Browse "Exploration"

Throughout the history of exploration, what one group saw as new territory was often long-established homeland for another. Canada’s Arctic was no exception.

Breadalbane is a ghost ship, a three-masted barque lying beneath the ice of the Northwest Passage. It is the world's northernmost known shipwreck and the best-preserved wooden ship yet found in the ocean.

Des Sauvages, ou, Voyage de Samuel Champlain (1603) records Champlain's first voyage to Canada as François Gravé du Pont's guest aboard La Bonne Renommée searching for the Northwest Passage.

Discovery, famous ship belonging to the East India Company, which first sailed into the Arctic under the command of George Weymouth in 1602. The same ship was used by Henry HUDSON to explore Hudson Bay in 1610. Hudson was cut

Exploration of Canada by Europeans began with the Norse in the late 10th century on the country’s East Coast. Following Jacques Cartier’s arrival in 1534, over the course of the next three centuries British and French explorers gradually moved further west. Commercial, resource-based interests often drove exploration; for example, a westward route to Asia and later, the fur trade. By the mid-19th century most of the main geographical features of Canada had been mapped by European colonists. (See also Arctic Exploration.)

The disappearance in 1845 of Sir John Franklin and his crew in the Canadian Arctic set off the greatest rescue operation in the history of exploration. More than 30 expeditions over two decades would search by land and sea for clues as to his fate, in the process charting vast areas of the Canadian Arctic and mapping the complete route of the Northwest Passage. The search for clues continued into the 20th and 21st centuries. On 9 September 2014, it was announced that one of the expedition ships, later identified as the HMS Erebus, had been found off King William Island. On 12 September 2016, a team from the Arctic Research Foundation announced that they had located the Terror in Nunavut's Terror Bay, north of where the Erebus was found.

The fur trade began in the 1600s in what is now Canada. It continued for more than 250 years. Europeans traded with Indigenous people for beaver pelts. The demand for felt hats in Europe drove this business. The fur trade was one of the main reasons that Europeans explored and colonized Canada. It built relationships between Europeans and Indigenous peoples. (This article is a plain-language summary of the fur trade. If you are interested in reading about this topic in more depth, please see our full-length entry, Fur Trade in Canada.)

Histoire du Canada depuis sa découverte jusqu'à nos jours, a Canadian classic by François-Xavier GARNEAU, appeared in 4 volumes from 1845-52, tracing French Canada's development from Champlain's voyages of discovery to 1840.

The Karluk was trapped by ice in the Beaufort Sea 300 km short of the planned base, HERSCHEL ISLAND. While Stefansson was away hunting seals, the weather changed and the ship was carried westward towards Siberia for 4 months until crushed by ice.

The Land God Gave to Cain, was Jacques CARTIER's description of the north shore of the Gulf of St Lawrence, which he first sighted in 1534. Cartier was presumably alluding to Genesis 4, in which Cain, having killed his brother, is condemned to till land that is barren.

Mémoires de l'Amérique septentrionale, a learned and entertaining natural history of Canada, was the journal kept by Louis-Armand de Lom d'Arce, baron de LAHONTAN, during his travels in New France, 1683-93.

Mer de l'Ouest ("Western Sea"), originally the goal of exploration during the French regime, was the stuff of wishful thinking obligingly corroborated by Indians. Initially thought to be an inland sea somewhere west of the Great Lakes, it gradually blended in imagination with the Pacific.

A small horde of second- and third-graders swarms down onto the blood-red deck like so many giggling pirates. But the "blood" on the deck is really red-oxide paint. And the children - from Parkcrest Elementary School in Burnaby, B.C.This article was originally published in Maclean's Magazine on May 11, 1998

Red River Expedition, the military force sent to Manitoba after the transfer of the Hudson's Bay Co territory to Canada in 1870.

South Sea Company, chartered in 1711 by the British Parliament, with a monopoly over the W coast of the Americas to a distance of 300 leagues out to sea. In 1720 it assumed a large part of the British national debt and almost collapsed that year in a stock market crash known as the South Sea Bubble.