 |
|
Tracking Mackenzie to the Sea
by Robert J. Hing
 |
|
220 pages, softcover
Anchor Watch Press, 1992 |
Publisher's Comments
The first crossing of continental North American had to wait 300 years from the time Columbus landed on the rim of
the New World. It was made by Alexander Mackenzie in
1792/3, and epic trip terminating at Bella Coola, an Indian village at the head of a fiord on the Pacific Ocean,
4,500 canoe-miles from Montreal.
Mackenzie's journal of his expedition to the Pacific appeared in December 1801, in a handsome quarto volume
entitled, Voyages from Montreal on the River St. Lawrence through the Continent of North America to the Frozen and
Pacific Oceans in the years 1789 and 1793.
To retrace the route described in Mackenzie's book requires travelling by canoe or floatplane through mostly
roadless country. Using the explorer's own journal as a guide,
author Robert Hing retraced Mackenzie's trail in the summer of 1990, alone, in a small floatplane.
This trail, North America's first overland route, is a transcontinental pathway unique in the world, a water
highway linking two far-distant oceans. The places are still there, and the essential experiences of Mackenzie's route --
wind, waves, fog, mishaps of all kinds -- still to be had.
Tracking Mackenzie to the Sea, Coast to Coast in Eighteen Splashdowns is a lively account of that journey,
a celebration of the first crossing of continental North America, and of the freedom of splashing down on the lakes and
rivers of Canada's vast and sparsely populated interior.
|
|