North-West Passage: An Arctic Obsession, National Maritime Museum, London
Sound sets the scene. When you pass through the doors, you are assailed by the bone-chilling noise of howling winds, and the crepitation of ice. Welcome to an exhibition about the fabled North-West Passage, a source of endless, greed-driven fascination, and often fruitless and tragic endeavour, for centuries. Was it somehow possible to travel by sea from the North Atlantic to the North Pacific, passing through the ice-bound waters of Alaska? Many tried. Many perished. John Cabot, sailing in 1497, believed that it would give him access to the fabled riches of the Far East. There then followed five hundred years of failure. Yes, it was not until 1906 that a Norwegian called Roald Amundsen achieved the near impossible, threading his way through, quite modestly, in a small herring boat.
This pleasing, intelligent, compact show at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich – and what more fitting a location could there be than this museum? – tells the story of some of the most remarkable of those voyages, and of those who led them. But it does much more than that. It shows us the instruments that were used, and of how they grew in sophistication, the food that was eaten, the clothes that were worn, and the way that these lands, and the indigenous peoples of these lands, were represented.
Early attempts to map the region were primitive in the extreme. Mercator's of 1620 shows the North Pole as a large rock rising from the sea. Sir Martin Frobisher's early voyages to the Arctic of 1576-8 resulted in a remarkable find – fool's gold, which Elizabeth I took for the real thing, locking it away in the Tower for safe keeping. Fragments of it are here...
Read entire article at Independent (UK)
This pleasing, intelligent, compact show at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich – and what more fitting a location could there be than this museum? – tells the story of some of the most remarkable of those voyages, and of those who led them. But it does much more than that. It shows us the instruments that were used, and of how they grew in sophistication, the food that was eaten, the clothes that were worn, and the way that these lands, and the indigenous peoples of these lands, were represented.
Early attempts to map the region were primitive in the extreme. Mercator's of 1620 shows the North Pole as a large rock rising from the sea. Sir Martin Frobisher's early voyages to the Arctic of 1576-8 resulted in a remarkable find – fool's gold, which Elizabeth I took for the real thing, locking it away in the Tower for safe keeping. Fragments of it are here...