Adventurers & Explorers

In Adventurous Dreams, Adventurous Lives, 120 outstanding individuals representing a who''s who of international exploration recall the indelible moment in their youth when the dream that launched their remarkable lives was born. As they recount the turning points to fulfilling those dreams - often overcoming enormous physical, emotional or other o …

Alex Ransby is a bad boy, better suited for Armani and Jaguar than epoxy and glue. As his life lay in tatters, an arthritis-stricken Ransby made the decision to build a boat and sail around the world. But his hopes and dreams slowly eroded until all that was left of the original plan was the Atlantic and the homemade boat he called HipJoint.

HipJo …

Widely recognized as a classic of northern-exploration literature, A Journey to the Northern Ocean is Samuel Hearne's story of his three-year trek to seek a trade route across the Barrens in the Northwest Territories. Hearne was a superb reporter, from his anguished description of the massacre of helpless Eskimos by his Indian companions to his met …

In the spring of 1953, Farley Mowat returned to Europe to retrace his wartime footsteps and search for peace. He returned to England and France: countries that less than a decade previously had been made weary under the weight of war. He wanted to see what the land--and its peoples--were like when the world as not a charnel house of mud, rain, met …

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 w …

Born in Labrador, one of 19 children of a Scottish Hudson's Bay Company cooper, Lyall grew up in a north dominated by white traders. After adventures that took him around the Arctic and down the Labrador coast, Ernie settled in Fort Ross in the Arctic Islands. He married an Inuit woman, Nipisha, and immediately became part of her extended family. E …

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 coastl …