BETWEEN 1492 and 1542, European explorers mapped the coastlines of South America, Central America, and much of the east and west coasts of North America. Yet it took a further 350 years of navigating treacherous Arctic waterways to finish the outline of the New World. Even then, the North-West Passage remained elusive. The triumphs and failures of the centuries-long struggle to survey those Arctic shores are the main focus of geographer Roger McCoy’s On the Edge.
Back then, the far north was even more frigid than today. The Little Ice Age, which began in the 1300s and lasted for…
