Quests to discover a navigable or usable Northwest Passage ended in failure, but as Discovering Nothing shows, the many attempts to find what nature did not provide led to the construction of its transcontinental equivalent, changing the landscape of North America forever.

This first modern study to focus on James Cook’s polar adventures, Captain Cook Rediscovered introduces an entirely new explorer who is more at home along the edge of the polar ice packs than the Pacific’s sandy beaches.

These essays Jennifer Brown’s investigations into the surprising range of interactions among Indigenous people and newcomers as they met or observed one another from a distance, and as they competed, compromised, and rejected or adapted to change.

This fascinating tale of the rivalries and intrigues that played out as Canada secured the Arctic illuminates an under-explored era in Canadian foreign policy.

This unique exploration of commemoration and memory traces Jacque Cartier’s evolving image over five centuries to show how changing notions of the past have shaped identity formation and nationalism in English- and French-speaking Canada.

The most complete study of Bodega and his epoch yet written, At the Far Reaches of Empire is an absorbing narrative of eighteenth-century empire building.

This collection of correspondence – letters sent to Hudson's Bay Company men by their families and loved ones but never delivered – offers a rare and human history of ordinary people, many of whom were the early settlers of the Pacific Northwest.

The experience of these conscientious objectors offers insight into evolving attitudes about the rights and responsibilities of citizenship during a key period of Canadian nation building.

Gunboat Frontier presents a different interpretation of Indian-white relations in nineteenth-century British Columbia, focusing on the interaction of West Coast Indians with British law and authority.

The journal of James Colnett is the last unpublished account of the early maritime fur trade on the Northwest Coast.

A new interest in European maritime exploration was aroused with the publication of the first volume of J.C. Beaglehole's edition of The Journals of Captain James Cook in 1955. In the forty-odd years since then ...

This books examines the Hudson's Bay company exploration efforts beyond the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean from 1793 to 1843 – which led to the commercial development of the Pacific coast and the Cordilleran interior of western North America.

This previously unknown collection of letters lets us experience colonial British Columbia through the eyes of a young British naval officer who spent three years on Vancouver Island commanding a Royal Navy gunboat during the Cariboo gold rush.

In this beautifully designed and richly illustrated book, Diane Eaton and Sheila Urbanek re-create Paul Kane's heroic journey across Canada and bring to life the people, places, and events he experienced.

The remarkable journal of the 1864 Vancouver Island Exploring Expedition, a four-and-a-half-month journey that describes the island's pristine wilderness, as well as Cowichan, Chemainus, and Comox and the coal-mining town of Nanaimo.

These fascinating memoirs of Father Nicolas Coccola, a Corsican-born Oblatean who arrived in British Columbia in 1880, reveal the complexity of the work carried out by ordinary missionary priests.