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Arctic Labyrinth: The Quest for the Northwest Passage. By glyn williams. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. 462 pp. $45.00 (cloth); $22.95 (paper).
Decreasing ice coverage of the Arctic Ocean due to global warming has generated an increasing interest in Arctic shipping routes during recent years. Global shipping companies are speculating if and when the Northwest Passage might become an alternative for global cargo transportation between the Atlantic and the Pacific, and legal aspects of the passage in the context of the Law of the Sea are causing tensions between the United States and Canada-altogether a good time for a new historical book on the Northwest Passage despite the huge number of already available books and articles on the wider context of the search for the passage and in particular the lost expedition of Sir John Franklin.
But simply categorizing Glyn Williams's new book as just another book on the topic would completely undervalue the book. Arctic Labyrinth is in fact the first really comprehensive and analytical book written by an authority on the subject that is not limited to a single aspect of the story. The book not only provides a chronology of the search for the passage or sheds light on particular expeditions but places the whole story from the first expeditions by Martin Frobisher in the 1570s to the first successful completion of the passage by Roald Amundsen with the FRAM (completed in 1906) and the following passages up to the American tanker Manhattan in 1969 or the German research icebreaker...