Presenting a special 2-book bundle of Anthony Dalton’s outstanding writing on Canada's polar regions, their history, and their greatest explorers.“Dalton does an excellent job … a very enjoyable read.”— Bios NewsletterIncludes:River Rough, River SmoothManitoba’s Hayes River runs over 600 km, from Norway House to Hudson Bay. Traditionally used for transport and hunting by the indigenous Cree, it becam...

On September 8, 1923, seven US Navy destroyers rammed into jagged rocks on the California coast. Twenty-three sailors died that night. Five years earlier, the Canadian Pacific passenger ship Princess Sophia steamed into Vanderbilt Reef in Alaska's Lynn Canal. When she sank, she took 353 people to their deaths. From San Francisco's fog-bound Golden Gate to the stormy Inside Passage of British Columbia and Alaska, the magnificent west coast of North America has taken a deadly toll. ...

From the era of wooden sailing ships and Europe’s golden age of exploration, the story of famed British navigator Henry Hudson tells a classic tale of courage, ambition, and treachery on the high seas. As the leader of four Arctic voyages in 1607, 1608, 1609, and 1610, Hudson searched in vain for a navigable route through the polar ice that would open the way to the riches of Asia. In his obsession to succeed, he made reckless decisions that pushed his crew to the brink, with disastrous re...

No vessel that sailed the Arctic seas has raised so much speculation or triggered imaginations as has the legendary Hudson's Bay Company ship Baychimo.In the 1920s, Baychimo set up trading posts in eastern Canada, sailed on fur-trading expeditions to Siberia during the turbulent years of the Russian civil war and made dangerous annual voyages around Alaska to Canada's western Arctic coast, shouldering her way through ice floes to resupply the HBC's remote trading ...

In the summer of 1984, Anthony Dalton embarked on a near-fatal voyage in a small open boat along the wild northwest coast of Alaska, attempting a solo transit of the Northwest Passage. His sea quest ran parallel to an arduous relief expedition undertaken in 1897-98, when the officers of the US cutter Bear set out to reach eight whaling ships that were stranded in thick ice, their crews on the verge of starvation. Both journeys are depicted in this captivating adventure tale, and D...

Dewey Soper first travelled to the Arctic in 1923. During the next seven years he accepted three research postings on Baffin Island, each of which lasted between one and two years. In 1929 he discovered the breeding grounds of the blue goose in the southwest corner of Baffin Island. He also charted the final unknown region of Baffin Island’s coastline. Later in life he worked in the western Arctic. Outside the Far North, Soper studied bison in Wood Buffalo National Park, documented bird li...

This is a book for all those who yearn for far away places: the adventurers and the armchair travellers. The stories run the gamut from searching for Polar bears on the shores of Hudson Bay through mountain climbing in Western Canada to tracking Royal Bengal tigers in Bangladesh jungle. They depict often hilarious encounters with an eclectic variety of wildlife in the Canadian Arctic, the Falkland Islands and Namibia. Author recounts his adventures at sea on tall-ships, and his fumbling attem...

After Royal Navy captain Sir John Franklin disappeared in the Arctic in 1846 while seeking the Northwest Passage, the search for his two ships, Erebus and Terror, and survivors of his expedition became one of the most exhaustive quests of the 19th century. Despite tantalizing clues, the ships were never found, and the fate of Franklin’s expedition passed into legend as one of the North’s great and enduring mysteries.Anthony Dalton explores the eventful and fascinating life of this ...

In mid-July 1925, the SS Bayeskimo ran into heavy drift ice at the entrance to Hudson Strait. The ice carried her north, squeezing the steamer and testing the strength of her rivets. Helpless until the tide changed and the ice moved, the officers and crew could only watch and listen to the ship’s tormented groans. Slowly at first, trickles of freezing water seeped through the steel plates on her bow. The trickles became a flood, and Bayeskimo began to sink.Bay...

On January 22, 1906, the passenger ship Valencia lost her way in heavy fog and rain and rammed into the deadly rocks at Pachena Point on the west coast of Vancouver Island. As the wreck was shattered by the pounding waves, the survivors clung desperately to the rigging. Few made it the short distance to shore through the frigid and turbulent waves—117 of the 164 souls aboard perished. A year earlier, the King David had been wrecked on Bajo Reef near Nootka Sound. The fate...

Manitoba’s Hayes River runs over six hundred kilometers from near Norway House to Hudson Bay. On its rush to the sea, the Hayes races over forty-five rapids and waterfalls as it drops down from the Precambrian Shield to the Hudson Bay Lowlands. This great waterway, the largest naturally flowing river in Manitoba, served as the highway for settlers bound for the Red River colony, ferrying their worldly goods in York boats and canoes, struggling against the mighty currents.Traditiona...

Considered wise and powerful by the Inuit and other Native cultures, and celebrated in legend and literature, polar bears have become a charismatic symbol of animals threatened by climate change in the Arctic ecosystem. Yet for centuries, polar bears were demonized and slaughtered by adventurers who sailed the icy seas seeking wealth and glory. These fascinating stories from northern lands, including Canada, Alaska, Greenland and the Norwegian islands of Spitsbergen, draw from the annals o...