Alone Against the North (2 page)

PEOPLE OFTEN ASK ME
how I became an explorer. They wonder how I acquired all my wilderness survival skills. Did I take the best survival course offered anywhere? Had I been the most diligent of Boy Scouts? Was I an orphan who was raised by some grizzled old-timer in a cabin in the backwoods? The answer to all three questions is no. The truth is, developing survival skills and learning about the outdoors was the easy part. There was nothing to it: it was just an incidental part of my youth and a logical consequence of growing up with a passion for the outdoors in rural Canada. My backyard in Fenwick, Ontario, was a swampy deciduous forest, and there I roamed with my fraternal twin, Ben, and our dog from sun-up to sundown. My father, a woodworker who could make anything with his hands, taught us how to fish, trap, track, and enjoy the mystery of the woods. The hard part was figuring out how I could use these skills in a career. After the bloom of boyhood enthusiasm and dreams of exotic lands had worn off, I assumed that exploration was largely a thing of the past—that the whole world had already been explored. It was only when I started to study geography, history, archaeology, and anthropology that I learned that the age of exploration was far from over. This knowledge, rather than any physical skill like rock climbing or canoeing, was the difficult part of my journey to success as an explorer. I first had to
appreciate that the world still contained hidden gems waiting to be revealed.

Over the course of high school, I became disillusioned with my prospects. I remember watching someone on the Discovery Channel say that there was nothing left to explore in the world—that the entire planet had already been explored. Not knowing any better, I resigned myself to believing that this was true. After all, the source was the Discovery Channel. It was only when I entered university that I came to realize, from better books and wiser sources, that the world still contained unexplored areas. This knowledge was invigorating. It made me realize that my childhood dream was—if not yet within reach—at least theoretically possible. To my amazement, I learned that new species were still frequently discovered (such as the Lavasoa dwarf lemur in Madagascar and a species of toothless rat in the Indonesian rainforest), that some parts of the world are yet unmapped, that rivers exist that no one has ever canoed, and that mountains exist that no one has ever climbed. As incredible as it seemed, some Stone Age tribes were still living in isolation from the outside world, deep in the Amazon jungle. It seemed, then, that the adventures of the past were not over, and that it was yet possible to live the life of an explorer.

What intrigued me the most was looking at maps showing wilderness around the world—they indicated that the earth's greatest expanse of wilderness outside Antarctica happened to be in my own country: Canada. What a blessing to be born in a land of almost limitless wilderness. This vast area offered me the best prospects for exploration. Canada's desolate northern wild stretches across more than five thousand kilometres—from the
Alaskan border to the windswept shores of Labrador—and forms a wilderness region larger than the Amazon rainforest, the Sahara Desert, the wilds of Siberia, or the Australian Outback. Even today it's possible to travel through Canada's remote northern landscape for literally thousands of kilometres without ever crossing a single road. As I would soon learn first-hand, a person can journey for weeks into these wilds without seeing another soul or even any trace of humanity. There is nothing else like it on the planet. And this wilderness is even greater than Canada's political boundaries: it continues westward into Alaska, all the way to the Bering Sea; eastward across the ice and frigid seas into the immensity of Greenland; and northward to the Pole. It comprises over a dozen distinct ecosystems, including the icy barren lands of the Arctic, the subarctic boreal forest, the snowcapped peaks of the Rocky Mountains, the lush temperate rainforest of the Pacific coast, the swampy Hudson Bay Lowlands, and the rugged northern cordillera.

The population density of this enormous swath of wilderness is less than 0.09 people per square kilometre, meaning that most of it has no population at all. To put that in perspective, the population density of India is 390 people per square kilometre and the population density of Mongolia, the world's most sparsely inhabited country, is 1.76 people per square kilometre. In other words, Mongolia's barren landscape is approximately
nineteen times more populated
than the immense wilderness cloaking northern North America. On a global map showing population density, Canada's northern wilderness appears as one vast uninhabited wasteland—or a paradise, if your point-of-view is similar to mine. It's little wonder then that mapping
and exploring this territory has taken centuries and is still not finished today.

Leaving aside the excursions of the Vikings and aboriginal people, Europeans first began exploring Canada in 1497 with John Cabot's voyage to the rocky shores of Newfoundland. In the centuries that followed, explorers gradually filled in the broad outlines of Canadian geography, mapping and exploring the major rivers, lakes, and coastlines. But this still left thousands of rivers and lakes as well as countless topographic features uncharted. In 1916, the Geological Survey of Canada estimated that the country still contained over nine hundred thousand square miles (almost one and a half million square kilometres) of unexplored territory that appeared as blank spots on the map. The Survey was founded in 1842 with the purpose of accurately mapping all of Canada, building off the work of early explorers stretching back to the time of Samuel de Champlain. But despite nearly seventy-five years of systematic fieldwork that involved dispatching parties of explorers to canoe rivers and map as much territory as possible, Canada is so vast that well into the twentieth century an aggregate area nearly the size of India remained virtually unexplored. Astoundingly, it was only in 2012 that the last 1:50,000 scale topographic map of Canada was finally finished, which completed the mapping of Canada at that scale—the standard scale for a topographic map. However, despite this accomplishment, considerable portions of the country's wilderness remain unexplored and, in some cases, aren't even accurately mapped. How is that possible?

Technology superseded actual exploration. By the 1920s, the Geological Survey began to rely on aerial surveys conducted
with airplanes. With the newly invented planes (and later helicopters), surveyors were able to fly over remote stretches of Canada taking aerial photographs that could then be used to finish the process of mapping the country (safely, back in Ottawa). This type of surveying was a far cry from the traditional work of cartographers in birchbark canoes, trudging through wilderness with theodolites to painstakingly explore, map, and record the geography of unknown lands. Today, we have progressed to even more advanced methods with the use of satellites. But viewing the ground from high above in airplanes, helicopters, or satellites is no more like exploration than staring at the moon through a telescope in your backyard is akin to the
Apollo
moon landings. Deriving maps from satellite imagery and aerial photographs also ensures that some topographic features—such as waterfalls and islands—are occasionally missed. Ultimately, the only way to really know what's out there is to do things the old-fashioned way, by seeking out the rivers no one has canoed, the mountains no one has climbed, and the caves no one has entered. As far as this sort of actual boots-on-the-ground exploration goes, Canada 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 artist
who 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 no
contribution—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 experiences hiking in parts of Canada's wilderness where no humans had ever previously ventured. Ray Mears, a British survival expert and TV host, has similarly stated matter-of-factly that Canada's wilderness is so vast that places remain that have never seen a human footprint. Claims like these, if nothing else, fire the
imagination and encourage one's appetite for adventure. But skeptics might well wonder if this is all just romantic wishful thinking. Perhaps it merely reflects some deep-seated human desire to believe that unexplored territory still lies beyond the horizon? An almost mythical untouched place where it is still possible to become the first human visitor? At any rate, that was my original impression on the matter as a young undergraduate. However, as I researched the topic more extensively, I was surprised to learn that most evidence favours the idea that the earth still has places no human has ever been (and not just in Antarctica). Some of these places are tucked away deep in the Canadian wilderness. To assume that each of Canada's three million lakes, infinite number of ponds, and tens of thousands of other waterways must have been visited by someone is rather naive. (In fact, Canada has so many lakes that no geographer has ever succeeded in counting them all—three million is the currently accepted best estimate.) North America is not Europe or Asia: it was never densely populated, has been inhabited for a much shorter period of time, and has always contained vast uninhabited regions incapable of sustaining significant human populations.

The most rigorous scholarly estimates for Canada's population before European contact put the number at a mere 200,000 to 300,000 people (compared with over 35 million today). That would give pre-contact Canada a population density of less than 0.03 people per square kilometre. With such an extremely low population density scattered over such a vast expanse of territory, it is exceedingly improbable, if not impossible, for humans to have covered all that ground in the fewer than 10,000 years
most of Canada has been inhabited. Canada's foremost expert on aboriginal history and culture, anthropologist Diamond Jenness (himself a recipient of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society's gold medal), noted: “A quarter of a million people cannot effectively occupy an area of nearly four million square miles, and there were doubtless many districts seldom or never trodden by the foot of man, just as there are to-day.” Jenness thus corroborated the view that Canada's wilderness is sufficiently vast to still contain territory unvisited by any person.

Jenness' conclusion is more credible when one considers that those roughly 250,000 inhabitants weren't evenly distributed across Canada. In pre-contact Canada, approximately two-thirds of all people lived in just two small areas of the country: the lush temperate rainforest of coastal British Columbia and the lower Great Lakes region of what is now southern Ontario. In the Pacific Northwest, the mild weather, abundant resources, and, above all, immensely plentiful salmon runs made it possible for a relatively large population to develop (though that population would be considered small relative to that area's current population). The territory around the southern Great Lakes, in contrast, supported agriculture, which allowed certain aboriginal groups with cultures based on farming rather than hunting and gathering to flourish. In these regions, the first European explorers found well-established villages, well-worn portage trails, and guides who could tell them about the surrounding country and how to get from one place to another. Elsewhere it was a different story.