Northwest Passage by Kenneth Roberts

First published: 1937

Type of plot: Historical

Time of work: 1759-1768

Locale: The United States and England

Principal Characters:

• Langdon Towne, a young painter, the narrator of the story
• Robert Rogers, a colonial frontier soldier, the leader of Rogers’s Rangers and seeker for the Northwest Passage
• Sergeant McNott, a dedicated follower of Rogers
• Elizabeth Browne, Towne’s early love, later Rogers’s wife
• Natty Potter, Rogers’s secretary
• Anne Potter, Natty’s daughter, later Towne’s wife
• John Singleton Copley, an American artist
• Hunk Marriner, and
• Cap Huff, Towne’s Portsmouth friends

The Novel

Northwest Passage is divided into two parts dramatizing the career of Major Robert Rogers as the leader of Rogers’s Rangers during the French and Indian War and his subsequent failure as an explorer seeking a cross-continental northwest passage to the Pacific Ocean. Sharing focus is the novel’s single narrator Langdon Towne, a young artist from Maine who first joins Rogers in part 1, on Rogers’s 1759 military expedition against the hostile Indian village of St. Francis near the Canadian border, from which the French-supported Indians have conducted bloody raids into New England settlements. Towne’s career thereafter intersects with that of Rogers, who is revealed through the narrator’s eyes. Towne is the dominant figure in part 2, which shows him in London developing into a successful artist as Rogers attempts to gain expeditionary backing there, and later in North America and England as Rogers fails and falls in fortune and reputation. Towne’s progressive development provides the story’s unity.

In part 1, suspended Harvard student Langdon Towne of Kittery, Maine, faces the displeasure of his father and his young beloved Elizabeth Browne, who both disdain Towne’s artistic ambitions. Moreover, Towne’s injudicious statements necessitate his fleeing town with friend Hunk Marriner to avoid arrest. In flight, they meet Rogers, about to lead his rangers from Crown Point on Lake Champlain on a reprisal mission against St. Francis village, and they join his company. Rogers sees Towne’s sketches and the advantages of having an artist record his expedition’s travels. Concomitantly, Towne is impressed by Rogers’s vigor and his dream of finding a northwest passage. He increasingly admires the major’s outstanding leadership on an expedition plagued by loss of men and supplies through accident, ambush, pursuit by French and Indians, bad weather, hazardous terrain, exhaustion, and hunger. Although the military objective of destroying the Indian encampment is accomplished, the ranger casualties are high. Towne and a few others make their way back to civilization only through the resourcefulness of Rogers, whom Towne now considers heroic. Yet upon his return, Towne’s worship of Rogers diminishes when the latter woos and weds Towne’s love Elizabeth Browne. Hoping to forget them both, Towne departs for London, encouraged by American artist John Singleton Copley to study painting abroad.

Part 2 discovers Towne in London winning success as an artist and again encountering Rogers there to publicize his exploits and seek support for his Northwest Passage project. He receives no funds, but he obtains an appointment as governor of a Great Lakes region called Michilimackinac (now Mackinac, between Lake Huron and Michigan). Towne is not impressed by Rogers’s opportunistic behavior nor by his bibulous secretary Natty Potter, who persuades him to locate and release Potter’s daughter Ann from a slum family’s guardianship. He does so only to find that Ann becomes his unofficial ward.

Returning to America with Rogers, he finds that the new territorial governor is opposed by a powerful enemy, Sir William Johnson, the administrative officer of Indian affairs, and is blocked from launching a Northwest Passage expedition. Rogers is later imprisoned, court-martialed, and ruined financially. Finally disillusioned with Rogers when learning that he has made improper overtures to Ann, whom the young artist has come to love, Towne reunites with Ann and marries her in England, where he later finds Rogers drink-sodden and destitute in debtor’s prison.

With Ann, Towne returns to America after the Revolution and learns that Rogers has left prison and has fought both in Algiers and with British forces in the American Revolution. Although still disillusioned with his onetime hero, Towne forgets neither the latter’s worth nor his dream of expansion and adventure.

The Characters

Rogers, the historical protagonist, and Towne, the fictitious protagonist and narrator, are both well-rounded figures who drive the story’s events and, secondarily, reflect thematic concerns. Characteristically, Roberts contrasts an action-oriented historical hero with a fictional narrator of disparate temperament who establishes a direct relationship with the reader.

The courageous and resourceful Rogers takes center stage in part 1’s wartime setting and reveals himself as a superior military leader. In part 2, Rogers becomes the victim of betrayal, hamstrung and discredited by greedy superiors who consider him a threat to their plans for a Great Lakes inland fiefdom. They imprison and unsuccessfully court-martial Rogers on bogus charges; he is acquitted but left without money or reputation. Out of wartime, Rogers displays shortcomings of character and judgment ranging from womanizing and drunkenness to the incurring of debt, all of which are described by the narrator. He snatches Towne’s young love Elizabeth, attempts to seduce Ann Potter, and becomes an indigent drunkard in debtor’s prison. Yet for all of his faults, Rogers emerges as a tragic hero, imperfect to be sure, but a victim less of himself than of others.

Contrasted to Rogers, Towne begins as an inexperienced, sensitive, middle-class gentleman and artist who goes to war only because circumstances force him. Awed by Rogers, he develops self-discipline and survival skills on the Indian campaign, discards in peacetime the bloodlust imposed in battle, and matures into an admirable man and artist. His progress, viewed against that of Rogers, is an hour-glass pattern: As Towne rises in finding his identity, Rogers by the novel’s second half begins to fall. Both characters are well orchestrated to illumine each other’s qualities.

Towne’s friends Hunk Marriner and Cap Huff are humorous figures providing comic relief as well as expository and plot functions. Their trouble-begetting high jinks with Towne before the Rogers campaign introduces them as fun-loving, practical working-class men who serve as a foil to the narrator. When Hunk dies during the campaign, Sergeant McNott inherits his comic role. McNott becomes a one-legged survivor whose Indian wife controls him by commandeering his wooden leg when necessary.

Although critically faulted for not creating dimensional women, Roberts plausibly defines snobbish Elizabeth, who as a shrewish wife highlights the failures of Rogers and the growth of Towne. Elizabeth contrasts with the simple goodness of the lesser-born Ann, a fictitious and less-rounded character whose growth into a lady and wife demonstrates the narrator’s honorableness, mature judgment, and love. Together, Towne and Ann represent a new family for a new country.

Roberts tends to present his characters directly and realistically, revealing them by their actions and description. They are chiefly employed to move the story forward and, when secondary figures, to delineate the protagonists. Briefly sketched are the novel’s villains, including William Johnson and his subalterns Lieutenant Roberts and Jonathan Carver. In addition to contributing to the plot, these men also reflect a theme of betrayal of heroes by the less talented.

Critical Context

This historical novel, like Rogers’s others, treats early American history relating to his own family’s New England roots. It focuses on an imperfect, unconventional hero who has deserved better, in Roberts’s view, from historians. In his later novel Oliver Wiswell (1940), Roberts contradicts the conventional picture of an event and deals sympathetically with the loyalist side in the American Revolution. Displaying a characteristic pattern of its author, Northwest Passage adopts an iconoclastic stance in purportedly offsetting one-sided views of historians and biographers. When a noted historian claimed that no record existed of Rogers’s court-martial, Roberts located it in England. In his aforementioned autobiography, Roberts observes that history gives only an outline of events, explaining nothing fully and omitting details that the novelist must explain. When history, for example, did not explain why a powder-burned ranger lieutenant had to turn back with forty men before the Indian village attack, Roberts provides a reason. Also noting that most historical accounts are both dull and filled with bloodless personages, the author affirms his intent to give the reader the vivid illusion of sharing the experience of the past.

Representing the apex of its author’s career, Northwest Passage has been critically acclaimed for its thorough research, action-filled scenes, and vivid descriptions enriched by historical detail; it was popularly received as a best-seller. Roberts also was praised for using images consistent with speaker and subject, simple and concrete diction, and a direct style with uncluttered syntax that keeps the narrative moving swiftly. The novel’s success overcame some critical reservations about its being overwritten and overladen with historical detail; the book established its author with most critics and historians as a superior historical novelist setting a high standard of excellence for other writers of the genre. Along with Roberts’s other work, it has won for him a lasting place in American letters. Although the Pulitzer Prize committee did not give the novel an award, it publicly cited the author’s work as having long contributed to creating interest in early American history. Roberts’s ability to bring history alive as well as to reexamine conventional conceptions of historical figures and events makes Northwest Passage worthy of study both for students and for all readers liking a well-told tale of early America.

Bibliography

Bales, Jack. Kenneth Roberts. New York: Twayne, 1993. An informative literary biography, including a seven-page analysis of Northwest Passage placing focus on the historical and fictional protagonist. Includes chronology, selected bibliography, and index.

Bales, Jack. Kenneth Roberts: The Man and His Work. London: Scarecrow Press, 1989. Contains a substantial biographical essay and an extensive annotated bibliography of criticism, with seven pages of book reviews on Northwest Passage. Detailed appendices list special collections of Roberts material, interviews, and speeches.

Bettinger, B. E. “Land Where Our Fathers Died.” New Republic, July 14, 1937, 287. Review of Northwest Passage praising the author’s narrative skill in creating “vivid history” and recommending it to anyone interested in the making of the nation.

Harris, Janet. A Century of American History in Fiction: Kenneth Roberts’ Novels. New York: Gordon Press, 1976. A detailed study of the author’s works, including a perceptive analysis of Northwest Passage focusing on themes, characters, plots, and other elements. Includes chronology and comprehensive bibliography.

Roberts, Kenneth. I Wanted to Write. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1949. An autobiography about the writer’s literary career. Deals with the research, writing, revising, and rewriting associated with his novels, including Northwest Passage.