The history of the early search for the Northwest Passage has been surprisingly overlooked. Most of the time the bibliography that examines the long and doomed quest focuses on nineteenth-century official expeditions, climaxing with the Franklin tragedy in June 1847. It is true that the death of the Trafalgar hero turned Arctic explorer underscored the absurdity of the quest while also marking the culmination of a paradigm in the British imagination. The Arctic was where a specifically British ethos was born, the model of a heroic, sublime masculinity, in a world becoming more and more complex as the British Empire was reaching its zenith. But Franklin's last expedition and the search expeditions launched as late as the 1870s were only the visible tip of a gigantic iceberg that had been floating into Victorian culture from a venerable past. The massive underwater portion of the mountain needs now to be examined.

The findings might well entail a revision of the cultural landscape that we inhabit. Indeed the discovery in 1497 of Newfoundland by John Cabot seems to have been supplanted in the cultural unconscious of Britain by the story of the two colonies of Roanoke (1584–7) and Virginia (1607), so that the Powhatan, romanticized as they are, are generally thought to provide the very first scene of the encounter between English travellers and American Indians.