In the summer of 2007, some of the routes through the usually ice-choked waters of the Canadian Arctic opened to shipping for the first time. At last, the Northwest Passage—the oft-envisioned sea passage through the maze of islands that form Canada's northernmost regions that would provide easy access to the riches of the East—had come to exist in a meaningful way for maritime traffic. Even today in an age of air travel, it still offers commercial possibilities, as it could reduce the length of voyages from New York to Tokyo by 3,000 miles. It also may, however, unleash a fierce international competition for control of both the route and the oil and gas reserves to which it might provide access.

Two centuries ago, when the search for the Northwest Passage was at its apex, it was the quest itself that was the dominant issue; the question of what to do once it was achieved arose only in speculative terms. This was because in the first half of the nineteenth century “the ice never melted” (5), thwarting the ambitions of dozens of—mostly British—explorers and taking the lives of dozens more, including all 126 men on Sir John Franklin's expedition in the 1840s. But this is to begin with the tragic ending rather than the optimistic beginning. In the early nineteenth century, it was widely held that Arctic waters were frozen only at their edges, with an “open polar sea” beyond that would permit ships to sail easily across the North Pole, thereby reducing the journey from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans by many thousands of miles in the days prior to the opening of the Panama Canal. The personal fame and national glory that would accrue to the discoverer of such a route was immense and well worth the enormous risk.

Geographic and climatic reality rapidly put paid to the dreams of one explorer after another, but there were always others willing to take up the charge, even after it became clear just how formidable a task it was. “To the north everything was ice, nothing but ice” (20) read the reports dispatched to the Admiralty over and over again. The blank spaces on the maps were filled in painstakingly slowly, and often inaccurately, as the distinctions between ice and land and water were rarely clear. To be sure, the men who headed into the waters of the Canadian Arctic were undeniably brave. Franklin ultimately became a sort of comic figure, too old and too fat for his final, catastrophic command. (This was, after all, the man who brought 700 pounds of bacon on his first journey into the Arctic.) But before we dismiss him entirely, we should recall that he was a veteran of two previous expeditions to the Arctic as well as one to Australia, along with the battles of Copenhagen, Trafalgar, and New Orleans. At the latter, he took a bullet in the shoulder while on a raiding party. And Franklin looked positively effete next to the Scotsman John Ross, who joined the Royal Navy at age nine and was wounded no less than thirteen times. But the Arctic proved too much for him, as it did for Franklin: after sailing eighty miles into Lancaster Sound in 1818, Ross spotted what appeared to be mountains in the distance that blocked his path and ordered his two ships to reverse course. Those mountains, however, did not exist, as was proven a year later when another expedition sailed right through them. Either Ross's eyes had played tricks on him or his nerve had failed, but whatever the case may have been, his reputation never recovered. Finally, inevitably, it was accomplished: the Norwegian Roald Amundsen emerged at the western end of the Northwest Passage in 1906, but it had taken him three years. It was not until 1944 that a Canadian icebreaker made it through in a single season. The difficulty of the feat failed to elevate its conquerors, for Amundsen had revealed that the route was all but useless for commercial purposes in the days before global warming melted the ice on a consistent basis.

It cannot not be said that much of what Anthony Brandt describes is new, for the story of the search for the Northwest Passage has been told many times. The opening two chapters, cast in the context of the changes wrought by global warming, are compelling, but he then resorts to a conventional chronological narrative that follows well-trodden ground. Brandt's prose is workmanlike rather than brilliant: all too often, he relies upon pithy quotations from other authors to give his own work verve. His own attempts to spice things up—such as his reference to Sir John Franklin as “old school” (300)—can be gratingly anachronistic. But above all this is a book meant to breathe new life into the story for an audience of general readers, and by that measure it must be counted a success. What makes The Man Who Ate His Boots most worthwhile is its cynicism: previous studies of the search for the Northwest Passage have emphasized the heroism of the explorers over the futility of their objective, but Brandt is more willing to accept folly for what it is and to assert that, even in their own time, they should have known better than to let hope fly in the face of geographical reality. This is refreshing and more consistent with present-day attitudes toward exploration for the purpose of territorial conquest and commercial gain. Brandt's conclusion says it all: “We can admire the courage, even the persistence of the quest. But if we respect history at all we must temper whatever admiration we may feel with the image of pieces of human arms and legs cooking in a kettle while starving men stare with deadened eyes at the ultimate consequences of this spectacular piece of folly” (396).