The Happy Camper: Adam Shoalts’ Hunt for Canada’s Greatest Unknown Explorer
At first glance, Adam Shoalts’ new book Vanished Beyond The Map: The Mystery of Lost Explorer Hubert Darrell looks like another good yarn about some legendary explorer who mysteriously disappeared in remote northern Canada. It’s that… but a lot more!
This part detective story, part biography and part first-person adventure narrative, written by a bestselling Canadian writer and modern-day explorer, doesn’t just dwell on the disappearance of explorer Hubert Darrell back in 1910. It goes far beyond that. The book goes into great detail of how Darrell became legendary for travelling thousands of kilometres across the wilds of the Northwest Territories, alone and on foot. However, shortly after he vanished somewhere in the frozen wilderness, his name quickly vanished from the history books. At the same time, other notable northern explorers were praised for their ventures, and they retreated back to their fancy English mansions, never to set foot in the north again. The chance to go down in history slipped through Darrell’s fingers. Why?
Shoalts started researching the explorer Hubert Darrell back in 2011, and year after year he became more and more obsessed by not only his disappearance, but all his incredible accomplishments while he travelled the north: a 1,600 kilometre solo trek to bring word of the trapped whaler’s plight to the outside world; an epic journey with explorer Hanbury to collect Arctic butterflies; guiding Canadian Mounties through blizzards, ice and snow. Darrell was regarded as the hardiest and competent explorer of his day. Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen—who knew Anglo-Irish explorer Ernest Shackleton, British Royal Navy officer Robert Falcon Scott and pretty much every other leading polar explorer—described Darrell: “Once of the finest men of the Northern breed that it has ever been my good fortune to meet.”
Famous poet Robert Service knew Darrell and said that some of his finest work was inspired by him: “The lure of timeless things…yet the WILD must win in the end.” Explorer David Theophilus Hanbury, who seemed to know him the best, said, “Exploring the barren Northland has a wonderful fascination for those who have once penetrated it’s solitude.”
Adam Shoalts isn’t a writer who scribes intriguing historical moments in time. He also sets out by canoe and snowshoe to try and capture the essence of it all. That’s one of the biggest reasons why readers are drawn to his work. Not only is he a darn good writer, one who I once described as the Farley Mowat of our times, but he talks the talk and walks the walk, as they say.
With a hand full of Darrell’s letters, journals and hand-drawn maps, Adam headed out multiple times to retrace the past explorer’s footsteps, not necessarily to find the body but to find the reason of his disappearance. That portion of the book kept me flipping the pages through the night. I read this book in only three days!
Some key moments in the book were the account of Darrell punching out some British aristocrat in an igloo; why he thought Robert Peary (first to reach the North Pole) was a fraud; and his lost love in the farmland of Manitoba.
However, overall, I think Shoalts’ book is an attempt at actually getting some recognition for Hubert Darrell. He certainly seems to deserve it. Maybe Vanished Beyond the Map is a call out to authorities and historians to pull Darrell out of the shadows and give him a proper place in history. I won’t be surprised if that happens real soon.
Darrell travelled extensively in the north purely because he loved the land, the people and the culture. He created hand-drawn maps that are incredibly accurate to this day, he adapted to local clothing and learned native languages, he advocated for Indigenous cultures, he was admired and respected by the local peoples—nothing that explorers like John Franklin, Robert Peary and Alfred Harrison ever achieved.
My dad was a professional boxer, and he would always tell me that you should give credit when credit is due. He despised the heavily sponsored fighters who had the looks but not the bronze and he disliked the talkers but not doers. He would have admired explorer’s like Hubert Darrell more than the ones who went for a great adventure but then escaped to their comforts at home and relished in praise and false admiration.
It symbolizes Shakespearean irony, don’t you think?
By the end of my read, I wondered if Adam Shoalts somewhat paralleled his life with Darrell’s. I’ve always admired Shoalts’ work. How could you not? The guy followed the path of a Peregrin Falcon from Lake Erie to northern Labrador; he crossed 4,000 kilometres of Canada’s far north searching the remote Mealy Mountains in central Labrador for the haunting of a large creature and came back with pure science behind it rather than a clickbait storyline; his book A History of Canada in Ten Maps: Epic Stories of Charting a Mysterious Land should be made a required reading in every high school history class. And now Vanished Beyond the Map: The Mystery of Lost Explorer Hubert Darrell is out for us to enjoy and savour, and to help make a lost explorer a true legend in the history books.
Check out my Whisky Fireside Chat with Adam Shoalts about his new book on my KCHappyCamper YouTube channel.
