Disappointment River: Finding and Losing the Northwest Passage

by Brian Castner

Overview

In 1789, Alexander Mackenzie traveled 1200 miles on the immense river in Canada that now bears his name, in search of the fabled Northwest Passage that had eluded mariners for hundreds of years. In 2016, the acclaimed memoirist Brian Castner retraced Mackenzie's route by canoe in a grueling journey — and discovered the Passage he could not find.

Disappointment River is a dual historical narrative and travel memoir that at once transports readers back to the heroic age of North American exploration and places them in a still rugged but increasingly fragile Arctic wilderness in the process of profound alteration by the dual forces of globalization and climate change. Fourteen years before Lewis and Clark, Mackenzie set off to cross the continent of North America with a team of voyageurs and Chipewyan guides, to find a trade route to the riches of the East. What he found was a river that he named "Disappointment." Mackenzie died thinking he had failed. He was wrong.

    In this book, Brian Castner not only retells the story of Mackenzie's epic voyages in vivid prose, he personally retraces his travels, battling exhaustion, exposure, mosquitoes, white water rapids and the threat of bears. He transports readers to a world rarely glimpsed in the media, of tar sands, thawing permafrost, remote indigenous villages and, at the end, a wide open Arctic Ocean that could become a far-northern Mississippi of barges and pipelines and oil money.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780385541626
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/13/2018
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	1,150,597
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Brian Castner is a former Explosive Ordnance Disposal officer who received a Bronze Star for his service in the Iraq War. He is the author of two books, The Long Walk (2012) and All the Ways We Kill and Die (2016), and the co-editor of the anthology The Road Ahead (2017). His journalism and essays have appeared in Esquire, Wired, Vice, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and other publications. The Long Walk was adapted into an opera that has been performed at prestigious venues nationwide.

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Table of Contents

Author's Note xiii

Prologue 1

1 The North West Company, 1788 3

2 Into The North, 2016 11

3 Scotland, 1774 16

4 New York, 1775 23

5 Montreal, 1778 31

6 Detroit, 1784 41

7 Into the Pays d'en Haut, Spring 2016 51

8 To Grand Portage and the English River, 1785 57

9 Matonabbee and Awgeenah 71

10 Murder at the Old Establishment, 1787 84

11 To the Northwest Passage, 1788 93

12 All It Takes Is Time, 2016 102

13 Embarkation, June 1789 110

14 The Rapids of the Slave, June 2016 117

15 Shoot The Messenger, June 1789 127

16 Thunderstorms And Raids, June 2016 138

17 Into The Mountains, July 1789 163

18 The Plagues of the Deh Cho, July 2016 169

19 The Dogrib, July 1789 192

20 Rapids Without Rapids, July 2016 200

21 You Can Starve on Rabbits, July 1789 215

22 Fort Good Hope to Tsiigehtchic, July 2016 220

23 Satisfy The Curiosity, Tho' Not The Intent, July 1789 241

24 Into The Earth Sponge, July 2016 248

25 The Highest Part of the Island, July 1789 260

26 A Sea of Ice, Frozen No More, July 2016 267

27 Many Returns 274

Epilogue 289

Acknowledgments 297

Notes 299

Selected Bibliography 314

Index 319

Editorial Reviews

In the late eighteenth century, the fur trade in North America entailed a huge and costly detour. Beaver pelts, harvested in Canada and the United States and destined for China, had first to be shipped east to London. From there they traveled southwest, around Cape Horn, and then west halfway around the world to the Orient. The modern equivalent would be to fly from Chicago to New York with a connection in Honolulu. In 1789, fifteen years before Lewis and Clark's expedition, the North West Company asked twenty-six-year- old Alexander Mackenzie to find a shortcut. The commission was to go "in a Bark Canoe in search of a Passage by Water through the N.&nsp;W. Continent of America." His goal was the Pacific Ocean.

A more famous explorer, Captain James Cook, had recently failed to find the Northwest Passage. But Mackenzie was young and ambitious. He set out with a party of seventeen from the Great Slave Lake in north-central Canada. From there he entered the newly discovered Deh Cho River, which was later renamed for him and is Canada's longest at over 1,000 miles. The party navigated northwest for forty days. But instead of reaching the Pacific, the river emptied into the Arctic Ocean. Standing on Whale Island at the river's northern terminus, Mackenzie saw ice stretching all the way to the horizon: an impassable wasteland that was commercially useless.

In Disappointment River: Finding and Losing the Northwest Passage, Brian Castner writes that, because of climate change, the vista has been free of ice in summer since 2007. "The way is open. Mackenzie was simply two hundred years too early." Castner, a combat veteran and the author of two well-received memoirs of war, has written a joint chronicle of Mackenzie's expedition and his own recreation of it in 2016. In order to experience the river for himself, Castner set out with a rotating cast of four friends who each paddled a leg of the river with him. He travelled 1,125 miles by canoe -- nearly a million paddle strokes. Castner interweaves Mackenzie's chronicle with his own travelogue, making for a brisk read and a thoughtful meditation on adventure, discovery, and ultimately failure.

Mackenzie is obscure today, although his memoirs were bestsellers in their time. He is overshadowed by more famous explorers of the Northwest Passage like John Franklin and Roald Amundsen. Mackenzie's journals serve as Castner's main source, but they require some fleshing out. "All Hands were for some time handing the loading and Canoe up the Hill. Men and Indians much fatigued." So writes Mackenzie of an exhausting 820-pace portage along a narrow, wet ledge over treacherous rapids. The party lost a canoe there: a single slip caused it to fall to the rocks below. At moments like these, Castner's own voyage helps fill out the story, with a fresh set of eyes on a landscape so vast and barren that it has not changed much over the centuries.

Its abiding feature is mosquitoes. The Mackenzie River passes through Canada's Northwest Territories, a remote area of heavily forested taiga and tundra that is twice the size of Texas. The river hugs the eastern foothills of the Canadian Rockies; at times it is deep and miles wide, while at others the water has a draft of only a few feet. (These shallows, as well as the northern river's frozen reaches during much of the year, limit its use as a major commercial waterway today.) The mosquitoes are everywhere. Castner and his boat-mates try everything to avoid them. In the 1840s, the gentle and gentlemanly Franklin is said to have blown them from his skin rather than swatting them. Another voyager, Amos Berg, who traveled the river for National Geographic in 1929, found that the only way to enjoy a meal without himself becoming one was to eat while running up and down the shore.

Disappointment River is a story of exploration, but not of tragedy or disaster. It is not an epic. No one died on Mackenzie's expedition or on Castner's, and while the landscape was expansive, it was not particularly dramatic. Mackenzie's encounters with indigenous tribes were cordial and marked by productive trade; Castner's were haunted by the poverty and idleness of a mistreated people. Even the romance of the wilderness is taken down a notch: "The song of the north is not a loon's call or a wolf's howl, as many famous outdoor writers contend, but rather the hum of the diesel engine," Castner writes. Yet the book is not without a certain power. The journey itself is the reward: it is the ultimate adventure cliché, but it happens to be true. As Ernest Shackleton famously said, "It is in our nature to explore, to reach out into the unknown. The only true failure would be not to explore at all."

Michael O'Donnell is a lawyer who lives in Evanston, Illinois. His reviews and essays appear in The Nation, the Washington Monthly, and the Christian Science Monitor, among other publications.

Reviewer: Michael O'Donnell

The Barnes & Noble Review

01/29/2018
Memoirist and Iraq vet Castner (All the Ways We Kill and Die) blends stories of his own travels in Canada’s far north with an exhilarating historical narrative set in the area in the late 18th century. In 2016, Castner set out to paddle the 1,124 miles of the Mackenzie River in Canada’s Northwest Territories, retracing the route taken by Alexander Mackenzie in 1789. A prominent fur trader, Mackenzie hoped to discover the fabled Northwest Passage and thereby secure the rich markets of East Asia. Guided by an incomplete map, Mackenzie pushed his group of voyageurs and native Chipewyans through intense privation into Arctic latitudes previously unknown to Europeans. Over two centuries later, Castner finds indigenous cultures negotiating the dangers, and opportunities, of modernity and climate change. Yet despite the buildup along the banks, the vast river Mackenzie named Disappointment retains both its dangers and majesty. Of the alternating accounts, the fur trader’s is more gripping, as Castner evokes vivid personalities and drama from the archives (at one point, to stave off loneliness, Mackenzie “trudged the forty miles through the snow for a glass of wine and dinner with Roderic,” his cousin and fellow adventurer). The author’s own reasons for embracing such intense physical misery remain unclear, and the themes of global warming and Native American resilience are left underdeveloped. Nevertheless, Castner is an engaged narrator and writes from a visceral connection to the natural world, describing insect swarms and whitewater spills. Historians and armchair travelers alike will be equally pleased with this volume. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 2018-01-11
"Fierce winter never relented": searching for a little-known explorer who left his name on many places, themselves little known, in the Canadian Arctic.It's not enough for Castner (All the Ways We Kill and Die, 2016, etc.) to have survived roadside bombs in Iraq, an experience he recounted in The Long Walk (2012). Now he sets off in search of Arctic explorer Alexander Mackenzie (1764-1820) and the river named for him, the second longest in North America, which traverses a country of few humans and plenty of bears. As the author writes appreciatively at the opening, the Mackenzie River is "so wide that the far bank appeared to be little more than a slight film of green," while the island that stands at the river's egress into the Arctic Ocean "is larger than five Manhattans." He adds, "everything about [it] is enormous." So it is, with an appropriately big story to match. Castner handles its several components skillfully, covering all the bases: for one, he provides a lively biography of Mackenzie, the youngest principal in the Northwest Company, contending not just with the rigors of exploration, but also with early corporate politics. For another, he covers the territory, traveling in what he conjectures to be Mackenzie's footsteps and paddle traces in search of the fabled, elusive Northwest Passage, a pathway now easier to chart given thawing permafrost and melting ice caps. Every American knows the story of Lewis and Clark, Castner writes, surely too charitably; why, then, would we not know of Mackenzie and his legendary explorations? "And if I could trace the Missouri and Colorado rivers," he writes, "if I knew how the Hudson and Lake Champlain got their names, how could I not do the same for this river, greater than them all?" In the end, that challenge is rhetorical, for Castner pays for that knowledge with no end of sweat, toil, and even some blood and tears.A vital addition to the library of the far north and of exploration.

Kirkus Reviews

"Discovering history, and not just new landscapes around the next bend in the river, is one of the delights of Disappointment River. And, during a time when so many American descendants of foreign extraction rail against immigration, it’s useful to recall that all of us originated in a diaspora."
—Rinker Buck, Wall Street Journal 

“Vivid. . . . Castner has the Conradian ability to make you see and feel.”
—The Washington Post

“Disappointment River is an adventure tale that will keep you happily reading while safely in your armchair.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Whether recounting the historic search for the Northwest Passage or his own epic journey on the Mackenzie River, Castner is an able guide, a steady hand, a voice of reason. You’ll want to sit in his canoe and ride this out. I couldn’t put Disappointment River down.”
—Dean King, author of Skeletons on the Zahara and The Feud

"...[Castner] provides a lively biography of Mackenzie, the youngest principal in the Northwest Company, contending not just with the rigors of exploration, but also with early corporate politics...A vital addition to the library of the far north and of exploration."
—Kirkus, starred review

"An exhilarating historical narrative...Castner evokes vivid personalities and drama from the archives ... Historians and armchair travelers alike will be equally pleased with this volume." 
—Publishers Weekly

"Vividly described, in well-wrought scenes that alternate from inspiring to humorous to stomach-clenching... Castner is a highly skilled writer and engaging companion."
—Anchorage Daily News

"Appealing on both historical and contemporary levels, Castner’s work will please readers fascinated by tales of discovery."
—Booklist 

"...Intriguing and enlightening...For anyone concerned with the global effects of climate change, the meaning behind Disappointment River becomes alarmingly clear." 
—BookPage

From the Publisher

Brian Castner’s canoe trip along the 1,100-mile Mackenzie River in the Canadian Northwest Territories sounds daunting to the point of completely terrifying. His deep voice and matter-of-fact tone combine with a keen sense of timing, a glint of amusement, and a dash of fear to evoke hardship, awe, isolation, and clouds of buggy misery. Castner, along with a relay of four friends, re-creates Alexander Mackenzie’s attempt to discover the Northwest Passage in 1789. Both expeditions are described in alternating chapters. Some things are just the same—wind, whitecaps, mosquitoes. Others are completely different—it took years for the original fur trappers to receive payment, and now there is intermittent cell phone reception. Of course, the most significant difference is that Castner succeeds in finding melting polar seas where Mackenzie was stymied by impenetrable ice. A.B. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

MAY 2018 - AudioFile

Brian Castner’s canoe trip along the 1,100-mile Mackenzie River in the Canadian Northwest Territories sounds daunting to the point of completely terrifying. His deep voice and matter-of-fact tone combine with a keen sense of timing, a glint of amusement, and a dash of fear to evoke hardship, awe, isolation, and clouds of buggy misery. Castner, along with a relay of four friends, re-creates Alexander Mackenzie’s attempt to discover the Northwest Passage in 1789. Both expeditions are described in alternating chapters. Some things are just the same—wind, whitecaps, mosquitoes. Others are completely different—it took years for the original fur trappers to receive payment, and now there is intermittent cell phone reception. Of course, the most significant difference is that Castner succeeds in finding melting polar seas where Mackenzie was stymied by impenetrable ice. A.B. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

MAY 2018 - AudioFile