Northwest Passage Quotes

The Package is the Product, onomatopoeticized

In the last few months, perhaps because he has had no one to speak to -- or at least no interlocutor who can respond with actual out-loud speech -- he has learned how to let different parts of his mind and heart speak within him as if they were different souls with their own arguments.

We all have our time machines. Some take us back. They're called memories. Some take us forward. They're called dreams. – Jeremy Irons

She would follow him there. And she would die there -- and die soon. Of misery and of strangeness and of all the vicious, petty, alien, and unbridled thoughts that would pour into her like the poison from the Goldner tins poured into Fitzjames -- unseen, vile, deadly.

What does Africa — what does the West stand for? Is not our own interior white on the chart? black though it may prove, like the coast, when discovered. Is it the source of the Nile, or the Niger, or the Mississippi, or a Northwest Passage around this continent, that we would find? Are these the problems which most concern mankind? Is Franklin the only man who is lost, that his wife should be so earnest to find him? Does Mr. Grinnell know where he himself is? Be rather the Mungo Park,the Lewis and Clark and Frobisher,of your own streams and oceans; explore your own higher latitudes — with shiploads of preserved meats to support you, if they be necessary; and pile the empty cans sky-high for a sign. Were preserved meats invented to preserve meat merely? Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice. Yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads.What was the meaning of that South-Sea Exploring Expedition,with all its parade and expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact that there are continents and seas in the moral world to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being alone.

Indeed, there is some evidence that abrupt change may already be underway. In recent years we have witnessed the greatest contraction of Arctic sea ice since modern measurements began, and perhaps much longer if anecdotal and anthropological reports are to be believed.42 The summer of 2012 saw an all-time low in Arctic sea ice cover.43 Already in the summer of 2000 a Canadian ship succeeded in transiting the legendary, once impassable Northwest Passage, the elusive goal of mariners since the sixteenth century.

THREE SECONDS before the arrival of J. B. Hobson’s letter, I no more dreamed of chasing the unicorn than of trying for the Northwest Passage. Three seconds after reading this letter from the honorable Secretary of the Navy, I understood at last that my true vocation, my sole purpose in life, was to hunt down this disturbing monster and rid the world of it.

Spilsby in Lincolnshire is proud of its most famous son, Sir John Franklin, and home to an enormous bronze statue of him. It was unveiled in 1875 and according to the legend on its plaque, it was Sir John who discovered the Northwest Passage. This is overstating things a little, given that the discovery was made twenty-five years later and by Roald Amundsen.

She may never be someone ANYONE can understand. But she will always be worth the wait.

Mankato was originally called Mahkato—meaning “greenish blue earth”—by its earliest inhabitants, the Dakota, although it didn’t look any different to me. It became Mankato because of a spelling error that was never corrected, possibly made by the eighteenth-century Europeans searching for the Northwest Passage who settled there after getting lost on the Minnesota River.

The Memoirs from Beyond the Grave have come to be considered a classic of French literature as much for the elegiac beauty of their language as for the way they capture an age. If they are the recollections of a sometime ambassador, a part-time politician, and a onetime celebrity, they are also the masterwork of an artist in consummate control of his prose. The person who writes that, on the day of his birth, his mother “inflicted” life on him, who makes up a meeting with George Washington and has the gall to declare that the first president “resembled his portraits,” has picked up the plume for more complicated reasons than the urge to compose a record of his times. The seductiveness of the Memoirs’ style—what Barthes calls the “vivid, sumptuous, desirable seal of Chateaubriand’s writing”—makes questions of factual authenticity seem piddling. The voice of the Memoirs is the voice of the private man behind the public façade, the grown-up boy who left home out of fear and in search of the Northwest Passage, the death-haunted exile, the solitary writer at his desk at night, who knew that he had to imagine himself and his world into being, as if everywhere were America, a second space and a dominion of dreams.

I couldn't make it in a chicken world, sir, so I hit the road in search of something better.

Henry sailed from England in July of 1776. The stated objectives of Cook’s third expedition were twofold. The first was to sail to Tahiti, to return Sir Joseph Banks’s pet—the man named Omai—to his homeland. Omai had grown tired of court life and now longed to return home. He had become sulky and fat and difficult, and Banks had grown tired of his pet. The second task was to then sail north, all the way up the Pacific coast of the Americas, in search of a Northwest Passage.

The first words I encountered in the North were made not through symbols but by rock, sky, and water — and, later, by the profound animals who possessed potent languages of their own. In the dramatic gallery of ice that cracked and floated off the Sermeq Kujalleq glacier into Disko Bay I began to perceive speech and language that proved other than human: to translate it I’d need to understand my own mind and body in a new way.

Mukilteo

Everyone longs for a secret door, an opening to a world beyond loneliness — it’s part of the human imagination. But stand under the lowering baskets in Naples all you want — you can’t climb in, or be the women lowering them or the youths catching them and hoisting them to market. And these Arctic hills, gold, blue, and purple, were achingly remote: our ship floated past and they lay just beyond reach. Each breath was a cold shock and the land was magnetic, like an encounter with someone who truly sees you: yet we were offshore.

arrogance and ignorance. Yet we were allowed through. The five months we were underway gave us memories, sights, and feelings that no encounter I can conjure ever could. I am humbled and blessed and forever I’ll carry with me the blessings that were heaped upon me, upon us, during our transit of the Northwest Passage that summer of 2009.

Sun Tzu wrote, it was wise to know your enemy before heading into battle.

Anything, I eventually learned, is preferable to war; but that knowledge is something every man must learn for himself—usually at considerable expense.

The twin threats of deforestation and fire prompted the private and public sectors to act. Large firms like Weyerhaeuser began fire prevention programs and invested in sustainable yield research. The federal government instituted measures to conserve the nation's forests in 1891 with passage of the Forest Reserves Act. Under the leadership of President Grover Cleveland and later President Theodore Roosevelt, the federal government set aside 12.5 million acres in forest reserves in Washington, more than 25% of its total land mass.

By 1854, when the search was called off, almost every corner of the Canadian archipelago below the 77th parallel had been traversed, drawn, and recorded on large maps carefully tipped into the papers. So fragile now they hardly bear touching, they are still in their spare precision beautiful and moving, the tangible result of the toes and fingers lost to frostbite, the starvation and profound exhaustion and sometimes the death of me dragging heavy sledges over rough ice or through deep snow, skirting the edge of human endurance.

On every side of us are men who hunt perpetually for their personal northwest passage, too often sacrificing health, strength, and life itself to the search; and who shall say they are not happier in their vain but hopeful quest than wiser, duller folks who sit at home, venturing nothing and, with sour laughs, deriding the seekers for that fabled thoroughfare?

It was an act of wholehearted fortitude and the result was never to be forgotten. “It cost me every effort I was capable of making,” he wrote, “and it passed by a majority of one vote only.” Fully fifteen years after his father’s success in championing passage of the 1787 Northwest Ordinance abolishing slavery in the territory, he had carried the same banner of abolition and with success.

Our daily routine was soon working smoothly, and everyone gave the impression of being eminently fitted for his post. We constituted a little republic on board the “Gjöa.” We had no strict laws. I know myself how irksome this strict discipline is. Good work can be done without the fear of the

The English explorer Martin Frobisher developed a novel technique for using the services of the Inuit as pilots for his ship during his first Arctic exploration, in 1576. When he sailed around Baffin Island, searching for a northwest passage to the Pacific, Frobisher watched for Inuit men out in their kayaks. When he saw one, he leaned over the bow of his ship and rang a bell, which he held out as though offering a gift to the passing native. When the friendly Inuit came closer and reached up for the bell, Frobisher grabbed him and forced him to pilot the large ship through the Arctic bays and inlets.

At the rendezvous, Alexander requested the top assignment: to take over Athabasca, the company’s most important and productive department, and, while Roderic ran the business in his absence, to find a path through the continent. His fellow bourgeois signed off. Alexander was on his way to find the Northwest Passage.

He noted that the same summer that witnessed the Constitutional Convention saw the passage of the Northwest Ordinance barring slavery north of the Ohio River.

As blunders went, this topped the charts. Joel couldn't believe his luck, or the injustice of it all. A good night's sleep, a decent breakfast, and a leisurely stroll through Helena, Montana, had cost him his world.

He did not know what he would do or where he would go, but he would not dwell on things he could not change.

He had an encyclopedic mind, the curiosity of an inventor, and the judgment and discipline of a three-year-old.

Joel?" "Yeah?" "I have a question." "Shoot," Joel said. "How is your English progressing?" "What?" "Well, I was just wondering what part of KEEP OUT and NO TRESPASSING and DANGER you don't understand.

He entered his strange new world with angst, disbelief, and wonder.

The same thing is going on right now at a thousand other games in a thousand other towns. It's what baseball is all about.

Fully fifteen years after his father’s success in championing passage of the 1787 Northwest Ordinance abolishing slavery in the territory, he had carried the same banner of abolition and with success.

Behind him were three Arctic voyages in search of the North-West Passage. Before him were two books of seamanship and six fatal cuts of a Japanese pirate’s sword.

He wanted to tell Grace that he knew what was coming and that it was time for them to escape to a place where they could ride out the ugliness and not think about Hitler or Tojo or catastrophic loss. But he knew things had already reached a point where even a prescient time traveler could do little more than make the best of a bad situation.

Grace may never be someone you can read or understand. She may never be someone anyone can understand. But she will always be worth the effort and the wait. Beneath that delicate exterior is a strong, resolute woman who does nothing halfway. Never take her for granted and never underestimate her. She will amaze.

Joel did not doubt that Grace would follow him. She would follow him to the ends of the earth. But did he have the right to take her there? Did he have the right to deprive Edith Tomlinson of a niece or Virginia Gillette and Katie Kobayashi of a friend or future children of a chance to exist? Grace had been prepared, after all, to marry someone else. Perhaps that was her destiny. Joel considered her professional interests as well. Did he have the right to deny Grace the life she was meant to lead? Or deny countless students in the forties, fifties, and sixties an inspiring teacher? An instructor who might push their lives in important and even critical directions? He wondered if Grace had an Einstein or Edison or Salk in her future.

Sitting in a window seat three rows back, Tom waved to his family, blew a kiss to Ginny, and gave Joel a half-hearted salute. His family and friends waved back. They never saw him again.

Joel placed the photo in the water and let the surf do the rest. The picture bobbed, twisted, and curled before finally sinking from sight. Joel gave the image one last thought before turning his back on the ocean and starting for town. He had made his peace with God and the girl. It was time to move on.

Joel looked at Katie and thought about the fate that awaited her. More than four hundred Japanese American students had been forced to leave the university after Pearl Harbor and live in internment camps. Joel was certain Katie would be among them.

Joel wasn't one to get caught up in the moment, in any moment, but this farewell hit him hard. He was not only saying goodbye to a dear friend but also allowing fate and history to take their course. For weeks he had considered pushing Tom into enlisting in the Coast Guard or even the Navy to shake things up. But he knew it wasn't his place to play God and knew that he had already overstepped his bounds with Grace. So he sent Tom on his way with the only words that made sense. "Come back to us," Joel said. "Make your family proud. Don't be a hero.

Joel could not help but ponder the possibilities should that fiancé turn out to be Tom Carter. If he saved Tom's life by steering him away from the Army, or even the war itself, he might meddle with his own existence. If Grandma Ginny does not meet and marry Grandpa Joe, there is no daughter Cindy or grandson Joel. Would he vanish into thin air like Marty McFly? Or continue on his merry way in a parallel universe? Joel knew now why people passed up philosophy classes. This stuff could fry your circuits. The grandfather paradox took on new relevance.

The victory over Pakistan unleashed a huge wave of patriotic sentiment. It was hailed as ‘India’s first military victory in centuries’,53 speaking in terms not of India the nation, but of India the land mass and demographic entity. In the first half of the second millennium a succession of foreign armies had come in through the north-west passage to plunder and conquer. Later rulers were Christian rather than Muslim, and came by sea rather than overland. Most recently, there had been that crushing defeat at the hands of the Chinese. For so long used to humiliation and defeat, Indians could at last savour the sweet smell of military success.

A peregrine falcon,” a passenger said, “lives at 2180 Yonge Street in Toronto, on the corner of Yonge and Eglinton. It sits high on the Canadian Tire building, hunts from there, brings prey, and in full view of everyone in the offices, tears it to pieces. Blood everywhere.

Thanks to global warming it is beginning to seem likely that the Northwest Passage will open for longer and longer periods each year, until, perhaps by the end of this century, ice will have vanished from the world altogether and the ancient dream of a Northwest Passage will have been, unexpectedly and inadvertently, realized.

For drawing attention to these men, the Anti-Defamation League was somehow tarred as a liberal, partisan organization by an elected Jewish Republican—the essence of an assault on a century-old Jewish institution. I did not see any organized effort to rally around the institution. Why is that significant? The question brings to mind a haunting passage from a Jewish newspaper in Berlin, written in 1933 and quoted by Timothy Snyder in On Tyranny. We do not subscribe to the view that Mr. Hitler and his friends, now finally in possession of the power they have so long desired, will implement the proposals circulating in [Nazi newspapers]; they will not suddenly deprive German Jews of their constitutional rights, nor enclose them in ghettos, nor subject them to the jealous and murderous impulses of the mob. They cannot do this because a number of crucial factors hold powers in check … and they clearly do not want to go down that road. When one acts as a European power, the whole atmosphere tends towards ethical reflection upon one’s better self and away from revisiting one’s earlier oppositional posture. * * * Institutions matter, but they do not survive on their own. They must be defended, and at the moment, the Anti-Defamation League is an institution under concerted, partisan attack and is not being defended. Truth also needs to be defended, and groups like the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center try to defend truth as they expose hate. To most of us, at least for now, the notion that Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager, John Podesta, ran a pedophile ring in the back of Comet Ping Pong, on a busy commercial strip in Washington’s affluent Northwest quadrant, is absurd. So is the tall tale that Seth Rich, a young Democratic National Committee staffer who was tragically murdered in a gentrifying part of Washington before dawn in 2016, was rubbed out by Democrats because he was leaking emails to the Russians. But in the alternative universe of the alt-right, these stories are taken as truth—not because the haters in the alt-right have found logic in these stories but because they feed the larger narrative of a debauched world of liberalism that needs cleansing by fire. Even after a disturbed man from North Carolina showed up with a gun at Comet Ping Pong to free the enslaved children and nearly caused a real tragedy, the promulgators of Pizzagate like Mike Cernovich offered no mea culpas or apologies. The lies are too valuable to the larger movement.

Mackenzie traversed those waters via canoe, and so I planned the same. My choice involved more than historic homage; it is the perfect slow vehicle to see the country. No noise, no pollution, no trace left of your passage, yet still able to travel far enough a day to give the sense one is making progress.

In this golden age of discovery, nothing was actually discovered. White humans stepped no place in North America that other human feet had not already trodden. But these Europeans did leave a mark, because they did two things that no one else had. They mapped the lands, and they told the rest of the world about them.