Explore: A Canadian Geographic podcast

Commander Chris Hadfield is arguably Canada's most famous astronaut. There's even been times when he's been our most famous Canadian, like when he produced a viral video singing David Bowie's "Space Oddity" on the International Space Station, seen by hundreds of millions of people. A veteran of multiple missions to space with the Canadian Space Agency, NASA and the Russian Space Program, he was the first Canadian to do a space walk, was commander of the International Space Station and he spent five years as the NASA representative to the Russian Space Program based in Moscow, becoming a fluent Russian speaker in the process. It's fair to say that Chris Hadfield knows a thing or two about space, and when it came time for him to write his first ever novel, he turned to the cosmos and the heyday of the space race, during the Apollo Missions to the moon in the 1960's and '70's. “The Apollo Murders,” is a classic cold war-era spy thriller, it comes out in October 2021. In this fascinating conversation we discuss the moments in his own career that inspired a novel that now has leading Hollywood figures like James Cameron and Ryan Reynolds exploring turning it into a film.

“Colombia is a place where magic seems to happen every moment and I would argue that only a people like the Colombians, with their enduring spirit of place, their indescribable capacity for joy, could have endured the agonies of the last fifty years.” Author and RCGS Honorary Vice President, Wade Davis says his latest book -- Magdelena - a River of Dreams -- is a love letter of sorts. Colombia, he says, is "a nation that allowed me to dream, that gave me my wings to fly." His love affair with this troubled nation began as a fourteen year-old in the late sixties, when he went on an exchange from suburban Montreal. He has been returning ever since, as a writer, botanist, traveller, scholar of indigenous religions, captivated by the unbelievable range of history, cultures, environments, climates, and people that exist in this diverse South American nation.

In this final episode of Explore’s journey into the history of the Hudson’s Bay Company as it turns 350 years old, we take one last trip into the HBC vaults at the Manitoba Museum with curator Amelia Fay. As a way of illustrating the importance of company fur traders to the 100-year-old HBC collection, Amelia pulls out three items donated by Julian Camsell, HBC Chief Factor for the MacKenzie District in Canada’s Arctic and father of Charles Camsell, founding President of The Royal Canadian Geographical Society.

On this episode of Explore, we take another fascinating dive into the Hudson’s Bay Company Collection at the Manitoba Museum. It contains over 27,000 items, far too many for us to pour through on our podcast, so we asked curator Amelia Fay to take us down into the vaults and talk about some of her favourite items, as well as items that speak to the long 350-year history of the HBC and its impact on Canada.

"CHARLES THE SECOND, by the Grace of God, King of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, &c. To ALL to whom these Presents shall come, greeting." With that opening line, a Royal Charter granted all of the land in the watershed of the Hudson's Bay, a massive area of present day Canada and the northern United States, to the Hudson's Bay Company, or as it was known then, "The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England, trading into Hudson's Bay." As an historic document, "it is both incredible and problematic," says Amelia Fay, Curator of the HBC Collection at the Manitoba Museum. Incredible because of the impact it had as one of the primary drivers in the creation of what is now Canada. Problematic because in doing so it gave away lands of the Indigenous people who had lived on them for millennia, without their consent. Fay takes us through the importance of the Royal Charter, written on animal skin 350 years ago, on May 2, 1670, in this first of three episodes inside the HBC Collection at the Manitoba Museum and Archives.

What was it like to live in a remote Hudson’s Bay trading post in the 1880s in Canada’s north? In this bonus episode of the Explore series marking the 350th anniversary of the Hudson’s Bay Company, we hear a rare, first-person audio account of life at Fort Simpson in the Northwest Territories. The storyteller is Charles Camsell, founding president of The Royal Canadian Geographical Society, talking about his childhood as the son of an HBC fur trader, in an old Canadian radio recording taped in 1938.

“I would say the Métis all track back to the fur trade and they probably all have some connections in the Hudson’s Bay Company,” says Jean Teillet. Teillet is Canada’s leading Indigenous rights lawyer and author of the best-selling book, “The Northwest is Our Mother, The Story of Louis Riel’s People, the Métis Nation.” That Métis Nation, one of three recognized Indigenous peoples in Canada, traces its ancestry to both First Nations and Europeans. The great-grand-niece of Louis Riel, the most famous Métis leader, Teillet says it's almost impossible to separate the Métis from the fur trade.

Sir George Simpson spent much of his early days as HBC Governor in a canoe, paddling to trading posts and forts, carrying out record breaking canoe journeys across North America. It was all part of what James Raffan describes as Simpson’s “management by canoe.”

Hudson's Bay Company employees didn't venture much out of their forts and fur trading posts along the coasts of the Hudson's and James Bay in the early days after the HBC fur trading empire was founded in 1670. Adam Shoalts, RCGS Explorer in Residence, who has traveled extensively by canoe and on foot in the that region, says that isn’t surprising. "In their defense they'd probably say, ‘We just crossed 3,000 miles of open ocean and then we sailed across iceberg laden Hudson’s Bay, so we’ve done enough adventuring,’ Shoalts says, adding that, “if you’re in polar bear country and an unfamiliar environment, why would you want to venture out there?” Shoalts points out that there some very notable exceptions to this, including explorers Henry Kelsey, Samuel Hearne and the great Dene leader Matonabbee, who all took epic and ground-breaking journeys for the HBC in the 17th and 18th centuries.

The Hudson’s Bay Company turns 350 years old on May 2 and Explore: A Canadian Geographic podcast is marking this moment by taking a four-part journey to look into the outsize impact this former fur trading empire turned retail giant had in shaping the Canadian nation. If any one community can claim to be the birthplace of the Hudson’s Bay Company, it’s the James Bay Cree Nation of Waskaganish. In 1668, British merchants set up a trading post there, on the shores of the Rupert River, in what is now northern Quebec. “Then in 1669, they went back to England with all the fur they had traded for,” says Charles Hester, Culture Director for the Cree Nation of Waskaganish, “and people were so impressed with the quality ... they made a good amount of money and decided to set up a company, And that’s how the Hudson’s Bay Company was born.”

Astronaut David Saint-Jacques knows a thing or two about isolation. A year ago, before the world was in pandemic lockdown, Saint-Jacques was mid-way through a 204-day mission on the International Space Station, in orbit around the earth with two other colleagues, American astronaut Anne McClain and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko. Saint-Jacques says he enjoyed the experience, and even found it monastic and Zen-like. “We did a lot experiments, a lot of maintenance tasks. But every day was like you are just trying to do the same thing a bit better,” he said. “Every day you wake up, here is your schedule, talk to the ground, talk to the scientists, talk to the engineers, the controllers, gather equipment, do an experiment, repair something that is broken, exercise, talk to your family, look at the earth, rinse and repeat, for months and months. And you get very good at it. It’s very gratifying, that experience.”

Take a listen to some of the most surprising, thrilling, inspiring and thought-provoking moments from the first season of Explore. Featuring bestselling author Adam Shoalts, Canadian astronaut Dr. Roberta Bondar and more of Canada’s greatest living explorers.

For many Canadians, Charlotte Gray hardly needs an introduction. She is one of this country’s most loved authors and historians. For a quarter century she has delighted her readers with non-fiction histories that delve into often unexamined corners of Canadian history, revealing characters, places and moments in time that help explain this country. Her works have covered such diverse subjects as 19th century pioneers Susannah Moodie and Catherine Parr Traill, First Nations poet Pauline Johnson, and the mother of William Lyon MacKenzie King, and have won more awards than we can list here. She is a member of the Order of Canada and a Fellow of The Royal Canadian Geographical Society. She’s also an explorer who believes in travelling to the places that were important to her subjects in order to better understand them. “You can’t ever write true biography or history without experiencing the landscape and seeing how it must have shaped people’s behaviour,” she says.

Science writer Alanna Mitchell has arguably done more than any single person to ring warning bells internationally about the deteriorating state of our oceans due to climate change. In 2009, Sea Sick was released as a bestselling book which won the prestigious Grantham Award. It then morphed into a popular TED Talk, and is now a one-woman play which she is performing around the world, including this August at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. “This is not my father’s science,” says Mitchell. “In my father’s day a scientist would spend an entire career trying to figure out the life cycle of a single creature — how many babies it had, what it ate, how it spent the winter. It was all leisurely. Today they are racing to try and figure out how one species, humans, are radically altering nature‘s plan.” A native of Regina, Mitchell has been one of Canada’s leading science journalists and authors for decades, getting her start at the Financial Post and then the Globe and Mail. She has written about everything from cancer to climate change, evolution to Arctic exploration. Her most recent book, The Spinning Magnet, explains Earth’s electromagnetic field and how a reversal of the planet’s magnetic poles might impact our modern infrastructure.

James Raffan has a long and impressive resume, but if you were to boil it down to a couple of words, you might describe him as a canoe evangelist. Using the canoe as his portal, the Guelph, Ontario native has studied this nation, and especially the far north and it's people as a journalist and professor at Queen’s University. His documentaries have aired on the CBC, the National Geographic and the Discovery channels. His best selling books have included Fire in the Bones, the biography of Canadian canoeing icon Bill Mason, and Emperor of the North, about Sir George Simpson, the legendary 19th century Hudson’s Bay Company governor, as well chronicling his own adventures, such as circumnavigating the globe by following the Arctic Circle.

When stormchaser and extreme adventurer George Kourounis talks about his scrapes with Mother Nature, his excitement is almost palpable. The host of award winning television series like Angry Planet and Stormhunters, Kourounis has built a career out of running toward the things most people run away from, all in the name of science and public education. On any given day, you’re likely to find Kourounis in the crater of an active volcano, snapping photos of a tornado, or hiking in North Korea. In this episode of Explore, Kourounis and host David McGuffin discuss Kourounis’ adventures.

At 45 years of age, there seems to be very little that Johnny Issaluk hasn’t done or at least tried. He’s scaled Arctic mountains, scuba dived in the Northwest Passage, and travelled the world promoting Inuit culture. The Iqaluit resident is one of the most medaled athletes in the history of the Inuit Games, and was featured at the Vancouver Winter Olympics in the short film Inuit High Kick. Then came a starring role in the Arctic horror film Kajutaijuq, an official entry at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2015. Since then, his acting roles have only grown in prominence. He made his stage debut in the world premiere of a new play, The Breathing Hole, at the Stratford Festival in 2017, then appeared in the award winning film Indian Horse, produced by Clint Eastwood. Last year, he appeared in the critically acclaimed television series The Terror, which told the story of the ill-fated Franklin Expedition. To top it all off, on Monday Issaluk was made the newest Explorer-in-Residence of The Royal Geographical Society. In spite of his success and his busy travel schedule, Issaluk remains deeply grounded and connected to his culture and traditions.

Adam Shoalts is a young man in his 30s, but in many ways he’s a throwback to a much earlier era of exploration. His one-man adventures across the Canadian Arctic and the Hudson Bay lowlands call to mind the great early Canadian explorers Alexander Mackenzie and David Thompson. His love of challenging himself against the harsh conditions of the Canadian wilderness has earned him the nickname “Canada’s Indiana Jones.” Adam is a Royal Canadian Geographical Society Explorer-in-Residence. He’s written extensively about his own adventures, including the bestseller Alone Against the North and his upcoming book, Beyond the Trees, about his recent 4,000-kilometre journey across the Canadian Arctic.

Dr. Roberta Bondar remembers the moment she became the first Canadian female astronaut to go to space on board the space shuttle Discovery in 1992. “It certainly wasn’t a very comfortable ride,” she recalls. “Nobody told me that the last 45 seconds [during take-off] you can’t breathe. I just said to myself, this is so far away from Star Trek and Flash Gordon. This is like the most rudimentary tin can possible. It’s like being inside a roman candle.” Upon entering Earth’s orbit, Bondar also became the very first neurologist in space. Her studies on the impact of space travel on the human body have made her one of the world’s leading experts in that field. As speculation ramps up about how soon humans could visit Mars, Bondar says the obstacles to sending astronauts on such a long space journey aren’t insurmountable, but adds that she thinks that we should first focus on building a moon base.

One Ocean Expeditions presents Explore: A Canadian Geographic Podcast. Jill Heinerth is the world’s leading underwater cave diver, and her quest to understand what lies beneath the surface of our planet has taken her to some incredible places. “I have cave-dived beneath golf courses, bowling alleys, homes,” she says. “My favorite was under the salad bar of a Sunny’s BBQ restaurant while a surface tracking team was walking between the tables yelling, ‘cave survey, coming through,’ and planting an orange flag in a salad bar potato salad.” Heinerth’s dives have also taken her into lava tubes in underwater volcanoes, oases in the Sahara desert and flooded mine shafts. She has set records for the longest and deepest recorded cave dives, including for the longest dive inside an Antarctic iceberg. In 2016, she became the inaugural Explorer-in-Residence of The Royal Canadian Geographical Society, and she continues to push her own boundaries in pursuit of the thrill of discovery.

One Ocean Expeditions presents Explore: A Canadian Geographic Podcast. Ray Zahab has run across some of the world’s hottest deserts, including the Sahara, Gobi, Namib and Atacama. He led a Guinness World Record-breaking trek on foot to the South Pole, as well as expeditions across some of the harshest terrains in the world, including many in the Canadian Arctic. In this episode, host David McGuffin interviews Zahab about his adventures, including where he’s headed next.