Maps trace adventures modern and historic
Maps! You have to love them. I have a huge box under my desk, filled with maps: road ones, much-marked up topographic maps, nautical charts, Bruce and Grey road maps, and a few handdrawn guides to pieces of the Ontario wilderness.
These days I don’t often add to or subtract from that box. But now, I run my hands through the lot, thinking of the book that just came in for review, one that states, “But as more and more of Canada has become mapped – and mapped in ever greater detail – we’ve gradually lost a sense of mystery about what might lie beyond the seas, over the mountains, around the next river bend.”
The book was A History of Canada in Ten Maps: Epic Stories of Charting a Mysterious Land (Allen Lane, $36); the author, Adam Shoalts. If the name rings a bell locally it may be because Shoalts gave a talk in Owen Sound sometime this spring. He has been called “One of Canada’s greatest living explorers” for his recent 4,000 kilometre solo journey described in his Alone Against the Land.
In addition to being one heck of a paddler, Shoalts is also a historian, archaeologist and geographer. The 10 maps in his book span 1,000 years and tell stories of adventure, discovery and exploration, of conquest, empire, power and violence.
And he writes very well. Listen! “Some 9,984,670 square kilometres in all, an immense area nearly larger than the whole of Europe combined, with borders on three of the world’s five oceans and more coastline than any other country. Accurately mapping such a vast part of the globe took centuries, the final 1:50,000 scale topographic map of the last bit of Canada’s Arctic was completed only in 2012.”
There are few surprises in Shoalts’s choice of maps that cover 1,000 years of history. Champlain is there. Peter Pond, Samuel Hearne, Alexander Mackenzie, and David Thompson are too. Throw in the Skalholt Map (think Viking), the siege of Fort Erie, and mapping the Arctic frontier and you have a day’s reading that combines storytelling with cartography to add up to one fine book perfectly written for the armchair adventurer.
I ran into a name that rang a bell. Shoalts writes, “Under the Hudson’s Bay Company’s leading surveyor, Philip Turnor, he (David Thompson) studied astronomy, surveying and mathematics.” Did I not just get a biography of Turnor to review? And there it was, on my to-read pile of books: Barbara Mitchell’s Mapmaker: Philip Turnor in Rupert’s Land in the Age of Enlightenment (University of Regina Press, $39.95).
Mitchell, who lives in Otonabee, Ontario, is the great, great, great, great granddaughter of Turnor’s “country wife,” a Cree woman whose name is still unknown. She offers a two-part biography of one of Canada’s leading explorers and mapmakers. Interspersed with his life are Mitchell’s adventures in tracking Turnor down. I read it with fascination, coming on the heels of Adam Shoalts’ book on mapmakers.
My fascination with Turnor was doubled up with my memories of a trip down the Missinaibi River to Moose Factory made some years ago with a pair of paddling friends. We passed both Brunswick House and Thunderhouse Falls before reaching Moose Factory where Turnor was once the factor. In search of birds, we booked a trip out to Ship Sands Island, a large body of low land out in James Bay. We took a freighter canoe and the man behind the tiller was John Turner who I know now was a distant relative of Philip Turnor.
I have known Richard Thomas for what, 30 years maybe? A broadcaster with camera on his shoulder, he went on to become Owen Sound’s media man and an effective city counselor. Most of all he is a writer whose love for local lore is as incredible as is his love for the process of creating.
“I got 55,000 words done,” Richard exclaimed to me on a recent trip to the Ginger Press. He was referring too a new D. B. Murphy mystery that he had underway. After talking about the book’s plot, he offered to loan me his copy of the 2014 book called The Wreck of the Griffon: The Greatest Mystery of the Great Lakes (Seawolf Communications, $21.95). The authors are a husband and wife team, Chris Kohl and Joan Forsberg. Kohl’s name is best know for his many books on Great Lakes shipwrecks including directions, conditions, and depth.
In the year 1679, the explorer La Salle had a ship built at Niagara Falls. Dragged into Lake Erie, the Griffon became the first ship to sail on the upper Great Lakes. Filled with furs loaded on at Green Bay, the Griffon vanished in a storm to become truly “a ghost ship.” Now, more than 350 odd years later, the remains of that ship have never been found -- or have they?
“Dead men tell no tales,” the authors write. The fate of the barque Griffon has remained a puzzle for centuries. And then they list two-dozen locations that have been thought, over the years, to be the lost site of the wreck’s remains.
When I first found the Bruce Peninsula in 1966, I used to visit Orrie Vail in his museum/shack in Tobermory. There, I viewed bones and boards from what he labeled the Griffon, found in a Russel Island cove. This is only one of the many places to claim the ship.
Kohl and Forsberg give it full measure but still seem to come down in favour of some old remains (including six burials) found at the end of Manitoulin Island. Known as the Mississagi Strait Wreck, it is a close to the top of actual places that pieces of the old ship might be.
Richard Thomas’s new book is entitled The Trail of the Griffon. It will be published sometime this fall by the Ginger Press (or as soon as Thomas finishes the novel.) He has his own take on the mystery but has been telling me of Owen Sound’s H. G. Tucker, a lawyer who died in 1928 but not before becoming one more victim of the Griffon mystery.
Until The Trail of the Griffon is published, may I in my fascination with the La Salle’s ship, recommend Chris Kohl and Joan Forsberg ’s The Wreck of the Griffon. The library probably has a copy. Search it out and then join Richard in December for the annual Ginger Press authors’ gathering.