Download Disappointment River: Finding and Losing the Northwest Passage AudioBook Free
In 1789, Alexander Mackenzie journeyed the 1,125 kilometers of the huge river in Canada that now bears his name, searching for the fabled Northwest Passing, only to confront impassable load up snow. In 2016 the acclaimed memoirist Brian Castner retraced Mackenzie's road by canoe in a grueling quest - and learned the passage he cannot find. Disappointment River is a dual historical narrative and travel memoir that simultaneously transports listeners back to the heroic age group of UNITED STATES exploration and places them in a still rugged but increasingly fragile Arctic wilderness in the process of profound alteration by the dual pushes of energy extraction and local climate change. Eleven years before Lewis and Clark, the Scottish explorer Alexander Mackenzie actually crossed the UNITED STATES continent with a team of voyageurs and Indian courses. Before that he was the first to discover a path to the Arctic Sea from the fantastic Lakes, over the river he known as Disappointment because he presumed he'd failed in his objective to discover a trade path to the riches of the East. In fact he had - he was just two-plus hundreds of years early. In this book, Brian Castner not only retells the storyplot of Mackenzie's epic voyages in vivid prose, he personally retraces his moves in an 1,125 mile canoe voyage down the river that bears his name, battling exhaustion, coverage, mosquitoes, white-water rapids, and the risk of bears. He transports listeners to a global seldom glimpsed in the multimedia, of tar sands, thawing permafrost, distant Indigenous American villages, and, at the end, a wide open Arctic Sea that is quickly becoming a far-northern Mississippi of barges and pipelines and oil money.
