THE FIRST TO NAVIGATE
THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE

AMUNDSEN, ROALD. "THE NORTH WEST PASSAGE," Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship "Gjöa" 1903-1907 by Roald Amundsen with a Supplement by First Lieutenant Hansen, Vice-Commander of the Expedition . . . . London: Archibald Constable and Company Limited, 1908. Two volumes. 8vo. Original dark green gilt-stamped cloth over beveled boards. T.e.g. Half-titles. xiii, 335 pages; ix, 397 pages. Frontispieces, numerous plates and illustrations in the text (most from photographs), two folding color maps in rear pockets, one other color map. Slight wear to extremities. A near fine set, with the folding maps in excellent condition.

FIRST EDITION IN ENGLISH of Roald Amundsen's account of the first successful navigation of the legendary Northwest Passage. For nearly three hundred fifty years, some of the world's most illustrious navigators, including John Cabot, Jacques Cartier and Henry Hudson, searched unsuccessfully for a northern waterway by which ships could bypass the Americas from the Atlantic Ocean en route to the Pacific and Asia. It was the loss of one such expedition in 1845, under the command of Sir John Franklin, and the ensuing attempts to find the Franklin party, that "finally solved the riddle of the Northwest Passage: three different expeditions independently discovered three separate passages between the years 1848 and 1851" (Delpar, The Discoverers). However, no one succeeded in actually making the passage in either direction until the Norwegian explorer Amundsen (1872-1928) completed it in 1906, while traveling from East to West, enduring three Arctic winters and becoming the first to establish the precise position of the magnetic North Pole.

The story of this feat, accomplished by Amundsen with only six companions in the little herring boat Gjöa, was first published in 1907 as Nordvestpassagen [The North West Passage] in Norway, then in condensed form in the April, 1907 issue of Harper's Magazine, before the full text appeared in English as The North West Passage in 1908.

The Northwest Passage has not yet proven to be the viable route for commerce that generations of European merchants had sought, and perhaps the Panama Canal and the advent of commercial airlines have rendered such a passage less critical, but Amundsen's voyage brought to a successful conclusion one of the most fabled quests in the history of exploration. Arctic Bibliography 402. Haycox, p. 22. NMMC I, 1002. BT000066.

$1500

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