While Thomas James is not widely known today, this was not always the case: his 1633 publication The Strange and Dangerous Voyage of Captaine Thomas James was, until the early nineteenth century, the British public's primary source of information about what we now know as northern Canada. The account of his attempt to find the Northwest Passage and the winter he spent on an island in James Bay made his name synonymous with exploration and the north. Over the centuries James's narrative was used to compile travel books and to compose philosophical treatises, histories, children's books, as well as poetry and novels - most notably, it influenced Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Colleen Franklin's critical edition of the Voyage is the first since 1894. Her introduction details how James engages with both medieval and early modern perceptions of the north as well as the early modern imperative to base knowledge on observation and experience, and offers a history of the text's reception from its first publication into the nineteenth century. An invaluable reference on the early European exploration of North America, The Strange and Dangerous Voyage of Captaine Thomas James sheds new light on the representation of the Canadian north.

The 18th century was a wealth of knowledge, exploration and rapidly growing technology and expanding record-keeping made possible by advances in the printing press. In its determination to preserve the century of revolution, Gale initiated a revolution of its own: digitization of epic proportions to preserve these invaluable works in the largest archive of its kind. Now for the first time these high-quality digital copies of original 18th century manuscripts are available in print, making them highly accessible to libraries, undergraduate students, and independent scholars. Rich in titles on English life and social history, this collection spans the world as it was known to eighteenth-century historians and explorers. Titles include a wealth of travel accounts and diaries, histories of nations from throughout the world, and maps and charts of a world that was still being discovered. Students of the War of American Independence will find fascinating accounts from the British side of conflict. ++++ The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification: ++++ British Library T133977 First published in 1633 as 'The strange and dangerous voyage of Captaine Thomas James, in his intended discovery of the Northwest Passage into the South Sea'. Also issued as part of: 'A collection of voyages and travels, in three parts' by Daniel Coxe, [ London: printed in 1633, and now reprinted for O. Payne, 1740. [10],142p., plate: map; 8°

Western culture may have enshrined North as a touchstone by which all other directions are defined, but the North is not one but a number of Netherlands; like all frontiers, the North is, in its essence, imaginative, magicked out of ice and snow, muskeg and tundra. Storytelling is its generative principle, the activity through which the North and Northerners call themselves into being. In essays on topics ranging from the Aboriginal justice system in Canada to the search for the Northwest Passage to the cultural paradigms of medieval Iceland, The Fictional North examines stereotypes and iconic images of the North, the relationship of North to South, and ethnographic and fictional models of “Northerness.” This diversity of subjects and methodologies not only introduces readers to the diversity found above the 53rd Parallel, but also reflects the catholicity of the North itself. Interdisciplinary and timely, The Fictional North offers insights into the North’s past as well as its present to those interested in circumpolar issues and the areas of culture, literature, history, film, sociology, and education.

These essays trace the history of the British search for the Northwest Passage – the Arctic sea route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans – from the early modern era to the start of the nineteenth century.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1866.