Alone Against the North Read Free

still contains plenty of territory that has no record of any person exploring it. When modern explorers venture into these isolated places, it remains possible to discover topographic features omitted from the map, as I began to do myself soon after high school.
    That brings us to what professional exploration has always been about: not the hair-raising adventures and narrow escapes that were the stuff of my childhood imagination, but the generation of new geographical information that adds to humanity’s stock of collective knowledge. You could think of professional exploration like a grand mural, with each explorer as an artistwho contributes a little more detail to the big picture. Historically, explorers’ manuscripts and maps filled up the private studies and libraries of a privileged few in the capitals of Europe. Relics from explorers’ journeys to the far corners of the earth bedecked aristocrats’ wondrous cabinets of curiosities. Today, explorers’ reports are more widely available, thus enriching not a privileged elite, but anyone who takes an interest in their revelations. Exploration has always been a two-step process: a physical journey followed by the publication or dissemination of new geographical knowledge. Without engaging in both steps, one is not truly engaged in exploration.
    In my own small way, I try to contribute to our understanding of Canada’s wilderness. I seek to add a few more brush strokes to the grand mural of Canada’s topography by being the first to photograph, film, canoe, or make written descriptions of a particular river, lake, or area whose features are yet to be drawn.
    At this point, you might be wondering how the nomadic hunter-gatherers of North America’s past fit into the story of exploration. After all, didn’t they at some point in time paddle or travel every inch of Canada’s wilderness? While these nomads covered a lot of ground, aside from limited archaeological finds, we have no way of knowing exactly what areas they did or didn’t visit. This is because they created no maps nor left any written records behind. Their journeys have vanished into the unknowable mists of time. In other words, though they were in some respects among the greatest travellers who ever lived (they made journeys that no modern individual could hope to equal), ultimately they made no contribution to the mural of Canada’s wilderness. That is not to say that latter-day aboriginal people made nocontribution—great aboriginal explorers such as the Chipewyan leader Matonabbee and the heroic Cree adventurer George Elson journeyed into isolated regions where neither they nor anyone they knew had previously ventured. Many European explorers could not have succeeded without the help and expertise of aboriginal people. But it’s an error to equate hunter-gatherers—or for that matter, fur traders, adventurers, sport hunters, and wilderness campers—with explorers. Explorers are a different breed altogether.
    Still, out of purely academic interest, you might be wondering whether humans have penetrated every corner of the country. Explorers and anthropologists occasionally declare that Canada is so immense that places remain in which no humans have ever set foot. For example, the celebrated wildlife artist Robert Bateman, who has an academic background in geography, made this claim when in 2013 he was awarded the Royal Canadian Geographical Society’s prestigious gold medal, the Society’s highest honour. Bateman, in his acceptance speech, recounted how in the 1950s he explored a remote section of Quebec’s Ungava Peninsula with a pair of geologists and two Inuit hunters. The hunters informed them that they had never been into the area before, nor had any member of their community. Bateman stated that they were the first humans ever to set foot there . Two other eminent geologists and cartographers at that same event spoke of their