Free Alone Against the North by Adam Shoalts Page A

waterway, measuring only a hundred kilometres. Thus, the choice was between the more obscure smaller river or the bigger, but somewhat better known, waterway that might or might not have a name.
    I eventually resolved, having absorbed the lessons of past explorers, to keep our plans flexible. The presumed tributary of the Brant River would remain our primary objective, with the more obscure nameless river serving as an alternative should, for whatever reason, we fail to reach the first one. In any case, I planned to eventually explore both rivers over the course of several expeditions. If I had the funds and a willing partner, I might have attempted both in a single season—yet Brent affirmed that forty days was the absolute maximum amount of time he would spend in the wilderness.
    As things stood, there were plenty of obstacles to undertaking any exploring that summer. I had originally imagined that the backing of the Geographical Society would open doors and make our preparations straightforward. This wasn’t the case. An almost soul-crushing plethora of problems and obstacles arose in the weeks leading up to our departure. Things were already complicated by the last-minute lineup change from Wes to Brent, which put the entire burden of making preparations on my shoulders, as I dared not delegate anything to Brent—knowing him as well as I did. Time was of the essence: my hasty arrival back in Canada from the Amazon coupled with my work as a guide had severely compressed our preparatory time into afew hectic weeks. Everything needed to be in order by the end of July. Besides the annoyance of my lingering Amazonian recovery, there were serious logistical problems. My old car, our means of transportation to the northern town where we would board a bush plane, was pronounced unfit for the road by my mechanic. And Brent’s vehicle was no better. To add to our difficulties, it was a hot, dry summer in the North—the Ministry of Natural Resources fire report indicated that 109 forest fires were burning across Ontario’s wilderness, a serious hazard. I kept an eye on them via satellite updates, apprehensive that one might sweep across the area we were headed into. And if these concerns weren’t enough, I was informed by the Geographical Society’s president that the other expedition sponsored that year, to a river in Labrador, had failed to materialize. This news doubled the pressure for our expedition to succeed.
    Most problematic of all was the common bane of an explorer’s existence: a shortage of cash. While I was accustomed to performing expeditions with limited resources—I put my faith in traditional skills and knowledge rather than flashy gear—this was a Society expedition, so I couldn’t take the risks I normally did, and all sorts of expensive equipment, such as a satellite phone and a GPS, had to be obtained. But even with the Society’s generous funding, we had to cut some corners.
    This put us in good company: most of history’s greatest explorers were impoverished. Columbus set the template for many Renaissance-era explorers by spending years shifting between royal courts seeking a patron who would sponsor his proposed voyage across the Atlantic. The famed Victorian explorer of darkest Africa, Sir Henry Morton Stanley, was so embarrassedby his threadbare funding that he felt compelled to wildly inflate his expeditions’ budgets in his books. Despite his fame, Stanley was reduced to all sorts of cost-saving measures and once had to sell his watch for food. His contemporary, David Livingstone, wasn’t much better off. Livingstone had difficulty raising two thousand pounds in 1866 for his African explorations, complaining that even that amount was “wretchedly inadequate.” Sir Ernest Shackleton struggled almost as much in the drawing rooms of imperial London to raise funds for his expeditions as he ever did in the howling wastes of Antarctica.