Images of Canada [antikvár]

Introduction Even the North Pole is a tourist attraction these days. It wasn't so very long ago that Canada was seen by Europeans as little more than a vast snowbound, scarcely habitable terra incognita blocking their way to the riches of China and India. Sir Martin Frobisher, lohn Davis, Henry Hudson, William Baffin and Sir John Franklin were only a few of the navigators who tried to sail around Canada, searching for a way to the Orient through the ice-clogged Arctic islands. Hudson's expedition claimed his life in 1611. Franklin and his crew disappeared in 1847. Actual navigation of the Northwest Passage was not achieved until Roald Amundsen's voyage of 1903-1906, and by then the air age had begun. Today, if you have $7,000 and ten days to spare, you can fly from Edmonton to the North Pole. It's a three-stage journey over territory that many of those early explorers starved or froze to death without ever seeing. First you fly to Resolute Bay on Cornwallis Island, then to Lake Hazen on Ellesmere Island (about as far north as you can go and still be in Canada) and from there, via skiplane, to the Pole, where you stand around being exhilarated by the wonder of it all while sipping champagne and munching cavier on toast. On the return flight, weather permitting, the plane touches down at the North Magnetic Pole and you are served a beer and a sausage roll. Back in Resolute Bay, according to the tour operator's brochure, you can "take a snowmobile trip on the historic Northwest Passage____Then, prior to boarding PWA's Flight 582 to Edmonton, enjoy a farewell drink at Canada's most northerly bar, the Resolute Airport Arctic Club." That's Canada. In the last 350-odd years the land has provided to be rich, eminently habitable and not quite so snowbound as the first European visitors thought. Today, at work and at play, Canadians easily traverse their country in all manner of aircraft, boat and vehicle, including one-seater microlight planes, rubber rafts, dune buggies and giant earth-moving machines that are custom-built for the herculean jobs they do. Much of the final exploration of the country is being accomplished by satellite and airplane. Despite the fact that there is now virtually nowhere in Canada that we can't go to and live year-round if we have the mind to, few Canadians feel that the land has been conquered or even tamed. The Canadian landscape is too big, too diverse, too downright potent for its small population to have yet done much more than come to terms with it, and perhaps only temporarily at that. For not all of Canada is 350-odd years old. Vancouver, the country's third largest city, was not incorporated until 1886. The town of Faro, in the Yukon, was built in 1969, and new towns and cities are still being dreamed of and planned. In other words, Canada is still a long way from being a settled country in the sense that, say, France is. Canada covers an area of 3,851,787 square miles. At its broadest, the country is more than 3,000 miles wide; and the Trans-Canada Highway, the main east-west route, which connects the cities and towns of southern Canada where most of the nation's 24 million people live, is 4,900 miles long. From the northern tip of Ellesmere Island to the southernmost place in Canada—Pelee Island, located in Lake Erie—the distance is about 2,800 miles. Almost 10 percent of Canada's area is made up of lakes and rivers. The hydroelectric potential of these waters has only begun to be tapped, and there are dreamers and schemers who spend a lot of their time thinking about how they might divert Canada's fresh water reserves to thirsty regions of the United States and Mexico. But perhaps the greatest significance of Canada's lakes and rivers is their continuing importance as natural passageways through a vast, often difficult and sometimes impassable landscape. For instance, the St. Lawrence-Great Lakes system (a 2,500-mile route from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to Thunder Bay on the western shore of Lake Superior) has been the primary avenue to the interior of Canada from the very beginning of European exploration. Today the waterway, with the roads and railways that have been built beside it, is more important than ever as a carrier of raw materials and finished goods, and the country's two largest cities, Toronto and Montreal,