is a dual historical narrative and travel memoir that at once transports readers back to the heroic age of North American exploration and places them in a still rugged but increasingly fragile Arctic wilderness in the process of profound alteration by the dual forces of globalization and climate change. Fourteen years before Lewis and Clark, Mackenzie set off to cross the continent of North America with a team of voyageurs and Chipewyan guides, to find a trade route to the riches of the East. What he found was a river that he named "Disappointment." Mackenzie died thinking he had failed. He was wrong.
In this book, Brian Castner not only retells the story of Mackenzie's epic voyages in vivid prose, he personally retraces his travels, battling exhaustion, exposure, mosquitoes, white water rapids and the threat of bears. He transports readers to a world rarely glimpsed in the media, of tar sands, thawing permafrost, remote indigenous villages and, at the end, a wide open Arctic Ocean that could become a far-northern Mississippi of barges and pipelines and oil money.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Memoirist and Iraq vet Castner (All the Ways We Kill and Die) blends stories of his own travels in Canada's far north with an exhilarating historical narrative set in the area in the late 18th century. In 2016, Castner set out to paddle the 1,124 miles of the Mackenzie River in Canada's Northwest Territories, retracing the route taken by Alexander Mackenzie in 1789. A prominent fur trader, Mackenzie hoped to discover the fabled Northwest Passage and thereby secure the rich markets of East Asia. Guided by an incomplete map, Mackenzie pushed his group of voyageurs and native Chipewyans through intense privation into Arctic latitudes previously unknown to Europeans. Over two centuries later, Castner finds indigenous cultures negotiating the dangers, and opportunities, of modernity and climate change. Yet despite the buildup along the banks, the vast river Mackenzie named Disappointment retains both its dangers and majesty. Of the alternating accounts, the fur trader's is more gripping, as Castner evokes vivid personalities and drama from the archives (at one point, to stave off loneliness, Mackenzie "trudged the forty miles through the snow for a glass of wine and dinner with Roderic," his cousin and fellow adventurer). The author's own reasons for embracing such intense physical misery remain unclear, and the themes of global warming and Native American resilience are left underdeveloped. Nevertheless, Castner is an engaged narrator and writes from a visceral connection to the natural world, describing insect swarms and whitewater spills. Historians and armchair travelers alike will be equally pleased with this volume.
