Martin Frobisher led his small fleet in search of the “Straight of Anian” only to experience a close encounter with the Inuit people of Frobisher Bay. The coast of Baffin Island. (Source: Wikipedia) Why search for the Northwest passage? Securing funding for Frobisher’s voyage to search for a north-west passage to the Pacific Ocean was proving to be very difficult. As no concrete evidence was available that this route existed, speculators needed good reasons to back a venture that could potentially ruin them. ...

Martin Frobisher is credited with the first expedition into the Arctic in search of the Northwest Passage. But the idea for the journey didn’t come out of nowhere. Portrait of Martin Frobisher painted two decades after his death. Source: Wikipedia. North America witnessed its first Thanksgiving feast in 1621, or so the myth goes. “Pilgrims” who were in fact religious dissidents (not Anglican) landed in what would become Plymouth, Massachusetts, but being non-explorers, their food ran out. Their new theocratic settlement in the vein of “The Handmade’s Tale” were saved by the Wampanoag peoples who took pity on these rattled foreigners. ...

I’ve been told that Canadians are excellent writers. If there ever was an overstatement this certainly is one of them. Yet Canada has produced some world renowned authors. Think Margaret Atwood (“The Handmaid’s Tale”), Nobel prize winning Alice Munroe (“Lives of Girls and Women), Lucy Maud Montgomery (“Anne of Green Gables”), Mordecai Richler (“Barney’s Version”), Yann Martel ()“Life of Pi”), Leonard Cohen, Northrop Frye (“Fearful Symmetry”) and Malcolm Gladwell (“Outliers”, “Tipping Point”) to name a few. ...