The Quest for the Northwest Passage through North America to the Orient has dominated the psyche of European, especially British, adventurers, explorers and merchants since John Cabot's first voyage to the New World in 1497.

The Northwest Passage contains five units or chapters:

	First Polar Voyagers - describes the history and lifestyle of the first, and most successful, explorers of the Arctic -- the Native peoples.
	First European Explorers - tells the (mythical) story of Brendan the Bold, an Irish monk who sailed the North Atlantic in the 6th century; the Viking colonization of Vinland; John and Sebastian Cabot's expeditions to the New World; and a general overview of living conditions for sixteenth century mariners on transatlantic voyages.
	Elizabethan Adventurers - details the outrageous schemes of some of the swashbuckling privateers of Elizabethan England -- specifically Martin Frobisher's 'Asian' gold rush on Baffin Island in 1576.
	Hudson's Bay - explores the crazy, seemingly ludicrous and ill-conceived attempts of English navigators to locate a secret sea route west from Hudson Bay during the seventeenth century.
	Fur Traders and Overlanders - studies the early fur trade and Hudson's Bay Company activities (as they relate to the quest for a sea route to the Orient) during the eighteenth century. You can also enjoy the tales of overland adventurers Samuel Hearne and Alexander Mackenzie traveling in the lands west of Hudson Bay.
	The Royal British Navy - shows how following the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the Navy devoted excess ships and sailors to the most organized, politically motivated and systematic search for the Northwest Passage ever -- and how ill-conceived notions of cultural superiority and the attempt to blindly-bulldog through the Arctic Archipelago led to the horrifying demise of the unfortunate mariners who scoured the Arctic for the chimera of the Northwest Passage.

Open new worlds of understanding, discover the mysterious, bizarre unexplainable and sometimes horrifying behavior of the earliest explorers of North America. Understand how the cruel, daunting polar environment lured many to their doom in the lonely wilderness, or imagine the outrageous excesses of Dawson's golden demigods and demi-monds.

Enter a truly interactive world in the History Alive Series of high quality educational software products. Each module contains over one hundred archival photographs, drawings, paintings and ancient maps; numerous modern slide shows; sixteen beautiful interactive modern maps and timelines; an extensive gallery of interesting personalities; over sixty-five revealing and poetic excerpts from the original journals of explorers, fur traders and gold-seekers; narrations, animations, sound effects and historical folk songs; and 50,000 words of rich, well researched text with an extensive bibliography for further reference.

Carve through the vast database with powerful interactive tools -- skim the unit summaries, read it like a book, search with key words and an electronic index, enter spatially through interactive maps, and temporally through interactive timelines. Use the "Themes" button to view history from the perspective of cannibalism, death in the north, inter-racial conflict, the environment, the economy and more (over twenty different themes are designed for each module). Learning and understanding history has never been so exciting or alive.