6 - Booking a Northwest Passage: Thomas James and The Strange and Dangerovs Voyage (1633)

Summary

As the subtitle to The Strange and Dangerous Voyage (1633) states, the book's author, Welshman Thomas James (c. 1593–1635), sailed from Bristol on 2 May 1631 on an ‘intended Discouery of the Northwest Passage into the South Sea’. His voyage involved the intentional sinking of his vessel at Charlton Island, James Bay, so that ice would not destroy it during the winter that he and his crew spent miserably on the island. James represented his era accurately in not conceiving of such a passage as mythic. Merchants sponsored his expedition; profit was their goal. Sailing along the west coast of Hudson Bay in 1612 and 1613, Thomas Button had closed by one-half the distance between North America's Atlantic coast and the point on the Pacific coast that Sir Francis Drake reported having touched more than thirty years earlier.

But, as one would expect in a narrative of exploration prior to the Royal Society's edict in the second half of the seventeenth century that they should be expunged, strange and dangerous events, not just businessmen's considerations about shipping, found their way into James's book with sufficient regularity to lend the expedition a lustre as much of wonder and spiritual inquiry as of geographical exploration.