Explorers Set Out to Find the Fabled Northwest Passage From the Straits of Mackinac
After days floating on the cobalt, emerald and steely swells of Lakes Huron and Michigan bound for the Straits of Mackinac from Fort Detroit, Jonathan Carver must have become accustomed to the fresh, organic and faintly fishy scent of water. An aroma purified of humans and their business.
So the waft of humanity that greeted the stocky, 56-year-old Carver when he arrived at Fort Michilimackinac’s water gate on a late-August day in 1766, had to have been jolting. Gamey smoke swirled from the Indian campfires around the fort. Fur traders loading their canoes with pelts bound for Montreal reeked stale rum breath. Stench rolled in waves from summer-hot pit latrines. The 50 British soldiers of the 60th Regiment of Foot who guarded the fort stunk and so did their heavy redcoats and gathered-at-the neck white blouses.
Perhaps Carver also sniffed the scent of desperate ambition as he looked up into the face of the 6-foot-tall (towering for that era) Governor Commandant of the fort, Robert Rogers. Rogers was a man with a problem. The former French and Indian War hero, famed for forming the elite assault corps Rogers Rangers, was out of money, and his once brilliant reputation was tarnished by debt. Rogers’s solution? To accomplish the feat that had defied explorers for centuries: find the Northwest Passage. Carver was to be cartographer on the expedition.
If a waterway connecting the Atlantic to the Pacific, known as the Northwest Passage, did exist it would open up a trade route to China, provide access to a seemingly inexhaustible supply of fur and, legend had it, lead to mountains and cities rich with gold. In the words that Rogers wrote to the man he’d charged with commanding the expedition, James Tute, those lucky enough to find the passage would come to: “an Inhabited Country, and great Riches … From this Town the Inhabitants carry their Gold near two Thousand Miles to Traffick with the Japancies, and it’s said they have some kind of Beasts of Burden.”
Rogers’s post at the windblown Fort Michilimackinac, perched on the shores of the Straits of Mackinac, seemed well suited to seeking the Northwest Passage. At least that’s what England’s King George hoped when he appointed Rogers Governor Commandant of Michilimackinac, a title that extended from the fort to include Lakes Michigan, Huron and Superior. From Michilimackinac exploratory parties could head north to Lake Superior and on to the Hudson Bay, where it was believed there might be accessible “communication” with the Pacific Ocean. And from Michilimackinac it was only a paddle across Lake Michigan to rivers that led to the Mississippi—where current thought said one would also find the headwaters of a river that stretched to the Pacific....
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So the waft of humanity that greeted the stocky, 56-year-old Carver when he arrived at Fort Michilimackinac’s water gate on a late-August day in 1766, had to have been jolting. Gamey smoke swirled from the Indian campfires around the fort. Fur traders loading their canoes with pelts bound for Montreal reeked stale rum breath. Stench rolled in waves from summer-hot pit latrines. The 50 British soldiers of the 60th Regiment of Foot who guarded the fort stunk and so did their heavy redcoats and gathered-at-the neck white blouses.
Perhaps Carver also sniffed the scent of desperate ambition as he looked up into the face of the 6-foot-tall (towering for that era) Governor Commandant of the fort, Robert Rogers. Rogers was a man with a problem. The former French and Indian War hero, famed for forming the elite assault corps Rogers Rangers, was out of money, and his once brilliant reputation was tarnished by debt. Rogers’s solution? To accomplish the feat that had defied explorers for centuries: find the Northwest Passage. Carver was to be cartographer on the expedition.
If a waterway connecting the Atlantic to the Pacific, known as the Northwest Passage, did exist it would open up a trade route to China, provide access to a seemingly inexhaustible supply of fur and, legend had it, lead to mountains and cities rich with gold. In the words that Rogers wrote to the man he’d charged with commanding the expedition, James Tute, those lucky enough to find the passage would come to: “an Inhabited Country, and great Riches … From this Town the Inhabitants carry their Gold near two Thousand Miles to Traffick with the Japancies, and it’s said they have some kind of Beasts of Burden.”
Rogers’s post at the windblown Fort Michilimackinac, perched on the shores of the Straits of Mackinac, seemed well suited to seeking the Northwest Passage. At least that’s what England’s King George hoped when he appointed Rogers Governor Commandant of Michilimackinac, a title that extended from the fort to include Lakes Michigan, Huron and Superior. From Michilimackinac exploratory parties could head north to Lake Superior and on to the Hudson Bay, where it was believed there might be accessible “communication” with the Pacific Ocean. And from Michilimackinac it was only a paddle across Lake Michigan to rivers that led to the Mississippi—where current thought said one would also find the headwaters of a river that stretched to the Pacific....