Discovery of the North: The Exploration of Canada's Arctic
Description
Contains Illustrations, Bibliography, Index
$16.95
ISBN 0-88830-280-0
Author
Publisher
Year
Contributor
Barry M. Gough is a history professor at Wilfrid Laurier University and
author of The Northwest Coast: British Navigation, Trade, and
Discoveries to 1812.
Review
Daniel Francis of Montreal has another frontier volume of Canadian history to his credit: the work under review stands beside his Battle for the West: Fur Traders and the Birth of Western Canada (Hurtig, 1982) and Arctic Chase: A History of Whaling in Canada’s North (Breakwater, 1984). Discovery of the North is written as a history of discovery and exploration of the Canadian North. Funded in part by the Government of Canada through the Canadian Studies Directorate of the Department of the Secretary of State of Canada, its intended audience is the general public. The work succeeds in meeting its modest intentions and joinsa fairly long shelf of general histories of “the search for the Northwest Passage.”
English explorers beginning with Martin Frobisher in 1576 and ending with Sir John Franklin in 1846 (and successive search voyages) are the end points of this work. One yearns for more appreciation of the history of the northern rivers and for the techniques of travel, trade, and survival in the North. Nonetheless, for a concise history, this one is adequately researched, as the author’s bibliographical notes attest. The book has some good maps and photographs too. The 1984 photo of the frozen corpse of John Torrington, a twenty-year old petty officer on John Franklin’s third expedition who died in the spring of 1846 and was buried on Beechey Island, is a chilling reminder of the dangers and hazards (Torrington probably died of pneumonia) of northern travel.
The search for the Northwest Passage was one of hoped-for commercial advantage, imperial leverage, strategic gain, and national pride and accomplishment. Few private or amateur explorers made the attempt, but Francis devotes some attention to the little-known Charles Francis Hall, whose 1860s and 1870s explorations in search of the North Pole revealed to the rest of the world the existence of the northern-dwelling Inuit. The unheralded Canadian mariner, Captain Joseph Elzear Bernier, is likewise rescued from obscurity. This workmanlike book is a welcome addition to Canadian historical literature, and a poignant reminder of the geopolitical realities and strategic obligations confronting a country with such a long Arctic coastline. We still know all too little of our North, and most southern Canadians really do little to address the vitally important questions of how we should develop and defend our northern possessions. Francis indicates how northern Canada came to be put on the map. And as the writer correctly concludes: where do we go from here, with a vast northern land and coast whose strategic and international legal obligations may be quite beyond the grasp and scope of Canadian national will and commitment?