The story of George Vancouver – gifted navigator, lifelong mariner, and bewildered captain – is told here in Stephen Bown’s sympathetic popular history about the man who mapped more than 1,700 miles of Pacific coastline and helped limit Spanish and Russian claims to the western edge of the continent just in time for the Napoleonic wars.
    Upon Vancouver’s return to Britain after nearly four years at sea in the 1790s, his failing health and dwindling finances left him unable to combat smear campaigns orchestrated by Thomas Pitt, an arrogant midshipman hellbent on humiliating his former captain. For nearly 125 years, Pitt’s dismissive attitude, combined with institutional indifference from the British military – occupied as they were with the French threat and problems close to home –
marginalized Vancouver’s work.
    Bown creates an intricate psychological case for Vancouver’s erratic behaviour – flying into extraordinary rages if commands were not followed to the letter, flogging sailors for relatively minor offenses like waving to women on shore, etc. – and ostracism, citing the conditions of the voyage, exhaustion, and isolation as likely causes. Bown’s book provides a portrait of Vancouver as a kind of modern man – essentially flawed and slavishly devoted to a military institution that would ultimately reject his accomplishments.
    Most of Bown’s case for Vancouver’s mental state is based on secondary sources; Vancouver did not keep a diary of his voyage, preferring instead to write his memoir on his deathbed at journey’s end. We will likely never know what motivated him to behave the way he did, or what drove him in the wake of Captain James Cook and other explorer-scientists of the age. But Bown’s account makes an excellent case for the pressure that isolation and perfectionism can exert on a high-strung, seemingly compulsive individual.