A little over a century later, lured out of retirement by the prospect of riches and glory, Captain James Cook attacked the Northwest Passage from the west. On what would be his final voyage, the hero of British exploration made remarkable strides, accurately charting land never before mapped by Europeans and laying out the general shape of the northwest coast of North America for the first time. Cook, however, saw the whole project as a waste. When it became clear that the passage he had been following was not a route to the east, he wrote in his diary that he had lost two whole weeks settling “nothing but a trifling point in Geography.” The waterway was of so little consequence to him that he didn’t even name it.

George Vancouver sailed up the same coast between 1792 and 1794, completing the first circumnavigation of the hulking island situated just offshore before setting off in search of the passage. Unlike Cook, however, Vancouver did name the features en route to his eventual failure: Desolation Sound, Traitors Cove, Poison Cove—they remain today as faithful indicators of the explorer’s feelings about the land he helped trace.

On October 21, 1850, Robert McClure and a team of eight men left their companions aboard the ice-locked HMS Investigator and began the trek they hoped would finally establish the existence of the Northwest Passage. Finding the route wasn’t supposed to be their primary mission — the Investigator was one of thirty-nine expeditions sent in search of explorer John Franklin, who had famously disappeared into the Arctic wilderness with 128 men five years earlier — but the ambitious captain was determined to seize the prize while he had the opportunity.

In The Ice Passage, Brian Payton constructs an intimate narrative of the Investigator’s voyage from the journals and documents its sailors left behind. The account is full of the dramatic scenes of Arctic hardship — food frozen solid, fingers succumbing to frostbite — that have been staples of Arctic narratives ever since Thomas James’s memoir. That these scenes become slightly monotonous somewhere around the fourth winter shouldn’t reflect badly on Payton. As early as 1838, explorer Thomas Simpson was already worried about the staleness of yet another story of Arctic exploration. “I will have the honor and trouble of publishing our travels,” he wrote to a friend, “but the subject is so hackneyed and exhausted, and there are so few opportunities for vivid description among the interminable ice and almost tangible fogs that little remains to be won in that line.”

The difference here is that McClure’s trials and tribulations were rewarded with success. After their five-day hike across the ice, he and his men climb a hill and watch the sunrise from the shores of Banks Island, proof at last of a northern route. Back in England, the sailor is knighted and shares a £10,000 reward for discovering the Northwest Passage with his crew. But all the excitement obscures an awkward reality, one Payton doesn’t dwell on. As expedition interpreter Johann Miertsching was quoted as saying, the passage is “useless for navigation as long as the climate in these parts is so severe and the sea covered with ice 50 to 60 feet thick.” The Times dryly commented that a Northwest Passage “may be assumed as open once or twice in a century during favourable circumstances for short periods.”

Now that those so-called favourable circumstances are on their way to becoming a permanent reality, the time is seemingly ripe for another McClure moment. If Harper is correct, we face the culmination of centuries of northern speculation. The other possibility, of course, is that the Northwest Passage mania of today is no different from its precursors, yet another instance in which the incredible potential of a polar shortcut has blinded dreamers to the practical difficulties.

Certainly, Glyn Williams isn’t optimistic that we’ll have a commercially viable passage anytime soon, arguing that the cost of building suitable vessels and insuring them against damage would more than cancel out any money saved by using it. More radically, Brian Payton posits the inevitability of an open polar sea, and asks why merchants would bother navigating through Canada’s Arctic Archipelago at all when they could simply travel straight over the top of the globe.

For now, though, this is all speculation. As our Arctic expedition sailed north up the coast of Baffin Island this summer, past Frobisher Bay and Cumberland Sound, fields of sea ice blocked our path. For two days, we waited hopefully at the edge of the pack, exploring nearby inlets while our Russian captain checked satellite images to see if the ever-shifting ice had cleared. Finally, we had to admit defeat. Heading south to clearer waters, I felt a twinge of disappointment, a touch of the frustration explorers of the past must have experienced when they found their way to the north obstructed.

Any regret is more than mitigated, of course, by the knowledge of what such failures produced in the end. The country that stood in the way of the Northwest Passage, the so-called wasteland with no commercial value, has proven early explorers wrong. It seems only natural that we should now want our shot at the passage’s potential riches. But if there’s a lesson to be learned, however banal, from the stories of the thousands of men who have tried in vain to conquer the Northwest Passage, it’s that those riches tend to remain stubbornly inaccessible.