[In the following excerpt, Moore cites a number of Berton's "strengths" as a historian, but notes that "a few sloppinesses have crept in" to The Arctic Grail.]

The North West Passage, for all practical purposes, did not exist—that much was clear by 1700. But in 1818 the Royal Navy had run out of other navies to fight, and it decided to take on the North. The pursuit of what Pierre Berton calls the "Arctic Grail" began.

Seeking the elusive passage, the navy found a maze of icechoked channels where big naval vessels were the worst possible vehicle of exploration. Yet year after year, the navy sent ships and crews, with little or no special preparation, to bury themselves in the Arctic ice, then hope to get out before scurvy and starvation took over. Naval men refused to make any accommodation to the Arctic. They clung to their own brass-polishing subculture, and would no more take advice from Arctic whalers and northern fur traders than from the Inuit.

The navy's heroic stupidity culminated in Sir John Franklin's expedition of 1845. Franklin managed to bury two ships and 129 men more deeply than eer in Arctic ice—so successfully that no one ever saw them again. Franklin created one of those sentimental tragedies Englishmen loved, and it took ten frantic years and 50 expeditions to find where he had gone.

When the navy had proved what everyone knew, attention turned to a new grail, the North Pole. Brash Americans and methodical Scandinavians rushed in to compete, but the cold, distant pole defied them all. Finally in 1909 two separate American expeditions claimed victory. It now appears that both were frauds. No one, it seems, has ever reached the North Pole and returned unaided. The polar grail remains beyond reach, concludes Pierre Berton.

Berton's strengths as a historian are those that made him a master journalist: identifying the big story, getting the facts, and laying them out in clear, vigorous prose with strongly evoked protagonists and good common-sense judgements. All those strengths are evident in The Arctic Grail, and he needs them. Arctic exploration was often the work of vainglorious and incompetent men, but a Berton history needs heroes. With these the only heroes available, he has to steer a narrow passage between cautious debunking and qualified admiration.

There's another problem: most of the Arctic explorers turn out to be the same person. Question: which of the British explorersis a repressed, obsessed, middle-aged naval careerist with an odd marriage? Answer: all of the above. The Americans are all egomaniacal self-promoters, and the Scandinavians are, well, very Scandinavian. Berton uses all his narrative skill to guide us through their endless battles with cold, darkness, hunger, and each other. In a long book, a few sloppinesses have crept in. John Richardson could hardly have been a friend of Robert Burns, who died when he was nine. Surprisingly, there are lapses into jargon (tripe-de-roche, polynya), and the native people are mostly called Eskimo, sometimes Innuit, and once Inuit. The route maps are excellent, but the murky illustrations are haphazardly chosen. Where is the Arctic Council painting that is discussed in the text?

"Whose Arctic is it?" asks Berton at the close. He calls the British voyages the basis of Canadian sovereignty, and cites all their names on the map to prove it. But Frobisher Bay is already Iqaluit, and Franklin District will one day be Nunavut. Real Canadian sovereignty in the North came with the laborious imposition of Canadian policing and administration after 1900—a sovereignty still challenged by foreign submarines and tankers, and by the reassertion of native title.

The Arctic Grail closes on a plea to include the Inuit in northern history. Sadly, Berton has been almost completely unable to do this himself. He tells us the explorers failed to perceive the natives, but he notices only those few who played Sancho Panza to some explorer's Quixote.

Could he have done more? He tells how Robert McClure abandoned HMS Investigator at Banks Island in 1853, but not how the Investigator made the local Inuit rich. Coming so often to harvest precious wood and copper from the wreck, they wiped out the Banks Island musk-ox, which did not return for a century. McClure never knew that most lasting result of his voyage. Neither will Berton's readers. There is an ethnographic literature, not wholly valueless, that documents Inuit worlds. Who better than Berton to lead Canadians into them? But that might have meant challenging his readers—and Berton is cautious about that. He has given us an adventure thick with colour and drama. Are we asking too much to ask for more?