Passage to Juneau by Jonathan Raban – life's choppier waters

Raban’s book, which began as a project to navigate Alaska’s Inside Passage, is a superb travelogue, but the crises of his personal life make it a masterpiece

In the late 1990s, Jonathan Raban waved a “heartsore” goodbye to his wife and daughter on a Seattle quay and put to sea for Juneau, Alaska. The purpose of the voyage was, expressly, “work”. Raban’s already substantial reputation rested on a series of books that found shelf-room in bookshops’ Travel sections, and were united by their fascination with water: he steered a skiff through the rich soup of the Mississippi in Old Glory, sailed solo around Britain in Coasting, crossed the Atlantic in a container ship in Hunting Mister Heartbreak, and in Bad Land, prayed for rain. The Inside Passage – a thousand-mile-long crosshatch of channels and islands – home to native Americans, colonised by Europeans, fished to exhaustion and nowadays serving as the sublime backdrop to a booming cruise-ship trade – was on his doorstep. Newly a father, and reluctant to stray too far from home, it made excellent professional sense to turn it into the subject of his next book.

Raban’s idea was to follow in the oar strokes of those who’d travelled the Passage before him, considering the different meanings and interpretations they’d projected on to its surface and in to its depths. He’d read up on the coastline’s history – the mythology of the Pacific northwest’s indigenous people and Captain George Vancouver’s irascible account of his 1792 expedition – and equipped himself with a library that included Shelley, Waugh, Edmund Burke and Claude Lévi-Strauss. He was, he believed, all set. “I had a boat, most of a spring and summer, a cargo of books and the kind of dream of self-enrichment that spurs everyone who sails north from Seattle,” he says, with casual, almost glib intention. “Forget the herring and the salmon: I meant to go fishing for reflections, and come back with a glittering haul. Other people’s reflections, as I thought then. I wasn’t prepared for the catch I eventually made.”

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