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Limehouse Rally: Open Up the Northwest Passage

From Humphrey Gilbert to Guy-Ernest Debord, 2:15 pm, 22nd August 1993
Outside the Empire Memorial Hostel of the British Sailors Society Salmon
Lane, London E14 followed by Picnic nearby.
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and here's some further info on the passage and specifically how it relates
to cartography that you might be interested in:

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Admiral deFonte, the French colonial explorer mentioned a 'Northwest
Passage' through the interior of North America in his explorer's journal. In
the 1750's Joseph-Nicolas Delisle and Phillipe Buache (the 'theoretical
geographers' ) used his account when building their maps of North America in
the early 18th century, and they deductively imagined some outlandish
geography to make sense of the anomalies they found by compiling irregular
explorers' reports, topological survey, navigational charts, and indigenous
Cree maps. This included a series of imaginary rivers and an inland sea -
the 'Mer de L'Ouest' - deFonte's 'Northwest Passage' ran through this
fantastic topography.

Phillipe Buache's 'Carte Des Terres Australes' (1739)
(http://twenteenthcentury.com/saul/stuff/buachemap.gif)  which he compiled
using similar deductive methods - compiling epistemologically different
accounts and maps, appears to show a photographically accurate
representation of the subglacial topography of Antarctica, which wasn't
imaged or documented in any form until 1958. Although some of the accounts
he used to deduce this map were documented alongside it, the antarctic
sections were apparently copied from Greek maps from the library of
Alexandria. The fact that the last time Antarctica was thawed was 6000 years
ago has led some people to speculate that the map Buache copied from must
have itself been copied from maps of a thawed, populated Antarctica that
pre-date recorded history.

Michelle Serres also writes about the 'Northwest Passage' - he describes
negotiating between incompatable epistemes of knowledge - from sciences to
arts as traversing the 'northwest passage'

"Have you noticed the popularity among scientists of the word interface -
which supposes that the junction between two sciences or two concepts is
perfectly under control? On the contrary, I believe that these spaces
between are more complicated than one thinks. This is why I have compared
them to the Northwest Passage . with shores, islands, and fractal ice floes.
Between the hard sciences and the so-called human sciences the passage
resembles a jagged shore, sprinkled with ice, and variable . It's more
fractal than simple. Less a juncture under control than an adventure to be
had (Serres with Latour, 1995: 70)" 
(from Steven Brown - http://www.devpsy.lboro.ac.uk/psygroup/sb/Serres.htm)

So cartographically speaking, maybe we can learn from Buache's method -
using differing accounts, different epistemes and observations, and
stitching them together into an imaginist cartography - opening up the
Northwest Passage to Atlantis.