Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meaning (Paperback)

Jonathan Raban's Passage to Juneau is a pure delight, even for the most dedicated landlubbers. On April Fool's Day 1993, Raban set sail in his 35-foot ketch from "virtual reality" Seattle to travel the 1,000 or so miles up the often turbulent and tricky Inside Passage to Alaska. Despite describing himself as "a timid, weedy, cerebral type, never more out of my element than when I'm at sea", he nevertheless "meant to go fishing for reflections and come back with a glittering haul." And glittering this is, for Raban writes with such vivid acuity and witty iconoclasm about charted and uncharted waters, actual, historical, anthropological, natural and personal--and much else besides. His constants as he threads his course through the fretwork of islands, narrows and passes are tracing Captain Vancouver's 1792 voyage in the Discovery; the Northwest Indians' tenacious relation to the sea that dominated their lives and was mirrored in their art; Edmund Burke's 1757 theory of the sublime (terror was the most necessary ingredient) and the consequent, ecstatic recording of the coastal landscape (not by Vancouver, who found it dull and gloomy, but by his snobbish young upper-class officers); Raban's father's death and its aftermath which interrupted his voyage; and, of course, the sea itself with its six basic movements: pitch, roll, yaw, heave, surge, and sway.

Every page offers rewarding observations and colourful commentary: on the death of the great fisheries, the new tourism, a rereading of Shelley and Marcus Aurelius, bird flight, the rigours of outpost life, and even indeed the origins of "nookie." All of this makes for an utterly engaging, generously questing, scholarly and richly pleasurable work. -- Ruth Petrie

The author voyages in his own small boat northward from Seattle along the wild, romantic and dangerous coast of British Columbia to Alaska. This is far from being a muscular seafaring yarn, indeed Raban makes light of the problems of navigation, although any reader with the slightest knowledge of boating will understand the risks. To reach the remote communities of this coast the sea is the only highway and so he followed in the wake of such early explorers as the unimaginative and eccentric Captain Vancouver RN, who charted the coast diligently, but failed to understand anything of the unique Indian culture, its gods resided in the sea, they gave life and took it away with indifference for fishing in these treacherous waters was the natives only means of subsistance. All memories of these ancient certainties were swept away by the missionaries and adventurers that soon followed. In attempting to disentangle and find direction in the chaos of cultures that resulted Raban is ever aware that he and all the people that he encounters are part of the maelstrom. As the voyage reaches its poignant unplanned conclusion one feels that in writing this absorbing book the author has discovered and revealed to us more of himself that he intended. (Kirkus UK)

A rich, multilayered narrative of solitary travel through a vast and chilly landscape. Raban (Bad Land, 1996; Hunting Mister Heartbreak, 1991; etc.), a Londoner resident in Seattle, is one of the English-speaking world's great travelers and travel writers. Here he crafts a wonderfully literate account, full of thoughtful observation and self-deprecating humor, of a sailing trip up the Inside Passage from the Puget Sound to the Alaska Panhandle. He is not, he admits, a great mariner - "I am afraid of the sea . . . I'm not a natural sailor, but a timid, weedy, cerebral type, never more out of my element than when I'm at sea" - and the boat he bought for his voyage was chosen less for its sturdiness than for its built-in bookcases, which could house a fine library. Raban's journey is indeed bookish, full of observations culled from his readings. It's also set in parallel with other voyages, foremost among them that of the English sailor and explorer George Vancouver two centuries before. Along the way, Raban visits Native American villages, where he meets a Tsimshian man who presses his children to learn Japanese, Spanish, and computer science so that the Tsimshian people can take a place in the coming millennium; passengers on the ever-present cruise ships that ply the waters of the Inside Passage, the butts of countless Alaskan jokes and even undisguised scorn; and down-on-their-luck workers lured to the North by the promise of high wages but who never managed to punch the right ticket. For all the people Raban meets along his journey, however, his is a fundamentally lonely narrative, marked by sorrowful passages on the concurrent dissolution of his marriage and on the decline of the literary culture he so ably represents. Impeccably written and told, this will be irresistible to Raban's many admirers, as well as those who value a good story. (Kirkus Reviews)