[ 14 ]
We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.
—T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” 1942
THE LIFE OF AN EXPLORER is often lonely. Soldiers and sailors have their bonds of brotherhood—but explorers tend to be lone wolves, solitary sorts not given to intimacy. The more time they spend beyond the reach of civilization—in a place where life depends on cunning, and where they alone are the sole authority—the more difficult it becomes to adjust back to a normal life. Some of the world’s greatest explorers—men who had endured adversity and dangers beyond counting—later found themselves forlorn, wracked by self-doubt and overcome by despair. Meriwether Lewis, lionized for his crossing of North America, was later consumed by inner demons. Spurned in love, lonely and drinking heavily, despite the fame and accolades bestowed on him, Lewis fell irretrievably into despondency. One night, unable to cope any longer, he shot himself in the head. The bullet only grazed his skull. Grabbing another flintlock pistol, Lewis shot himself through the chest. Still, he did not die. Fully conscious, but out of ammunition, in desperation he reached for a razor. In the words of a horrified witness who burst upon the scene, Lewis was found “busily engaged in cutting himself from head to foot.” Choking with blood, Lewis gasped, “I am no coward; but I am so strong, [it is] so hard to die.” Only after agonizing pain that lasted for hours did Lewis—one of history’s most fearless explorers—finally succumb to his self-inflicted wounds.
John Hanning Speke, after discovering the source of the world’s longest river in 1858, a riddle that had been puzzled over since the days of the pharaohs—became ensnared in bitter controversies over his discoveries back in England. His fellow explorer Sir Richard Burton disputed the Nile’s source, and the acrimonious debate resulted in angry polemics in journals and newspapers. Speke had braved every imaginable danger in the wilds of Africa, but he found the hounding of the civilized world insufferable. On the afternoon of September 15, 1864, shortly before he was to appear at a session of the Royal Geographical Society to debate Burton, he fatally shot himself while hunting in the English countryside.
Some explorers simply vanished in the wild, never to be seen again, their fate a mystery, such as Percy Fawcett in the Amazon in 1925 and Hubert Darrell, a forgotten hero of the Arctic and solo explorer without equal, who disappeared in northern Canada in 1910 while on a lone journey into unexplored territory. Others lived into old age only to discover that their singular experiences had rendered them unsociable and incapable of developing deeper bonds with other people. They lived out their days filled with loneliness. But not for anything, I think, would any of them have traded their wilderness explorations for a more settled existence—like Faust, they could not repent, for they had seen and done things no one else had.
RAIN FELL ALMOST ceaselessly during the first seven days of my journey, further swelling already high water levels, which were at least a metre and a half higher than they had been the previous year. This meant that the waterfalls would be correspondingly shorter, as the water beneath each fall would have risen since I had last seen them. As Terry had warned, it also meant that the whitewater would be faster and more powerful. While the waterfalls posed little danger as long as I remembered their locations, the river’s countless rapids were unavoidable. Any one of these rapids was capable of swamping my shallow canoe—which I depended on to snake between dense forest on portages, not to handle whitewater. Even if I ran one hundred rapids flawlessly, an error on the hundred and first could prove fatal.
I got my first taste of high water levels while paddling down the winding course of the Kattagawami River on day one. Some of its rapids were transformed into frothing cataracts—one of which nearly hurled my canoe and me straight into a massive boulder that towered out of the river. I just barely managed to steer the canoe clear of the boulder as we plunged through the raging torrent. After that, I decided to make camp early for the day to rest. As it was, I was exhausted from a week spent with little sleep—and sleep deprivation and wilderness canoeing aren’t usually a winning combination.
The next day, rejuvenated from a night spent on a bed of lichens and moss, I paddled hard, arriving at a large, reed-covered lake. The weather had turned cold, with temperatures barely above freezing. While I was crossing the lake in a stiff headwind, a drizzle of rain turned into a steady downpour, chilling me to the bone. I managed to escape hypothermia by spending the night holed up in my tent on a sheltered island far from shore. Despite the weather, I was as happy as could be—I was back in the wilderness doing what I loved best. In the forest on the island I felt like I was in a dream world—the cathedral of ancient trees blotted out the sky, sheltering me from the rain, while thick carpets of bright green moss covered the ground.
The portages were as demanding as they had been the year before: the forest was sodden from steady rain and the ground was even swampier. But at least I could follow my old trails and didn’t have to blaze any new ones. One day, in the middle of the longest portage to the Again’s headwaters, I had fallen into a sort of mental fog, staggering onward in rain through swamp forest, when suddenly a deafening crash reverberated from out of the depths of the woods. Instinctively I froze. A tree must have toppled over—something I had witnessed several times in my life—but after days of silence, any loud sound was arresting. The tree might have fallen of its own accord, or it might have been knocked over by a black bear searching for insect larvae. I waited in silence to see if a bear would appear. When none emerged, I gingerly carried on with the portage to the Again’s headwaters, glancing over my shoulder every so often.
On that moonless night, I pitched my tent on a dry patch near the shoreline. More than just bears could be lurking in the darkness: wolves, wolverines, and supposedly wendigos haunted these unexplored regions. Anything out there could be silently watching me as I lay scribbling notes by the glow of my flashlight. Occasionally I heard a branch snap, the wind howl, or some unidentifiable noise rise from out of the darkness. But I slept easy—to be in the woods was to be home.
Strangely, my most dramatic wildlife encounter of the expedition took place in broad daylight. One morning I crawled out of my tent, still half-asleep, into some rare sunshine. I had camped in a burnt-out area. Short jack pines, the first trees to grow after a fire, and alder bushes were the only greenery on the charred landscape. I shuffled behind the tent into some chest-high alders to find some firewood. When I struck a branch with my hatchet I heard a sudden noise behind me—spinning around I caught sight of the fleeing backside of an enormous wolf. In a flash, it disappeared into the alder bushes. The wolf had been no more than three metres away from me. Previously in the wild, I had only caught a glimpse of wolves from a distance. I was puzzled to see one so close. But wolves, like all dogs, are innately curious, and this one, I suppose, couldn’t resist investigating what strange manner of creature lived in the nylon tent.
THE HIGH WATER made the rapid-choked course of the Again River more hazardous, but this time I didn’t have to worry about getting swept over any hidden waterfalls. I knew their approximate locations, and I could remember the look of the river above each fall. Several canoeists have been killed by unsuspected waterfalls in the James Bay watershed, and I didn’t intend to join them. According to legend, a war party of Iroquois braves plunged to their deaths in their birchbark canoes over an unfamiliar waterfall on the Abitibi River, at a place still called Iroquois Falls. More recently, in 1993, two American canoeists had drowned when they were trapped in a furious current and swept over a waterfall on the Missinaibi River. Their deaths were attributed in part to inaccurate maps of the river, which is, nevertheless, one of the best-known rivers flowing into James Bay.
Despite the higher water levels, the river was still shallow and rocky in places, especially along its upper course, which forced me to occasionally wade and pull the canoe behind me. In these stretches, the bottom of my canoe frequently scraped over sharp rocks. Each time my canoe ground over another rock, I wondered if it would be the last straw—but somehow Avalon managed to hold up. In a traditional birchbark or canvas canoe, the endless sharp rocks would have made navigating the river nearly impossible—part of the reason why the Again remained unexplored for so long.
As I navigated farther along the river, it grew larger and deeper. The whitewater rapids were of considerable size with serrated rocks and boulders dispersed throughout them like the obstacles in a pinball machine, all of which I had to snake around in my canoe. I spent all day doing so, navigating one rapid after another; but something about the grey skies, drizzle of rain, ceaseless rustle of running water, and cold air lulled me into a haze. Alone with my thoughts, my mind would drift, a risky prospect when every bit of river has hidden rocks. I find staying mentally focused to be one of the most underappreciated challenges of solo wilderness travel.
In the midst of one otherwise ordinary rapid, while I wasn’t concentrating on the river, my canoe suddenly smashed into a barely visible boulder, spun sideways, flooded, and bent round like a boomerang from the power of the water. When it began to fill with water, I leapt onto the boulder, while my gear was swept downriver. The force of the cascading water pinned the inundated canoe on the granite rock so that it looked as if the canoe would snap in two. There was nothing to do but attempt to free the crushed canoe from the rock and repair it onshore. I carefully stepped off the boulder into the cold, swirling water, which rose to my waist, and worked to free the canoe. It took all my strength to pull the flooded canoe off the rock and wade to the alder-covered banks to fix it. Fortunately, the repair work was easier than I thought it would be—I popped the crushed hull back into shape and it sustained little permanent damage. After retrieving my plastic barrel, paddles, and waterlogged backpack, which lucky for me were blocked from travelling far by rocks, I resumed paddling with a greater effort to avoid slipping into any further reveries.
A few days after my canoe was nearly broken in two by the boulder, I encountered more difficulty in whitewater. I had been navigating rapids along the Again all day—portaging around the largest ones, but more often than not running them. I was soaking wet from the waves, which frequently lapped over the canoe’s shallow sides and forced me to halt regularly, unpack the canoe, and empty the accumulated water before continuing. But I knew I was nearing the beautiful stretch of river that ran between the rocky hills and canyons, and I was eager to arrive there soon by paddling as many rapids as possible. Though I had only been there once, the stark beauty of the place was engraved in my memory.
After a sharp bend in the river, another rapid roared ahead—foaming water was crashing noisily over a rock ledge. The drop was not much more than a foot, so I decided to risk paddling it rather than unpack everything and perform yet another portage. But when I plunged over the ledge in my canoe, the waves lapped right over the bow, flooding the vessel. For a few seconds, it seemed as if the flotation I had lashed inside the canoe would prevent the inundated craft from sinking, but the weight of the water proved too much—as if in slow motion, the canoe sank with me in it.
My lifejacket kept me afloat as I found myself swimming in rapids, gasping in the cold. I grabbed on to the flooded canoe with my right hand, while with my left I struggled to get a hold of my watertight barrel, backpack, and paddles. With my hands full trying to hold on to all my vital gear, I watched helplessly as my brown fedora—an identical replacement for the one I had lost in the waterfall the year before—disappeared into the swirling water. Kicking with my feet, I managed to swim over to a boulder in the river, beach my canoe on that, and then make several trips to shore to secure my gear. Besides my hat, I lost my fishing rod, bug spray, a few other small items, and a bag of dried apples—nothing I couldn’t survive without.
THE MASTERCRAFT TORPEDO LEVEL mounted with the .22 calibre rifle scope worked like a charm for measuring the waterfalls—despite the hordes of blackflies that devoured my face and hands as I set up the instrument. My face was smeared with blood from their incessant bites. Sometimes, if I inhaled, I would cough from having swallowed a cloud of insects. Even in the rain the mosquitoes still swarmed me. Meriwether Lewis had written of the torments caused by swarms of mosquitoes:
The musquetoes continue to infest us in such manner that we can scarcely exist; for my own part I am confined by them to my bier at least 3/4 of the time. My dog even howls with the torture he experiences from them.
The early explorers in the Lowlands had learned from their aboriginal counterparts to cake themselves in foul-smelling bear grease to protect against blackflies and mosquitoes. I preferred a long-sleeved shirt, a mesh bug net, and if things were really awful, insect repellant, which was however never very effective.
The highest waterfall I surveyed measured just over six metres, or around twenty feet, which meant that at the time of my first expedition, it was probably not quite eight metres, or nearly twenty-five feet. The waterfalls on the Again River number between five and nine, depending on how one classifies “a waterfall” (no universally agreed criteria exist). The number varies based on whether one counts “split falls” around rocks or islands as one or two waterfalls, whether upper and lower drops should be counted separately, whether “step falls” (a sort of cascade) should be counted as a waterfall, and whether an exceptionally fierce, steep rapid with a considerable drop should be considered a waterfall or just a big rapid. My preference is for a conservative scale, according to which the Again River has five waterfalls. Waterfalls can be classified into over a dozen different categories, including curtain falls, plunges, cascades, fans, horsetails, slides, ledges, and punchbowls. The waterfall I went over was a ledge waterfall, where water descends over a vertical drop while maintaining partial contact with the bedrock. The horseshoe-shaped waterfall at the start of the longest canyon on the river was a plunge fall, where water descends vertically without contact with the bedrock. Two of the waterfalls, including the highest, were violent cascades, and the smallest was a “slide waterfall,” where water glides over bedrock while maintaining continuous contact. I photographed, measured, and recorded the longitude and latitude of each one—something no one had done before.
As fulfilling as I found such old-fashioned explorer’s work, as I paddled, waded, and portaged my way downriver, I was conscious of my desire to finally be rid of the Again. I wanted to move on to new horizons. Like a siren call, some new temptation, perhaps the promise of another nameless river, would lure me elsewhere into the wilderness. As I sat in my canoe paddling, I started to daydream of faraway places where I could explore a river no other living person had ever seen. A sudden zeal to finish my work meant that my progress on the expedition was rapid—I pushed myself hard from sunrise to sunset. When I had reached the end of the river, I paused to empty my watertight barrel of provisions and fill the barrel with a supply of freshwater. (The remaining provisions from the barrel I crammed into my worn backpack.) Then I headed down the Harricanaw River to the salt water of James Bay, where I intended to remain for a few days.
I spent my time near the mouth of the Harricanaw making short forays into the sea in my canoe—once or twice getting caught in terrifying waves far from shore that nearly swamped the canoe—and on land sketching birds, taking notes, and enjoying the solitude. But that solitude came to an end late one afternoon when I hiked down to shore to fetch some drinking water from my barrel. My eyes were greeted with an unexpected sight—a flotilla of canoes was coming downriver. I stood and stared at the canoes—it took a moment for me to appreciate that they were no mirage. There were six in total, each with two occupants. As they neared, I saw that it was a group of teenage campers, led by two adults. I stood on the riverbank, watching them as a wild animal might stand motionless and blankly stare at a passing canoe.
At the time, it didn’t occur to me that the ragged appearance of a lone man deep in the wilderness, suddenly emerging from the woods, might startle them. I had neither shaved nor bathed in weeks; my mop of hair was dishevelled by the wind, my clothes were tattered, my pants ripped nearly to shreds from the portages. A hunting knife was stuck in my belt and my army rain jacket was draped over my shoulders.
They paddled up to the bank near where I stood, beached their canoes, and began somewhat timidly climbing up the slope to where I stood watching them.
“Hello!” said the first one, apparently the camp counsellor in charge. He was a bearded, jovial looking man of about thirty.
I nodded hello.
“We thought you might be a Cree trapper,” he said, as his young charges followed him up the bank, carrying their packs. The other counsellor was a woman in her mid-twenties. “But you don’t look like one.”
“No, I’m not,” I said, warming up to the idea of being around people again. “Did you canoe the Harricanaw?”
“Yeah. We’re from Camp Pine Crest. I’m Matt.”
We shook hands.
“I’m Adam.”
“You’re not here alone, are you?”
“Yes, I am.”
“I take it you canoed the Harricanaw too?” asked Matt.
The campers had gathered round me in a semi-circle, curiously examining me as something of an exotic specimen.
“No,” I said, “I came down the Again River.”
They looked at me blankly.
“It’s a tributary of the Harricanaw. Have you heard of it?”
“No,” said Matt. “All alone?”
“Yes.”
“Now that’s something,” he said nodding appreciatively. “Well, we’re going to camp here tonight. You’re welcome to join us for supper. We’ve got plenty of extra pasta.”
Some of the kids looked at me expectantly.
“Thanks,” I replied, “I’d be happy to join you,” and, in fact, I was. As much as I like solitude, it was nice to be able to talk with people that could appreciate what I had just done.
That evening, we gathered around a campfire on what was a rather cold, windy night to eat pasta and swap stories. I regaled them with tales of my travels, unexplored rivers, hidden waterfalls, and snarling polar bears. They, in turn, told me about their summer camp and their three-week trip down the Harricanaw, which they took great pride in completing. And to their credit, any three-week canoe journey is no picnic. After dinner, I was astonished to learn that on their entire trip they never once drank tea. This seemed unthinkable: tea is the traditional drink of the northern woods, and some might say it is as much a part of the wilderness experience as the haunting cry of a loon, the crackle of a late-night fire, or a silent morning paddle across misty lakes. When I mentioned that herbal tea was the one luxury I prized above all in the wilderness, the campers all wanted a cup. We boiled several pots over the fire that night. Their trip had been a vegetarian one, and the teenage boys, in particular, looking rather ravenous, were ecstatic when I gave them some bags of jerky from my own supply.
THE NEXT MORNING, the campers and I went our separate ways. They set off to paddle to Moose Factory—which in fair weather was not a problem in their large, seventeen-foot canoes. Meanwhile, I remained behind on the coast, where I was to rendezvous with some of my companions from last year and cross James Bay with them.
This time things went smoothly, without any engine troubles or unexpected delays on sandbars. We did, however, stop to gather sweetgrass, a plant used in traditional Cree spiritual ceremonies. In Moosonee, as I was loading my canoe onto one of the Polar Bear Express’ boxcars for the train ride south, a man strode up to where I was standing with an excited look on his face.
“You’re Adam Shoalts!” he said, shaking my hand.
“Yes,” I replied, a little surprised by the attention.
“You’re a legend,” he exclaimed.
“Not quite,” I laughed.
“I’ve read all about you. I’ve done a lot of canoeing myself, but you know, nothing like what you do.”
“Where do you canoe?”
“Around here mostly, the Moose River. I live in Moosonee,” he explained. “I used to be a professional cyclist, but I gave that up and moved here with my wife. I love the outdoors—hunting, fishing, all that stuff.”
“I gotta ask you,” he said eagerly, “to show me your canoe. You’ve got to have some awesome gear.”
“Not really,” I gestured to my canoe lying in the open boxcar.
A horrified expression came over the man’s face. He was apparently expecting to see something state-of-the-art. “That’s your canoe!?”
“Yes.”
“How did you canoe here with that? That’s not even an ordinary tripper canoe. It’s so small. How does that thing get through rapids?”
“I bought it second-hand. New canoes are expensive,” I explained.
“But you must have sponsors throwing themselves at you?”
“No,” I laughed. “Not yet, anyway.”
When I returned home I discovered that the media’s interest in my expedition hadn’t died down. I had received more requests for TV appearances, magazine stories, and radio interviews. I accepted a few, but otherwise attempted to maintain a low profile. Wes had mentioned that he and his family were heading to Algonquin Park on a camping trip, and invited me to come along. I could never refuse any opportunity to strike off into the wilderness, so I happily joined them and forgot about the interviews. At night around the campfire, I entertained his young nieces and nephew with tales of man-eating bears and sasquatches lurking deep in the woods. I taught them how to make different types of tea from various wild plants, and I found myself wishing that I could remain in the forest and forget about the other side of life as an explorer—the paperwork.
Of course, that wasn’t possible. I had several hundred unread emails in my inbox, maps to create, and my expedition report and photographs to submit to the Geographical Society. In my absence in the wilderness, some outlandish claims had circulated about the Again River. Someone had claimed that the falls on the Again River were already mapped—but that proved to be a simple case of cartographic illiteracy. Another person, with no background in exploration history, geography, archaeology, or common sense, claimed that the 107-kilometre, rock-strewn, rapid- and waterfall-choked course of the Again River, which terminates in a swamp, was actually a “major trade route.” Of the hundreds of rivers in the Hudson and James Bay watershed, no more than a dozen or so could be said to have ever constituted a major trade route—and they were well known. The Again was emphatically nothing of the sort.
I fully expected, and regarded as inevitable, that in an age of internet anonymity, someone somewhere would claim to have previously canoed the Again River. Of course, such a claim would make no material difference to my expedition. But, to my surprise, despite the intense media glare focused on the river, only a single person emerged who claimed to have previously canoed it—a testament to its utter obscurity. The lone individual, a seventy-one-year-old man, claimed that he had been part of a team of geologists who had canoed the Again in 1961 under contract for the Quebec government. The other geologists, he said, were now dead. When I spoke to him on the phone and asked why the Quebec government would hire geologists to canoe a river that was mostly in Ontario, he admitted they had only explored the lower, more tranquil half of the river, beyond most of the dangerous rapids and all the waterfalls. Back in 1961, he had been a nineteen-year-old summer employee, and he had only spent that one summer in the area. He explained that the group had been dropped via helicopter at the river’s halfway point and that it was just one of several they canoed. His memory, after fifty-two years, was rather hazy—he couldn’t remember which river the Again flowed into and didn’t recognize any of the waterfalls from my pictures. However, he insisted, the expedition’s leader, the geologist Jerome Remick, had documented all their findings and work in an official report. I was sure that I had read Remick’s dry report five years earlier, and that it said nothing of the Again River. But, to be certain, I obtained copies of it, both in English and the original French, and reread it. As I suspected, the report made no mention of the Again River, nor did the Again appear on the maps that accompanied it. Their work had focused on the rivers in the upper part of the Harricanaw’s watershed, well south of the Again. Of course, I couldn’t rule out the possibility that they had canoed the lower part of the Again and for some reason failed to mention it—but this seemed unlikely. I could only speculate whether this claim was an honest mistake—after all, it had been over half a century. At any rate, it was immaterial to my expedition and made no difference to me personally. I had done what I had set out to do five years earlier when I first began to dream of the river in my cluttered, map-lined study, and beyond that, nothing much mattered.
A few months after my return from the Again, to my surprise I received notice that I had been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society for “extraordinary contributions to geography.” To be elected a Fellow was to join the company of such explorers as Sir Richard Burton, David Livingstone, Sir Henry Morton Stanley, Sir Ernest Shackleton, Sir Francis Younghusband, Percy Fawcett, and Charles Camsell—all of whom had been elected Fellows of their respective geographical societies on the basis of their expeditions. In comparison to them, I had done next to nothing to deserve such a distinction. The rivers I had explored in the Lowlands were small waterways, of no great importance in themselves, and my expeditions, while difficult and to a degree dangerous, were still only minor affairs.
I was to have the honour of presenting the Society’s flag that I had carried on my expeditions to Canada’s governor general, His Excellency, the Right Honourable David Johnston. At the ceremony in Ottawa, I marched down a red carpet holding the carefully folded blue flag in my hands, rows of seated dignitaries on either side, stepped onto a stage, bowed, and presented the flag to the Queen’s representative, feeling a bit like an explorer from an earlier era. When he shook my hand, His Excellency mentioned that he would like to join me on an expedition—if I promised to travel at a slower pace and do most of the paddling.
Gratifying as it was to be recognized in this way, the truth is that when my exploration of the Again River was finally complete, it wasn’t as if I felt a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I had gained the knowledge that I had sought about a river that had previously been an enigma, but many other unknown rivers remained to be explored—and I couldn’t resist them. I felt nearly as restless as ever in my obsession with seeking the world’s last unexplored rivers, and I still had an almost overwhelming compulsion to push myself to the limit to explore such places. The Again, like all the other rivers I had explored before it, seemed only to increase my appetite for greater challenges. And besides, I had the example of other Geographical Society Fellows to live up to. Within days of presenting the Society’s flag to the governor general, I had resolved to undertake a new expedition that would surpass all of my others in terms of risk, hardship, and geographical remoteness. I had, with Canadian Geographic’s encouragement, set my sights on the unexplored reaches of the High Arctic—the most extreme environment on earth where canoeing is possible.
The morning after the ceremony with the governor general, I attended a meeting at Canadian Geographic’s office to discuss these plans. The magazine was interested in an Arctic expedition, and they thought I was the man for the job—if I wanted it, and of course I did. Canadian Geographic stipulated that any expedition I dreamed up take place north of the Arctic Circle—a line of latitude that runs around the top of the world. Everything north of this line has at least one day of continuous daylight in the summer and at least one day when the sun never rises in the winter. Beyond the Arctic Circle lie the vast, nearly uninhabited Arctic islands—an immense archipelago of frozen wilderness stretching over 2,400 kilometres from east to west and consisting of 36,563 islands, of which only ten are inhabited. It’s a barren land of glaciers, featureless tundra, windswept mountains, and frigid lakes.
The canoe was never meant for the icy rivers of the High Arctic. The Inuit—who first colonized Canada’s Arctic islands about eight or nine hundred years ago—relied on dogsleds for transportation for most of the year, and when the ice briefly melted in summer would travel in kayaks made from animal skins, which they used to skirt the rocky coastlines. It was only in the mid-twentieth century that the first intrepid explorers attempted to canoe High Arctic rivers—no easy task, given that the Arctic is actually a cold desert that receives very little precipitation. As a consequence, most rivers in the Arctic are shallow, rock-strewn streams that are unsuitable for canoeing—aside from when the snow melts in July, which transforms these streams into raging torrents. The difficulty of canoeing in such a place is appreciable: besides all the usual hazards such as drowning, smashing one’s head on a rock, or getting crushed by an overturned canoe in a rapid, the icy water and cold air temperatures mean that merely capsizing or swamping in a river is liable to prove fatal. To add to the difficulties, the region has no trees to speak of, nothing in the way of natural materials like spruce resin or birchbark with which to repair a canoe, scarce shelter from the merciless winds, few wild edibles of any value, and of course, polar bears with no fear of humans. Even in mid-summer the wind chill is often minus ten Celsius, and snowstorms are possible.
As I left the meeting in the editor’s office and headed back down the hallway to leave, I couldn’t help but step into the boardroom to see Sir Francis Younghusband’s sword mounted on the wall. Three and a half years earlier, the sight of it had filled me with an irresistible yearning for faraway, unexplored lands. And now, seeing his sword again and having just received my orders to devise a new expedition, I felt once more the inexpressible allure of the unknown, the romance of adventure, and the thrill of exploration.