Paddling Through Time with Sir George Simpson
8 Nov
You can travel a long way in a canoe … especially when you use the simple craft to travel back in time.
And, for those paddlers who find themselves time-traveling as they move along the water, James Raffan’s new biography of Hudson’s Bay Company governor Sir George Simpson, Emperor of the North (Harper Collins, $34.95), might be just the off-season way-back vehicle they need for the coming winter months.
Raffan, the curator of the Canadian Canoe Museum in Peterborough, Ontario, brings an historian’s eye and a paddler’s sensibility to the biography. We learn not only of Simpson, the flawed and driven de facto “Emperor” of the vast Rupert’s Land, but also feel the times in which he lived. In that way, the book makes a fine companion to Peter C. Newman’s HBC history, Empire of the Bay.
Raffan is at his best during Simpson’s first year in country. Simpson is posted to Cumberland House, where he battles with the North West Company for furs and keenly assesses his often frustrating HBC employees, while arctic explorers John Franklin and George Back make cameo appearances in the background.
When Simpson, inspects his domain by canoe as an HBC governor — including on the longest single-season canoe voyage on record, when Simpson traveled some 5000 miles from York Factory to Fort Vancouver via Fort Chipewyan and the Peace River — Raffan recounts the travels with a paddler’s insight.
The Simpson that rises from the pages is a leader to respect but not a man to admire. In his wake he left a string of illegitimate children (13 children by at least eight women) as well as rumors of complicity in the murder of his nephew Thomas Simpson, who might have made a name for himself as the discoverer of the Northwest Passage, if not for his uncle’s envious obstructions.
As a time portal to an era when the canoe was king, though, Emperor of the North is a fine way to paddle back in time, Simpson’s company notwithstanding.
