Rating: 8.0/10.
Fairly short novel set around 1896 during the Klondike Gold Rush, focusing on a group of English aristocrats who venture into Dawson City, not through any of the conventional routes, but through one of the most difficult routes overland from Edmonton and down the Mackenzie River. It is led by Lord Luton and several of his fellow aristocratic family members and an Irish servant. Together, they travel by train to Edmonton and then buy a boat to go down the Athabasca and Mackenzie rivers. They first spend one winter camped near the Great Slave Lake, but then they are forced to spend a second winter on the Peel River, where many of them die of scurvy.
This occurs because Lord Luton decides to follow the more difficult route against the advice of nearly everybody, including much more experienced travelers, as he wants to do the journey entirely within Canadian soil and not step foot in America on his way to Dawson City. Such is his commitment to staying on his predetermined path that he is willing to ignore all the advice of experts. Due to the structural expectations of his title, everybody in the group is expected to go along with it, even at the risk of their own lives, when everybody knows it is a bad idea. A much easier route to float into the Yukon River in Alaska was available and could have been done in several months; instead, they spent two years in the wilderness.
The story is well researched and focuses on the arctic journey including portaging the canoes, setting up winter camps, encounters with French Canadians and Native Indians, surviving harsh winters in the Canadian Arctic, and dealing with rivers, mosquitoes, and mountain passes. Only Luton and Fogarty survive the trip and Luton leaves immediately without searching for gold in Dawson. The motivations of the characters are not so believable, but it was still an enjoyable short read.
