When the members of Canada’s First Arctic Expedition set out from Victoria aboard HMCS Karluk in the summer of 1913, it was a moment of great optimism. The three-year mission would chart unexplored landmasses of the Western Arctic and secure Canada’s place in the international geographic community. Little did the team of distinguished scholars and scientists realize, however, how their hopes would soon be brought to ruin. Just a few months into the journey, the vessel became lodge...

Slavery existed throughout the western Hemisphere, but after its abolition in the British empire it persisted for decades in much of the U.S. Even in states where slavery was illegal, slaves were subject to capture and return to their owners. The only sure escape was to cross the border into Canada.The Underground Railway was an informal network of secret routes and safe houses, an organized escape route run by blacks and whites who opposed slavery and who helped black Americans fi...

Building transportation routes through the Rockies is dangerous. It always has been. It is also expensive, labour-intensive, and highly political. But railway and highway construction through the western cordillera succeeded thanks to scientific innovation and sheer human grit. In the nineteenth century, steam locomotives, railways, tunnels, trestles, and telegraphy represented the hi-tech advances of the day. A vast country with a small population raised money (and more and more money) an...

In late 1942, Britain was desperate to win the ongoing Battle of the Atlantic. German U-boats had sunk hundreds of Allied ships containing millions of tons of cargo that was needed to continue the war effort. Prime Minister Churchill had to find a solution to the carnage or the Nazis would be victorious. With the support of Churchill and Lord Louis Mountbatten, eccentric inventor and amateur spy Geoffrey Pyke proposed a dramatic project to build invincible ships of ice—massive, unsinkable ...

It is said that the sparkle from Canadian diamonds mimics the awesome and seductive radiance of the northern lights. Yet until 1991, no one thought diamonds could even be found in Canada—no one except Chuck Fipke and Stu Blusson, who uncovered diamond-rich kimberlite in the Barrens at Point Lake, near Yellowknife, Northwest Territories.Their spectacular find caused great excitement in international diamond circles and sparked the largest claim-staking rush in Canada since the 1896 ...

For centuries, Europeans sought the elusive Northwest Passage that would link Europe to the Far East and China. Early visitors to Canada's northern coasts included Viking sailors and Basque whalers. Then came the prominent explorers -- John Cabot, Vasco da Gama, Martin Frobisher and Sir John Franklin. Now that global warming threatens to melt much of the Arctic ice cap, conflict over the Northwest Passage and the resource riches of the Arctic is intensifying.

After five months of teaching in Alaska, Lydia Falkner is back in the Yukon Territory. She is anxious to return to her beloved wilderness cabin. The salmon are running, the bears are afoot, and the fireweed is in bloom. Lydia longs to embrace it all. But, at the request of Teddy an old and dear friend, she will first visit a salmon research project on the Yukon River. The researchers share a camp with a group of mushroom pickers, a diverse and interesting group. Lydia befriends a small boy...

With prospectors, trappers, and whalers pouring into northwestern Canada, the North West Mounted Police were dispatched to the newest frontier to maintain patrols, protect indigenous peoples, and enforce laws in the North. In carrying out their duties, these intrepid men endured rigorous and dangerous conditions.On December 21, 1910, a four-man patrol left Fort McPherson, Northwest Territories, heading for Dawson City, Yukon, a distance of 670 kilometres. They never arrived. The ha...

“The Northwest Passage Exploration Anthology”, features the first-hand personal accounts of explorers: Roald Amundsen, Robert McClure, John Rae, John Franklin, Thomas Simpson, Peter Warren Dease, William Edward Parry and Richard Hakluyt. This book charts the full history of the exploration of the legendary “Northwest Passage” – the sea-lane around the frozen Northern shore of the North American Continent.   Discovering this passage became an obsession for generations of explor...

"Absolutely first-rate."—The New YorkerThis thrilling story is at once first-rate history and first-rate entertainment. Incredible events occurred in North America after a decrepit steamboat docked at Seattle in 1897 containing two tons of pure gold. So frenzied was the clash for gold and so scant was information about conditions in the Klondike that the rush for riches became a kind of fabulous madness. The entire tale—of which Pierre Berton's account is the definitive telling—has ...

The stories of the first explorers of the Arctic and the North Pole have always been somewhat overshadowed by the famous and tragic race for the South Pole a decade later. In truth the story is no less riveting to the reader, in terms of bravery, resilience and determination.What is more, in an extra dimension to the story there is the enduring controversy over who was in fact the first to make it to the North Pole. Was it Dr Frederick Cook in 1908, or Captain Peary in 1909? Histor...

Dave Vander Meer was just eighteen years old when he set out on his own to explore the northern wilderness of Ontario. Winter would start in just a week, and there was a camp to build, traps to set, and food and furs to collect. To survive, he needed to call upon all his knowledge because the closest point of civilization was more than twenty miles away. Now, years later, he still looks back upon his time as a teenager in the woods with wonder. He had the chance to walk the trails and padd...