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I believe most Canadians know little about the founding of Canada beyond the two superstars in Canadian history: the Mohawk leader Joseph Brant, whose real name was Thayendanegea, and the British General Isaac Brock. Canada after Confederation (1870) What is Canada? Canada is hockey. Canada is baseball. Canada is basketball. Canada is sport fishing along rivers or on one of the thousand of lakes. Canada is the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic Oceans. Canada is the great open plains of the West and big sky country. Canada is the majestic peaks, glaciers, mountain streams and thick forests of the Rockies. Canada is long backroads heading off into the horizon past farms, villages, forests, and lakes. Canada is a beaver dam, a moose wandering amongst trees in the boreal forest, or a muskellunge (Musky) landed in a rowboat on a Muskoka Lake. OK, so now that we have flipped through the pictures on the wall calendar, Canada is much more than this. ...

Sir Martin Frobisher (from 1620) My goal has been to give an overview of the life of Sir Martin Frobisher as it relates to the founding of Canada. To achieve that I had to be selective. Frobisher’s voyages introduced the world to the Inuit who lived and thrived in one of the most inhospitable climates on eart. English prejudices about native populations in the New World affected how Frobisher and his men related to the Inuit. Yet, at the same time they learned to respect and even admire them. ...

Frobisher leads a successful assault on El Leon, a key Spanish fort in Brittany, with the help of French troops among whom was a young Samuel de Champlain. Northen coast of Brittany Sometimes, as the saying goes, facts are more fascinating than fiction. In this, the last chapter of Sir Martin Frobisher, historians could not write a better ending for the great Privateer’s life. Frobisher exited history on the same peninsula that Samuel de Champlain entered history.1 ...

“The singular achievement of this new expedition was not so much that it met most of its objectives, but that it did so in the face of many strong reasons to abandon the voyage entirely. If this untypical commitment and cohesion was an occasion for praise, a great part was due to Frobisher himself.” Locations of Frobisher's Final Voyage Frobisher prepares for his final voyage to the Arctic When Martin Frobisher returned from his second voyage in 1576 with 200 tons of mined ore, he was at the zenith of his reputation1. Up and down England he was hailed as a hero and great explorer in the same class that Sir Francis Drake or Sir Walter Raleigh would be. But unlike these explorers, Frobisher’s peak veneration would not last. His financially disastrous third voyage in 1578 would lead to the ruin of the “Company of Cathay” investors. It would also result in a debacle of failed attempts at extracting gold from the 800 or so tons of ore extracted from the Arctic. ...

Michael Lok believed a dubious opinion that the black rock from the Arctic contained gold. A second voyage was sent to Little Hall’s Island to mine 200 tonnes of the rock. Sample of the rock that cost many lives and fortunes lost While on an island during Frobisher’s first voyage to the Arctic in 1576, one of his mariners picked up an unusual black rock that had within it something that glittered. ...

Martin Frobisher unexpectedly met the Indigenous peoples who inhabited the Arctic. We need to understand who they were before continuing our story. 1578 watercolor by John White depicting three Inuits abducted by Frobisher during his 1578 voyage to Baffin Island. The Inuit peoples Before we continue the story of Frobisher’s voyages to the Arcti, some context about the peoples Martin Frobisher and his crews encountered would be helpful. ...

John Ware, Canada’s Legendary Cowboy (1845-1905) This Article is dedicated to Nettie Ware (1893-1989) “a man of unquestioned honesty and agreeable nature…[who] boasted the rare distinction of never having been thrown from a horse. At roughriding and roping he was an expert’’ (Turner, 1950, pg. 461). Sometimes in life you are at the right place and the right time to met the most amazing people. No, I’m not talking about the day I met a former Canadian Prime Minister, which was rather underwhelming. I’m talking about the time I met Miss Janet “Nettie: Ware. ...

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, Nobel prize winning Alice Munroe, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Mordecai Richler, Yann Martel, Leonard Cohen, Northrop Frye and Malcolm Gladwell, to name a few. So, what is it about Canada that produces good writers? Could it be something about Canada’s long winters? Yet, lots of Canadians spend cold winter days - and nights - doing anything but writing. They are outdoors enjoying the frigid weather or skating on an ice rink shooting hockey pucks into frozen nets. They aren’t curled up in an armchair or sitting at a desk writing the next great novel. So we can’t entirely blame the weather. ...

I wrote a little poem called The Canon during my university days. A Canon typically defines the acceptable, standard set of literature for a specific genre. English Literature in academia has an accepted list of stories, poems and plays which an English Lit student must read to understand Western culture and civilization. As required by my professors, I used my dog-eared Norton Anthology of English Literature to analyze Shakespeare, Milton, Woodsworth, Shelly, Faulkner, and a hundred other famous writers in the Anglo-Saxon world. ...

This site provides background information to the articles published on my Substack Beyond Brant and Brock. It also includes other material that may be of interest to some of my substack readers. First, Read my Substack: Get informed about the origins of Canada: head over to glennjlea.substack.com. My Substack provides well-researched articles that document in a chronological order how Europeans “discovered” the New World in the 15th Century through to the founding of Canada in the 19th Century. ...