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Geographers … crowd into the edges of their maps parts of the world which they do not know about, adding notes in the margin to the effect that beyond this lies nothing but sandy deserts full of wild beasts, and unapproachable bogs.
—Plutarch, Plutarch’s Lives, first century AD
MUCH OF THE HISTORY of exploration is the story of failures. Christopher Columbus, after all, wasn’t looking for North America when he made landfall in the Bahamas in 1492. He was attempting to sail around the world to Asia—more precisely, the East Indies—hence the Italian mariner’s mistaken belief that the people he met with were “Indians.” Sir Alexander Mackenzie, perhaps the greatest of North America’s land explorers, had the misfortune to journey over two thousand kilometres in the wrong direction in his attempt to reach the Pacific Ocean. The eccentric genius Sir Richard Burton, among the most celebrated of African explorers, failed in his famous quest to find the source of the Nile. And then there was Sir Ernest Shackleton, widely considered a gifted leader and polar explorer par excellence, who never succeeded on any of his expeditions in reaching his objective. I took solace in these facts over my failure to explore the Again River two summers in a row. While I had not reached the Again, I had a consolation prize in that I had still explored a nameless river (a tributary of the Kattawagami, a map of which I created) and together with Wes blazed kilometres of new trails into unexplored territory. More importantly, my resolve to explore the Again remained undiminished.
It would be necessary to wait until the Hudson Bay Lowlands’ long winter ended and the ice melted before another attempt could be made to canoe the Again River. I felt certain that the summer of 2010 would be when I’d finally explore it—in fact, restless as always, I was growing impatient to free myself of the mental hold the Again was exercising over me and move on to other challenges. While the desire to reach the Again remained, haunting me like some sort of spectre, I hurled myself into other undertakings. I ventured to Lake Superior to search for ancient pictographs on that majestic body of water’s rocky shores and to explore its many mysterious caves. I wandered off into remote parts of the Rockies, crossing paths with black bears and elk. On the wide open grasslands of the prairies, I slept under the stars and collected mule deer antlers. And in Manitoba, I paddled azure lakes while fishing for pickerel. In fact, I roamed all around Canada’s wilderness from the rocky inlets of the Atlantic to the temperate rainforests of the Pacific. My life devolved into a restless search for one adventure after another—a desire “to escape from the commonplace of existence,” as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle put it.
When the summer arrived, I was impatient to attempt the Again once more. However, a wrench was thrown in my plans when Wes informed me that two weeks was all the time that he could afford for exploration. Financially, Wes found himself in difficult straits (I was no better off), and the practical man that he was, he was attempting to save money in order to buy a house with his girlfriend. For Wes to take an unpaid leave from his construction job to go exploring wasn’t economical. Until that time, I had mainly financed our expeditions the same way most explorers had paid for their work since the Victorian era—through writing and public lectures. While these speaking engagements and articles allowed me to eke out a living as an explorer and had made me something of a local celebrity in our small town, it wasn’t going to buy any house.
But things got even more complicated when in July, Wes gloomily informed me that a week was now all he could offer me.
“But a week isn’t enough time to explore the Again River,” I scoffed.
“That’s all I can afford to take off,” Wes explained.
“Yes, but just think, if we make this sacrifice now and succeed, it will pay off in the long run.”
“We need sponsors,” replied Wes, unimpressed.
“We’ll get sponsors by doing expeditions and making a name for ourselves.”
“We need them now, though.”
“We have only a few weeks, it’s not enough time to get any.”
“Then find a way to explore it in a week.”
Disheartening as this revelation was, I wasn’t going to abandon my quest to explore the Again that easily. As much as I disliked the thought and dreaded the increased financial cost to myself, I entertained the possibility of chartering a helicopter or floatplane to fly us as close to the river as possible, which might, under the best of circumstances, permit us to complete the expedition in eight or nine days.
However, this approach wasn’t without considerable drawbacks: inevitably it would entail exploring less territory, which would diminish our accomplishment. It felt as if half the point of the expedition—exploring the area fully from the ground—would be unfulfilled by doing things in this manner. Still, if this was the only way Wes could join me, I’d consider it. Since a helicopter was beyond my financial resources, I made inquiries with bush pilots about taking us, our gear, and our canoe to one of the lakes in the upper part of the Again River’s watershed. The response wasn’t encouraging.
The chief bush pilot in Cochrane, who made his living flying hunters and fishermen to remote wilderness lakes, had never heard of the Again River and wasn’t familiar with any of the lakes in its watershed. By now, I was familiar with this response. The bush pilot was uncomfortable flying to a lake he didn’t know—it might after all prove too shallow or rocky to land on—and suggested that we fly to one of the lakes he did know and content ourselves with paddling some other river. As far as our purposes were concerned, he proved unhelpful—he wouldn’t fly us where we wanted to go, so that option was quickly dropped. There was no way then—given Wes’ time constraints—to explore the Again that summer. Since I had come to regard the Again as the special shared ambition of Wes and me, it didn’t seem right to explore it without him. With much regret, I resigned myself to waiting another year to explore it.
Wes and I had to content ourselves with some minor adventures and exploring of a different sort—such as searches on the wooded hillsides of our rural countryside for giant puffballs, an oversized mushroom that resembles a volleyball (or as I like to say, a dinosaur egg), which we collected and ate. But the failure to explore the Again left me restless and more eager than ever to hurl myself into new challenges. Perhaps I was compensating for failure, but, regardless, I needed more adventures, more quests—to live a more satisfying existence. That autumn, I worked on my survival skills in the northern woods. I also made arrangements to spend the winter in Ottawa writing articles and doing research for Canadian Geographic magazine and the spring in the Amazon rainforest on a scientific expedition. These new challenges, which broadened my horizons, actually helped dissipate my interest in the Again. I half told myself to forget about that obscure river and to turn my attention elsewhere. The Amazon had long exercised a spell over me—rare is the explorer who isn’t interested in exploring its exotic, otherworldly jungles, where species unknown to science remain to be discovered and Stone Age tribes still live. I also longed to explore the Arctic and the northern reaches of the Hudson Bay Lowlands, the home of earth’s largest land carnivore, Ursus maritimus, the polar bear. The Again, in contrast, was in the southern part of the Lowlands, outside the range of the great white bear. I was eager to undertake bigger expeditions farther afield and convinced myself that the cursed Again had become a sort of millstone that was weighing me down. I told myself that one day I would undoubtedly explore it, but that it could wait for the time being.
That winter, Wes and I were snowshoeing and tracking wolves north of Lake Huron when he suggested that we canoe the Florida Everglades. Such an adventure sounded like a suitable warm-up for the Amazon jungle, so I started making plans for an Everglades canoe trip as soon as we returned from the wilds. But just days before we were to depart, Wes abruptly cancelled. He had decided instead on a trip with his girlfriend to a resort in the Caribbean. I was disappointed—considering the time that I had invested in making arrangements for the Everglades—and began to wonder whether his thirst for adventure was drying up. It certainly seemed like he was becoming domesticated. I shuddered with horror at the thought of such a thing ever happening to me.
ON MY FIRST DAY at Canadian Geographic’s head office in Ottawa, I attended an editorial meeting. On the wall opposite from where I sat was a glorious collection of old charters for the magazine’s publisher: the venerable Royal Canadian Geographical Society. The Society, modelled on Britain’s Royal Geographical Society, was founded in 1929 by the explorer Charles Camsell and other like-minded individuals. Besides publishing Canadian Geographic, the Society sponsors expeditions, produces the Atlas of Canada and other maps, promotes geographical education, and bestows awards and honours on explorers and geographers. I had held the institution in holy reverence ever since my grandparents had given me a subscription to Canadian Geographic as a child for my birthday. I dreamed of carrying the Society’s blue flag, emblazoned with its crest—a white, eight-point compass overlaid with a red maple leaf—on an expedition of my own one day.
Beside the old charters hung an antique Asian-looking sword with a golden hilt and decorative scabbard. With this curious artifact directly in my line of sight, it wasn’t long before I lost the thread of the editorial discussion and started pondering the sword. Beneath the sword, a plaque mounted on the wall read:
Presented to The Canadian Geographical Society by Sir Francis Younghusband, guest-lecturer, at the inaugural meeting of the Society in Ottawa. January 1930. This Tibetan sword was presented to Sir Francis Younghusband by the Chief of Bhutan in 1904.
Sir Francis Younghusband—now here was a true adventurer and explorer. He had lived a life so extraordinary that it seemed like he was straight out of the imagination of some adventure novelist. Younghusband was born in 1863 in the British Raj, or what is now Pakistan, where his father was stationed on military service. He was sent to England to receive an education and attended the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. But it was as an explorer, not as a soldier, that Younghusband would make his name.
In 1886, Younghusband participated in an expedition journeying from India to Manchuria. Impressed by his abilities, his superiors then dispatched him to explore the vast Gobi Desert of Mongolia and northern China. With only a few guides, he set off from Beijing on a journey through unknown territory, successfully crossing the Gobi Desert and then making his way over the Himalayan Mountains into India. For this remarkable journey, at age twenty-four, he was elected the youngest ever Fellow of Britain’s Royal Geographical Society. Next, Younghusband explored the border regions between India, China, and Russia, and the Hindu Kush mountains of Afghanistan, entering remote lands that time seemed to have forgotten. He wrote about these adventures in his book The Heart of a Continent.
In 1903, he was tasked with leading an expedition to Tibet, one of the world’s least known and most mysterious countries. Tibet’s isolated location high in the snowy Himalayas and its policy of keeping out all foreigners made it something of an adventurer’s dream—an enchanted kingdom hidden in the clouds. Younghusband became one of the first Europeans to enter Tibet’s ancient capital, the Forbidden City of Lhasa. But the dream became a nightmare when Younghusband’s troops massacred Tibetan militia. The bloodshed and lofty mountains left a deep impression on Younghusband, and he underwent a spiritual epiphany. He became a mystic, contemplating founding his own religion and writing numerous books on the subject. Younghusband even mused about fathering a “god-child” who would become a prophet of the new religion he dreamed of creating. Regardless of his eccentricities, he was elected president of the Royal Geographical Society, and in that capacity began promoting an expedition to scale Mount Everest. In 1930, by then an explorer of legendary stature, he arrived in Ottawa with a memento from one of his expeditions, a sword from the chief of Bhutan. Younghusband presented it to the newly founded Canadian Geographical Society, and perhaps by doing so hoped to inspire the same sense of adventure and wanderlust that drove his life. Whatever his claims as a mystic, he succeeded in bewitching me. Staring transfixed at his sword on the wall, I felt myself seized by an irresistible urge to explore distant lands.
As a result, I spent only three months in Ottawa working at Canadian Geographic. More importantly, during this time, I also submitted a detailed expedition proposal to the Geographical Society’s Expedition Committee, which approved and sponsored expeditions. I proposed to explore a remote, nameless river in the northern reaches of the Hudson Bay Lowlands that, like the Again, was all but unknown and had nothing on it in the published record. I planned to mount the first expedition to canoe this far-flung river with Wes. To reach the river would entail a long and difficult journey, preceded by an expensive flight north by bush plane. As far as I could ascertain, the Geographical Society had never previously sponsored a journey to the blackfly-infested Lowlands—which would give me the distinction of leading the first-ever Society expedition into North America’s largest wetland. But a response from the Expeditions Committee wouldn’t be forthcoming for some months, leaving me to pursue other projects.
In April, I was back home in Fenwick, working with my father to build a birchbark canoe for a local museum. In the swamp forests beside my family home, we found a large white birch that was straight with few branches and knots, which made it suitable for our purposes. With a knife and chisel, I climbed a maple sapling growing beside the birch and delicately peeled off the bark to a height of six metres. Not wanting to waste anything, we later chopped down the tree for firewood (my parents heated their house with wood in the winter). In a stroke of fortune, a windstorm struck the area in the following days, toppling over several big spruces. I dug up their strong and supple roots for lashing, while my father fetched some basswood bark for additional lashing. We felled a white ash for the canoe’s gunwales and thwarts, as well as for paddles. The only tree we needed but couldn’t find in our forests was eastern white cedar—the cedar’s flexible wood we wanted for the canoe’s ribs. Instead, I went to the local farmers’ co-op and bought some cedar fence posts, which my father and I split and bent to form the ribs. After working only intermittently for four weeks, we finished the thirteen-foot canoe (which was as large as we could make it, given the limited size of the birch we felled) and tested it in our pond. It handled well and, unlike the old fibreglass vessel Wes and I had paddled, didn’t leak at all. I penned an article for Canadian Geographic about it then boarded a plane to Ecuador, to set off into the Amazon rainforest.
ONCE I ARRIVED at a base camp deep in the Amazon jungle, a written test was placed before me by the scientists there, asking me to identify sundry species by their Latin names. I hadn’t done much biological fieldwork since my time working for Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources as a student, but I had spent the last eight months reading Amazon zoology books in my spare time. I have always been blessed with the capacity to memorize large amounts of data, and while rote memorization may not be much of a skill, my visual memory is one of the best assets I possess as an explorer—it has invariably saved me from losing my way, since I can always remember where I have been. The scientists seemed satisfied when I got a perfect score on the test, correctly identifying each species by its scientific name and all of the tropical bird calls they played on a tape recorder.
Soon I was hacking my way through the jungle with a machete, helping to carry out biological inventories and in the process acquiring a fine collection of ant bites. There was no electricity at our base camp in the rainforest, but after five weeks in the jungle I paid a visit to the nearest village with an internet connection to check my email. It proved a moment of triumph: I learned that the Geographical Society’s Expedition Committee had endorsed my proposal and was sponsoring the expedition to the Hudson Bay Lowlands.
A WEEK AFTER that I was back in Canada—eager to begin the greatest adventure of my life. Not even the “hangover” from the Amazon could dampen my enthusiasm. My legs were covered with insect bites, and I had pinched a nerve in my back when doing some heavy lifting in the jungle. I would have to continue my daily doses of malaria pills for another four weeks, and as a precaution I was prescribed a course of antibiotics because of a tick bite on my leg. But I had escaped any serious illness or inconvenience—some of the scientists had contracted leishmaniasis, dengue fever, and other tropical diseases. I came back feeling impatient to plunge into the subarctic wilderness.
Upon my return from South America, I expected Wes to be primed for our expedition, which we planned for the end of July. It was, after all, just over five weeks away and the adventure that we had dreamed of since childhood. But to my dismay, I found him noncommittal about whether he would even accompany me at all. He wanted to come, he told me. But he had to think about his job, his girlfriend, and saving money.
“But Wes, this is a dream to have the Geographical Society sponsor us to explore a wild river with no name,” I said in disbelief.
“It is a dream,” replied Wes, “but it’s your dream.”
Several weeks passed while Wes procrastinated over whether he would quit his job and accompany me on the expedition. In the meantime, I couldn’t be idle: over the winter I had made arrangements for my own intermittent employment as an occasional wilderness canoeing guide in Algonquin Park. I soon found myself guiding a short trip there with some German and Australian tourists. Still taking my malaria pills each morning, I was hiking and paddling around the wilds of Algonquin. When I returned home, I was greeted with the news I had been dreading. Wes told me that he couldn’t go through with the expedition. This was a huge blow—to me it felt something like Clark abandoning Lewis on the eve of their journey into the uncharted American West in 1804. Trying to pull off the expedition without Wes would be difficult, if not impossible. I certainly couldn’t do the expedition alone. I would have to find a replacement for him. I needed someone with Wes’ skills and experience whom I could rely upon. But more than that, Wes had been my friend since childhood; to do the expedition without him would be a deep disappointment.
That evening, melancholic from having received Wes’ unwelcome news, I took a lonely walk in the woods, accompanied by my dog Riley. He was a magnificent animal—he stood nearly three feet at the shoulders, weighed a trim 138 pounds, and had a handsome black and tan coat highlighted by a patch of white fur on his muscular chest. For eight years he had been my closest companion, a beloved and faithful dog that shadowed my steps through the woods.
As we passed through some maiden-hair ferns growing beneath a big swamp oak, I turned to him and said, “Well, Riley, Wes may have quit on me, but I know you never will.”
He wagged his tail and looked up at me, his big brown eyes full of understanding.
As we walked on through the woods, I noticed that Riley didn’t leave my side. At first I imagined that was only because he had missed me while I was away in the Amazon. But I sensed something wasn’t right—he didn’t have his usual lightness of foot and was curiously uninterested in the rabbit trails we were passing. The following day, I took Riley to the veterinarian. I was informed that he had an inoperable tumour, that there was nothing for it, and that all my love couldn’t save him. I was stunned. For the first time, I no longer cared about unexplored rivers. All I cared about was saving my best friend—the dog that I had shared countless adventures with. Refusing to believe the veterinarian’s diagnosis, I drove Riley to a specialist outside Toronto. But I was told the same thing. Riley had to be put down. He died in my arms. Heartbroken, feeling as if I had lost a part of myself, I buried his kingly body beneath a maple tree that he had always loved to sit under.
I HAD BARELY OVER THREE WEEKS to find a replacement for Wes, get him up to speed, and take care of all the planning and logistics for the expedition. It wasn’t going to be an easy task. I knew, from past experience, that my options for finding a suitable substitute for Wes—in fact finding any substitute—were not good. I learned quickly that wilderness exploring didn’t hold the same deep appeal for everyone that it did for me. While most people might enjoy a weekend spent leisurely paddling around tranquil lakes, a gruelling, hazardous expedition deep in the nightmarish Lowlands—where far more time would be spent carrying and dragging the canoe through thick forest and muskeg than ever paddling it—came across as decidedly unappealing. Typically, when I broached the subject of joining my expedition, the response was initially enthusiastic—until I explained the details of the horrendous portages through trackless swamps filled with millions of bloodsucking insects and the deadly hazard posed by half-famished polar bears looking to devour anything foolhardy enough to stray into their domain. Suddenly, that enthusiasm would dissipate.
After two weeks of interviews, I still hadn’t found anyone to replace Wes. The first people I had turned to were a couple of my cousins. Both experienced outdoorsmen who had in the past roamed around the wilds with me, neither of them (prudent people that they are) wanted to step up and accompany me to the Lowlands. My twin brother was equally uninterested—he positively despised portages and couldn’t fathom the over one hundred kilometres of it I was planning on doing, all of it without a trail. Next, I fired off a message to a friend of mine who was serving in the army. Unfortunately, so he told me, he had used up all of his leave for the year and wouldn’t be able to take the time required for the expedition.
In the midst of these hectic preparations, chance brought across my path an old friend, a gifted all-around athlete named Brent Kozuh. He was one of the most skilled hockey players our small town had ever seen and was equally adept on the tennis court and soccer field. It was thought by some that he might have gone pro in some sport. That is, if not for his Achilles heel: like many extraordinarily talented athletes, Brent found training, hard work, and old-fashioned grit beneath him. He liked to boast, with peculiar pride, how in high school he had been such a slacker that he had failed even his career studies course—and that he had literally slept through economics, finishing with a grade of seven percent. At age twenty-five, he was unemployed and still living at home with his parents. His life, so he proudly told me, consisted of getting by with the minimal level of effort. Since Brent had been on a few easy canoe trips with me in the past and because we unexpectedly crossed paths, I jokingly asked if he might like to join me on an expedition to the subarctic.
To my surprise, Brent took an immediate interest and said that he had always wanted to do a serious expedition. Perhaps, I wondered, he did have some iron buried in his soul—or maybe he just wanted to prove his doubters wrong. He didn’t exactly seem to be an ideal candidate for a gruelling wilderness journey. Despite his athletic physique, he was still an inveterate slacker. But I was fresh out of candidates and Brent, unburdened by a job, leapt at the chance to join me. If Brent really wanted to complete an extreme wilderness journey, I had no doubt he had the physical skill to do it. He did, in addition to a few canoe trips, have a passion for animals and the natural world—albeit largely limited to watching the Discovery Channel.
Desperation breeds hope, and with the expedition only a couple of weeks away I was desperate. I needed a partner—any partner. To go alone into polar bear territory was unthinkable. What gave me some hope that Brent would cast off his laziness and prove himself a capable expedition partner was his tremendous prowess as an athlete. Paradoxically, while anywhere outside a sporting match he was paralyzed by an all-consuming listlessness, when he was “in the zone,” he transformed into a fierce competitor. Whatever the sport, Brent was the kind of player for whom dominance came naturally. If his team was down in the third period, he’d single-handedly strip the opposing team of the puck and even the score. But after the final buzzer, it was as if a switch flipped off in his brain that caused him to transform back into an incorrigible idler who struggled just to carry his hockey bag to the parking lot. I figured that if I could get Brent to see an expedition as a sport—a physical challenge to be won—he would snap out of his habitual indolence and exert himself with all his superb skill.
Immersed in the preparations for the expedition, Brent showed an uncustomary keenness in helping (which was promising). He began to accompany me on my daily errands obtaining supplies. One of those errands was the important task of acquiring a suitable firearm. My arsenal consisted of only two guns—a .22 calibre rifle and a 1930s-era twenty-gauge shotgun—neither of which would deter a polar bear. My preference was for bows and arrows rather than firearms. I had grown up using a fibreglass longbow and had once fashioned my own bow from the wood of an osage orange tree, the finest of all North American trees for bow making. But government policy was to carry twelve-gauge shotguns in polar bear territory—nothing less was considered safe. So, Brent and I paid a visit to the local gun shop on the main street in our small town. We parked outside the wood-shingled building and entered a storeroom crowded to the rafters with firearms and mounted animal heads. The proprietor, a man in his mid-eighties who had been in the gun business since shortly after the Second World War, stood behind the counter, rows of rifles mounted behind him.
“We need something for polar bears,” I explained.
The old clerk nodded solemnly at my question, as if he had expected as much. “You hunting them?”
“Uh no, it’s just for a worst-case scenario. We’re going on an expedition and need some protection.”
“I got just the thing.” He reached behind the counter and produced a mean-looking shotgun. “Winchester Defender, twelve gauge, pump action, the perfect expedition gun. The short barrel will let you get it up in a hurry,” and with a rapid movement that belied his age, the clerk jerked the gun up to his shoulder, feigning a bear attack.
“Excellent,” I said.
“You’ll want rifled slugs. Nothing else will stop a polar bear,” he said as he reached behind the counter and produced a box of shells.
“Great,” I replied.
“And I’ll tell you what. I’ll throw in some birdshot, should you find yourself in an emergency like a plane crash and need to kill something for food.”
Brent stared wide-eyed at the accumulating arsenal on the counter.
“Perfect,” I said.
“And some target shot for practice shooting.”
“Wonderful.”
After completing the purchase (at a rather steep price) and the required paperwork, we exited the store with our new hardware. Brent, feeling hungry, suggested that we pay a visit to the Subway down the street.
“All right, then we’ll have to head to the map library at Brock University to get the topographic maps,” I said, glancing at the time. I had a hundred things on my mind, having to plan every detail of our journey down to the last food ration. As we entered Subway, there was one more thing on my mind: my friend’s notorious habit of misplacing things. Brent would lose his car keys pretty much daily, his phone regularly, and his TV remote habitually. My concern was that in the wilderness, his carelessness could have serious repercussions were he to leave behind some vital piece of equipment.
“God, I love meatball subs,” said Brent, between mouthfuls.
“Yes. Did you find your cellphone?”
“No,” said Brent, pausing to think, “must have left it at the bar the other night.”
“You know, when we’re on the expedition, it will be critical not to lose anything. We can’t afford to forget something at a campsite or misplace the satellite phone.”
“Don’t worry,” Brent gave a dismissive wave of his hand, “I won’t lose anything.”
We finished our subs and got up to leave. Just as we were walking out, the young woman who had served us spoke up. “Hey, I think one of you guys forgot your wallet.” She pointed to a black leather wallet at our table.
“Oh, my bad,” said Brent, as he sheepishly retrieved it.
I couldn’t help but feel a little uneasy about my new partner. He admitted that he had lost his wallet twice before that summer. This didn’t inspire a lot of confidence for our long journey ahead.
IF THERE IS ONE LESSON that can be gleaned from the history of exploration, it’s that nothing ever goes according to plan. Therefore, I had made a point of devising alternative plans for our expedition in the event of any unforeseen difficulties. From the very beginning, when I was preparing the expedition proposal back in Ottawa, I had made sure to keep my plans flexible. I zeroed in on two rivers in the northern reaches of the Hudson Bay Lowlands that I was interested in exploring, both apparently nameless. It didn’t much matter which of the two rivers we ended up exploring, as they were similar. The larger of the two was situated some forty kilometres east of Cape Henrietta Maria, and it appeared on maps as a nearly 150-kilometre-long nameless tributary of the isolated Brant River. This, however, as is so often the case when dealing with obscure geography, wasn’t entirely clear: other maps labelled the tributary as the Brant River itself. Consulting various maps from different government agencies only compounded the problem: there was no agreement on which of the upper forks in this river was the Brant and which was unnamed. Since the basis of my expedition proposal to the Geographical Society was the exploration of a nameless river in the Lowlands, I was loath to go to the effort of exploring this river only to have someone later claim that it was the fork which was properly known as the Brant. Government scientists, ornithologists, and others had flown via helicopter and bush plane to the Brant and explored portions of it. But no one, insofar as was known, had ever canoed the river from its headwaters to the seacoast. I spoke on the phone with the superintendent of Polar Bear Provincial Park, a reserve whose boundaries on the ground are indistinguishable from the surrounding wilderness. She was unable to tell me anything about these rivers or their names, except to say that she knew of no one who had ever attempted to canoe them.
In contrast, the other river that I had my eye on was more obscure and had no name on any map. This fact made it seem almost perfect—except that it wasn’t quite as long as the other waterway, measuring only a hundred kilometres. Thus, the choice was between the more obscure smaller river or the bigger, but somewhat better known, waterway that might or might not have a name.
I eventually resolved, having absorbed the lessons of past explorers, to keep our plans flexible. The presumed tributary of the Brant River would remain our primary objective, with the more obscure nameless river serving as an alternative should, for whatever reason, we fail to reach the first one. In any case, I planned to eventually explore both rivers over the course of several expeditions. If I had the funds and a willing partner, I might have attempted both in a single season—yet Brent affirmed that forty days was the absolute maximum amount of time he would spend in the wilderness.
As things stood, there were plenty of obstacles to undertaking any exploring that summer. I had originally imagined that the backing of the Geographical Society would open doors and make our preparations straightforward. This wasn’t the case. An almost soul-crushing plethora of problems and obstacles arose in the weeks leading up to our departure. Things were already complicated by the last-minute lineup change from Wes to Brent, which put the entire burden of making preparations on my shoulders, as I dared not delegate anything to Brent—knowing him as well as I did. Time was of the essence: my hasty arrival back in Canada from the Amazon coupled with my work as a guide had severely compressed our preparatory time into a few hectic weeks. Everything needed to be in order by the end of July. Besides the annoyance of my lingering Amazonian recovery, there were serious logistical problems. My old car, our means of transportation to the northern town where we would board a bush plane, was pronounced unfit for the road by my mechanic. And Brent’s vehicle was no better. To add to our difficulties, it was a hot, dry summer in the North—the Ministry of Natural Resources fire report indicated that 109 forest fires were burning across Ontario’s wilderness, a serious hazard. I kept an eye on them via satellite updates, apprehensive that one might sweep across the area we were headed into. And if these concerns weren’t enough, I was informed by the Geographical Society’s president that the other expedition sponsored that year, to a river in Labrador, had failed to materialize. This news doubled the pressure for our expedition to succeed.
Most problematic of all was the common bane of an explorer’s existence: a shortage of cash. While I was accustomed to performing expeditions with limited resources—I put my faith in traditional skills and knowledge rather than flashy gear—this was a Society expedition, so I couldn’t take the risks I normally did, and all sorts of expensive equipment, such as a satellite phone and a GPS, had to be obtained. But even with the Society’s generous funding, we had to cut some corners.
This put us in good company: most of history’s greatest explorers were impoverished. Columbus set the template for many Renaissance-era explorers by spending years shifting between royal courts seeking a patron who would sponsor his proposed voyage across the Atlantic. The famed Victorian explorer of darkest Africa, Sir Henry Morton Stanley, was so embarrassed by his threadbare funding that he felt compelled to wildly inflate his expeditions’ budgets in his books. Despite his fame, Stanley was reduced to all sorts of cost-saving measures and once had to sell his watch for food. His contemporary, David Livingstone, wasn’t much better off. Livingstone had difficulty raising two thousand pounds in 1866 for his African explorations, complaining that even that amount was “wretchedly inadequate.” Sir Ernest Shackleton struggled almost as much in the drawing rooms of imperial London to raise funds for his expeditions as he ever did in the howling wastes of Antarctica. Unable to raise the necessary funds, Shackleton’s 1907 expedition to the South Pole left him deeply in debt. Seven years later, for his epic and unprecedented attempt to cross Antarctica, the Royal Geographical Society offered him a paltry thousand pounds, which would comprise only a tiny fraction of his budget. To make up the difference, Shackleton was forced to plead with wealthy private sponsors as well as a British government preoccupied with the looming conflict on the continent.
Legendary explorer Percy Fawcett was a beggar at the Royal Geographical Society’s coffers, chronically short of money for his expeditions. On his quest in the 1920s to find the ruins of a lost civilization deep in the Amazon jungle, Fawcett received no salary, and the funding provided by the Geographical Society proved insufficient. But it took a certain flare, even genius, to mount expeditions with limited funds, and explorers like Fawcett who could do it were highly prized by underfunded geographical societies. Sir John Keltie, secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, noted:
It is quite true that [Fawcett] has a reputation of being difficult to get on with, and has a queer manner in many ways, being a mystic and a spiritualist, but all the same he has an extraordinary power of getting through difficulties that would deter anybody else.
While Fawcett did succeed time and again against great odds, eventually he vanished without a trace in the Amazon.
I now found myself in a similar financial situation: the Society’s generous grant of 5,500 dollars was inadequate to cover the entire expedition, which I estimated at around 10,000 dollars if we stuck to just the bare essentials. So, like Stanley, Livingstone, Shackleton, and Fawcett, I did the necessary trimming. We couldn’t afford bear spray, so that was dropped. We couldn’t afford watertight canoe barrels, so I improvised some of my own (in addition to one that I already possessed). We made a road trip to the United States to purchase a GPS, but couldn’t afford the mapping software that went with it—so we had to content ourselves with a GPS that had no maps but could at least give us our coordinates. Freeze-dried meals proved too expensive—so pasta, rice, and oatmeal would be our staples. Expensive waterproof Gore-Tex clothing was out of the question, as was a new canoe. Any sort of tripwire system or electric fence for protection against polar bears proved beyond our budget. Hiking boots and other miscellaneous gear were all old stuff that I had worn for years. Brent, having no money of his own, was outfitted entirely from my own closet: he was wearing my shirt, cargo pants, jacket, hat, bandanna, boots, and belt knife the day we left. Wes, meanwhile, lent Brent his backpack, sleeping bag, and a waterproof liner. By
2011 standards, our expedition was woefully under-equipped, but it was still the best outfitted expedition I had ever mounted—and besides, I reasoned, we were better provisioned than any of our historic predecessors. I took heart in those explorers who had done the seemingly impossible with what limited geographical society funding they had possessed. I resolved that, like Fawcett, we would find a way to get through all difficulties—be they pinched nerves, tick bites, malaria pills, a broken-down car, inadequate gear, raging forest fires—or anything else fate might have in store for us.