While Thomas James is not widely known today, this was not always the case: his 1633 publication The Strange and Dangerous Voyage of Captaine Thomas James was, until the early nineteenth century, the British public's primary source of information about what we now know as northern Canada. The account of his attempt to find the Northwest Passage and the winter he spent on an island in James Bay made his name synonymous with exploration and the north. Over the centuries James's narrative was used to compile travel books and to compose philosophical treatises, histories, children's books, as...