Reddit mentions: The best canadian exploration history books

Just to make it easier to find - it's spelled "Pierre Berton", not "Burton". Also, "Hostages to Fortune" was written by Peter C. Newman, not Pierre Berton (more about Newman below).

Here's Berton's list of books.

Some great foundational stuff about Canada is as /u/MonotheistThrowaway describes, in the 1812 things. There's also other stuff by him that's excellent:

"The National Dream" and "The Last Spike", about the construction of the railroad across Canada.

"The Great Depression", which of course is about the Great Depression.

"Vimy", which is about the Canadians at Vimy Ridge in 1917. It's not especially "scholarly", but it's incredibly accessible and a riveting read.

"The Arctic Grail", which is about the many attempts to find the North-West Passage. See also the Stan Rogers song about this. It's a pretty key piece of Canadian history.

There is lots and lots more in his bibliography. If you go out of your mind and decide to read all of his work, you'll probably know more about Canadian history and identity that 95% of those born here.

Peter Newman wrote similarly great Canadian history. He did a three-volume piece about the Hudson Bay Company, in the books Company of Adventurers, Caesars of the Wilderness and Merchant Princes. There's a sort of a "condensed" version called "Empire of the Bay" that might be a quicker read.

If you ever get bored of reading but you still want to learn Canada's history, check out "Canada: A People's History", an incredible series done by CBC back in 2001. That's a link to a playlist with all episodes. I can't possibly recommend it enough.

Edit to add: Welcome to Canada, friend!

Try Krakauer's other well known book Into Thin Air, and because there's some controversy regarding his version of events, also The Climb by Anatoli Boukreev who was a major player that day.

Krakauer's other book Under the Banner of Heaven is a good "true crime" style story about some Morman murders, but may not be enough like Into the Wild to appeal to you.

Over the Edge of the World is more of a history, covering Magellan's circumnavigation of the earth. It was facinating and definately had intrigue, machinations, and survival elements.

Another book on exploration and survival, Endurance: Shakleton's Incredible Voyage

And another one, Fatal Journey: The Final Expedition of Henry Hudson. I think this is the one I read, but I can't be certain. It doesn't seem to be as well regarded, but i thought it was still interesting.

A book on diving and survival: The Last Dive, Chowdhury

The Hot Zone could be thought of as science survival. Anyway, you'll probably love the opening bits in Africa, although it does slow way down after that.

Far away from survival, but still about travel are the wonderful Bill Bryson's travelogues. Witty and informative. In a Sunburned Country and A Walk in the Woods are particularly recommended.

>The most bilingual place in Canada and maybe one or the most in NA is the Montréal region.

I love Quebec, but there are millions more bilingual Spanish-English speakers in California than there are bilingual French-English people in Montreal.

There are more bilingual people in California than the entire population of Quebec, bilingual or otherwise.

>The United States has a strange relationship to language rights. Although the federal government has no official language, in recent decades individual states—California included—have adopted English as an official language, largely in response to a puzzling English-only movement. But, of course, English is not the only significant American language. One-third of California’s residents speak Spanish at home.

https://www.thenation.com/article/california-needs-take-bilingualism-seriously/

There are some interesting shared history between California and Quebec:

>Prudent Beaudry served as the 13th mayor of Los Angeles, California, from 1874 to 1876. A native of Quebec, he was the second French Canadian and third French American mayor of Los Angeles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prudent_Beaudry

>Today, Los Angeles is the undisputed megacity of California, but in 1852 L.A. had a population of only about five thousand people, way fewer than San Francisco’s 36,151. And at least some of L.A.’s growth into what it is today is credited to a former French Canadian mayor.
>
>Prudent Beaudry was mayor of Los Angeles from 1876-1878. I learned about him and his brothers from Gaétan Frigon’s chapter in Legacy: How French Canadians Shaped North America. The Beaudry bros were born outside Montreal. When Prudent Beaudry was 32, he decided to follow his brother Victor to San Francisco, where, Frigon writes, the two Canadian business men set up a business selling — and this is not a joke — syrup and ice.
>
>Two years later in 1852, Beaudry moved to the small town of Los Angeles which counted six hundred French speakers among its population of around five thousand. He began to build his fortune in real estate, buying up and developing “barren” land just north of downtown L.A., including what today are the neighbourhoods of Bunker Hill and Angelino Heights.
>
>“The subdivisions would be worthless, though,” explains Frigon, “unless water could be conveyed to them.” So next he needed to create the Los Angeles City Water Company, which pumped water to his new “upscale residential neighbourhoods.” To design the villas, he turned to “an engineer from the first graduating class of Montreal’s École Polytechnique.”
>
>Twenty four years after he first moved to L.A., in 1876, Beaudry was elected mayor. By at least one account, he was a pivotal one:

https://acresofsnow.ca/the-french-canadian-mayor-of-los-angeles/

I'm bored and I have an hour left until bedtime so I guess I'll research this a little bit...

G. S. McTavish seems to be correct. Mr. McTavish appears to have been mentioned in a court interview in 1882. From this document we know his first name was George and that he was involved in a rail company. I only skimmed the document because I don't have time to read it all, so there might be something I missed.

A search for George S. McTavish brings up this 1880 document, which shows that he was involved in some sort of railway work (again, not reading it all).

Thanks to that document I know he was from Winnipeg, so Googling his name with that appended brought this up (PDF link). This appears to be Mr. McTavish's son, who ran for political office and wrote a book.

Finally I found this, which says all we really need to know and will end my search for information on McTavish.

As for Dr. Grant, there's just not enough there to find anything. I can't find any record of a Grant that McTavish associated with. There's a chance he could be John Grant, or the James Alexander Grant someone in another comment mentioned, but that's pretty much a guess.

The terror's a good one. If you're interested in further reading about the actual history, (plenty terrifying and mysterious in and of itself) there's an excellent recently released book that covers the whole of it, anyway it's a fascinating read.

https://www.amazon.com/Finding-Franklin-Untold-165-Year-Search/dp/0773547843

I haven't read it yet, but I have heard good things:

Legacy: How French Canadians Shaped North America

This is such a huge component of our history. I always like to suggest this book as an understanding of our roots.

And in my opinion, this is the closest we would have to the New Yorker

http://www.amazon.com/The-Man-Who-Ate-Boots/dp/0307276562

Good read. You will find it... appetizing.

I think you mean The Franklin Cover-up. The Franklin Conspiracy is something else.

The wiki article on the expedition is a great place to start. There's also a number of new books (like this one) that are coming out about the expedition, since Terror was finally located in 2016.

Gore's note and its modifications by Crozier and Fitzjames is a powerful sight to behold. The linked page has the full text written out, since the handwriting is difficult to read in the image. It's one thing to watch the show or read the book, but it's entirely another to see with your eyes the actual paper that these men—who were both similar to and very different from the fictionalized versions we know—touched with their actual hands.

Imagining them squatting in the freezing cold next to that tall cairn, slowly scratching out a message as their ink froze and their hands shook, all out in the middle of that blasted desolation—it's just really, really haunting.

That could be the George Simpson McTavish mentioned here, who was involved with the Hudson Bay Company (and spent most of 40 years in some very isolated spots apparently). The Manitoba archives have some more info here. He retired in 1880 and could have been in the Quebec area. He even wrote an autobiography seen here.

THE FATAL PROBLEM

Those who have seen the show know that in the fateful conference aboard HMS Erebus in Episode 1, Sir John Franklin hosts a discussion by the officers of what course to adopt in view of the damage to HMS Erebus’s drive shaft and propeller, and the rapidly thickening of pack ice in front of them in (what we now know as) Victoria Strait. Captain Francis Crozier urges avoiding the pack ice and turning to the *east* of King William Land, which he suggests (correctly) is probably an island. But even if it is not, he argues, it would at worst let them winter out of the pack ice and retrace their steps. Sir John Franklin rejects the proposal and insists on trying to push through the pack ice. This is depicted as a fatal turning point for the expedition.

Of course, this is a *fictionalized* Francis Crozier and John Franklin we’re talking about – the Francis Crozier and John Franklin of AMC’s The Terror, and Dan Simmons’ novel of the same name (which includes a chapter on which the show's scene is fairly closely based). The sad reality is that we have no idea what was discussed or attempted by the expedition as it approached King William Island at the beginning of September 1846 – and we probably never will. We only know where they ended up, and when.

(In fact, there is some evidence, supplied by Inuit testimony, that Franklin’s ships may have tried to go east initially, only to run afoul of the shoals in Ross Strait. See Dave Woodman’s Unravelling the Franklin Mystery: Inuit Testimony, p. 78-82.)

What we do know, however, is that it almost certainly would not have saved them.

1. Seven years ago Russell Potter, author of Finding Franklin: The Untold Story of a 165-Year Search, pointed out on his outstanding blog on the Franklin Expedition (See here for original blog post link) how very difficult it would have been for two relatively deep draft (4.47 meters) warships to navigate the utterly uncharted straits to the east and south of King William Island. Relying on the work of The Northwest Passage: Arctic Straits, by Donat Pharand and Leonard H. Legault and consulting Royal Navy expert Capt. Patrick R.M. Toomey, Potter concludes that three key straits – Ross Strait, Rae Strait, and Simpson Strait (see red circles on accompanying map) – would have been too shallow and too treacherous for Erebus and Terror to navigate without detailed charts and pilots, let alone sonar. As it was, even Roald Amundsen, who finally navigated the Northwest Passage in 1903-05 by taking precisely this route, had to remove a great deal of supplies from the deck of his light draft (10ft fully loaded) Gjoa to avoid running aground.
   
2. This in turn provoked a spirited response by Ken McGoogan, author of Fatal Passage: The Story of John Rae, the Arctic Hero Time Forgot, who insisted that there were passages (barely) deep enough for Franklin’s ships even at full load, and that Potter did not give Franklin and his officers enough credit for how they could have navigated them. Still, the weight of expert opinion lines up quite strongly with Potter, alas: the question is not so much whether these three straits around King William Island are theoretically navigable by 4.47 meter draft wooden sailing vessels, but whether they would have been at all practicable with absolutely zero charts and winter coming on.
   
3. Of course, this is not to say that that heading east would have had *no* advantage to the expedition - assuming they did not wreck the ships trying, of course. Even if stymied in the Ross or Rae Strait by shoals, they could at least have wintered out of the pack; and they would at least have been anchored off a part of King William with more plentiful game. This likely would have only delayed their eventual deaths, however, since they merely would have been trapped in a modestly less lethal and remote spot in the Arctic. If there’s a lesson here at all, rather, it is that the entire expedition was poorly conceived by the Admiralty, and that the expedition was almost certainly doomed the moment it entered Peel Sound in August of 1846 (and not because it provoked a powerful Inuit ice demon).
   
   The scene still has dramatic value for both the series and the book, of course: it heightens and clarifies the danger that the expedition faces right out of the gate, and underlines important facets about Franklin’s and Crozier’s characters, in ways that are not entirely unfounded based on what we know of both men and their interaction. But the course of action it puts in Francis Crozier’s mouth seems highly improbable to have saved the expedition from destruction, and indeed may well have been tried briefly.

No, no, no, no, no. Just like The Da Vinci Code ripped off Holy Blood, Holy Grail, Simmons stole from The Franklin Conspiracy.

THIS is the book you have to read.