Ironically he called the waterway "the River Disappointment," since the river did not prove to be the Northwest Passage, as he had hoped. The river later came to be known as the Mackenzie River in his honor. Mackenzie returned to Canada in 1792, set out once again to find a route to the Pacific, what he managed in the summer of 1973. Having done this, he had completed the first recorded transcontinental crossing of North America north of Mexico, 12 years before Lewis and Clark.