'This volume brings together essays devoted almost exclusively to what Britons, and later Americans, wrote about their search... The essays here reward close reading.' Renaissance Quarterly

• Introduction: The Northwest Passage and the Imperial Project: History, Ideology, Myth, Sophie Lemercier-Goddard, Frédéric Regard; Chapter 1 Arctics of Empire: The North in Principal Navigations (1598–1600), Mary C. Fuller; Chapter 2 From Myth to Appropriation: English Discourses on the Strait of Anian (1566–1628), Ladan Niayesh; Chapter 3 ‘Not Now Believed’: The Textual Fate of the Baffin and Bylot Expeditions (1615–16), Catherine Bécasse; Chapter 4 George Best’s Arctic Mirrors: A True Discourse of the Late Voyages of Discoverie … of Martin Frobisher (1578), Sophie Lemercier-Goddard; Chapter 5 ‘A People of Tractable Conversation’: A Reappraisal of Davis’s Contribution to Arctic Scholarship (1585–7), Marc-Antoine Mahieu, Mickaël Popelard; Chapter 6 Booking a Northwest Passage: Thomas James and the Strange and Dangerovs Voyage (1633), I. S. MacLaren1; Chapter 7 Anthropology as Curiosity: Samuel Hearne’s Journey from Prince of Wales’s Fort … to the Northern Ocean in the Years 1769, 1770, 1771 & 1772 (1795), Nathalie Zimpfer; Chapter 8 Alexander Mackenzie’s Search for the Northwest Passage: The Commercial Imperative (1789–93), Robert Sayre; Chapter 9 Illusion, (Self-)Delusion: Jefferson’s ‘Corps of Discovery’ and the Elusive Northwest Passage (1804–6), Gérard Hugues;