Tributes
Eric Morse of Morse River — and Larrimac
The Low Down to Hull and Back News, February 20, 1986
Eric Morse is the only living Canadian who has a river named in his honour. He is a Member of the Order of Canada and has an Honorary PhD from Queen’s University. A former Prime Minister, one of his canoeing companions, wrote a foreword to his best-selling book on Fur Trade Canoe Routes of Canada: Then and Now. He is a Fellow of The Royal Canadian Geographical Society and has travelled over 30,000 miles by canoe. And he lives at Larrimac in Chelsea.
I spent a delightful afternoon with Eric Morse, sipping tea and munching on cookies made by his wife, Pam. But more of her vittling prowess later.
Eric was born in India and got his first love of the wilderness and wildlife in the Indian jungle on the Himalayas, 8,000 feet up at the edge of Nepal. His family came to Canada early in the nineteenth century and settled in Ontario. Eric went on his first canoe trip at age thirteen in the Haliburton area. He was so smitten with the life, he convinced his parents to build a cottage there. He has never looked back, except of course, to broaden his horizons on the great white north of Canada.
After leaving the Air Force at war’s end, Eric joined the United Nations Association as the national secretary. He specialized in international affairs from 1945 until 1948. He then became the national director of the Association of Canadian Clubs and served with great distinction for over 20 years.
It was in 1951 at a diplomatic dinner party that the idea was hatched to show diplomats the real Canada by taking them on canoe trips that retraced the routes followed by the voyageurs in their pursuit of the fur trade. As a result of these yearly adventures, the book, Fur Trade Canoe Routes of Canada: Then and Now was published in 1969. The book has become a runaway best seller, for a “non-novel,” as Eric is wont to put it. The book was reprinted in 1971 in second edition, with some 24,000 copies sold. But, then again, it does really run to high adventure, as the Rt. Hon. Pierre E. Trudeau noted in his foreword to the book: “Anyone who wishes to get a feeling for the unique history and geography of his country can do no better than follow Eric Morse’s example. All who do will derive a double pleasure from this book; the pleasure of reading it and the pleasure of exploring some of the routes it describes. Like those of us who have canoed with the author, I am sure they will come to share his enthusiasm for the tough but satisfying life of the voyageurs.”
Perhaps it is even more unique in that Eric took along excerpts from the early journals of the voyageurs for on-the-spot study. He found, even 300 years later, little had changed. But with the advent of new hydro dams and northern settlement, he concluded that it was lucky he did the trips in the 1960s, as in later years it would be impossible to undertake as close a study of the actual trade routes.
Very few of us today even give pause to think about the hardships of our forefathers in this great land. And even if we knew of their existence, the voyageurs were likely passed over in our compulsory history reading at school as wild fellows in canoes somewhere up north.
Just to give readers of The News a little taste of what it was really like, here’s a short quote from Chapter 1, entitled “The Voyageurs on the Trail”.
“The fur-trade period has been depicted as Canada’s epic age, which may be true. But the glamour should be muted, and considered against the toil of the voyageurs working sixteen and eighteen hours a day, often immersed for long periods in icy water or carrying 180-lb. loads through bog, up hills and over long portages. Other hazards haunted the voyageur as he worked a canoe containing three tons of cargo up a foaming rapid, or navigated the canoe down some roaring canyon. Or, as he coasted around an inland sea like Superior, perhaps suddenly half-way across a great bay a squall struck. Squall, toil, hazard and hardship dogged the voyageur on the trail.”
One last quote from Fur Trade Canoe Routes of Canada: Then and Now to make a distinction that had certainly never occurred to me: “The Voyageur employed by the North West Company was the Canadien — tough, gay and carefree. Without him the Montreal fur trade could obviously not have been carried on. He was incredibly durable, and also tractable. The voyageur is not to be confused with coureur de bois, who, though he too paddled and carried, was an independent trader, not a hired labourer. There is, moreover, a time-distinction: by and large, the coureur de bois belongs to the French period of Canadian history, while the voyageur belongs to the period after 1763.”
It is hard to realize that these routes the voyageurs followed, formed Canada’s main transport and supply line right across the continent, covering more than a million square miles!
It was certainly no mean feat to retrace the routes with good friends and companions, as Eric Morse did from the 1950s through the 1970s. At roughly 1,000 miles per season, he has chalked up, or paddled up, nearly 30,000 miles. That’s a lot of water to push a paddle through!
Once Eric had all of these routes sorted out and well documented in his books and articles in the Canadian Geographical Journal, he still thirsted for bigger and better wilderness. This he achieved by heading still farther north to become one of the pioneers of recreational canoeing in the Canadian Arctic Barren Lands — roughly 1,000 miles north of Edmonton — north again from the Arctic Circle.
He recalls with great enthusiasm, one of his most exciting trips down the Mine River. This one with Mr. Trudeau. “We ran rapids through canyons and made swift passage to the open sea. It grabbed you all the way. It had everything, but it is hard to express, the excitement often left you breathless.”
Another trip that Eric mentioned as being exceptional, was on the MacKenzie River, across the Barren Lands to Hudson Bay. By way of modest comment, Eric said, “We were the first recreational canoeists to take this trip.”
One of the problems he encountered, and which has plagued recreational canoeists and others, is the lack of maps that accurately showed the rapids or white water. It should be remembered that the maps are compiled from air photos taken from an altitude of 30,000 feet, hardly conclusive to minute detail. The folk in charge of mapping were keenly aware of the shortcomings of these maps and were anxious to make corrections. It is interesting to note that a study found that in the Northwest Territories, only one per cent of the rapids were actually shown on the maps. This is quite a serious defect — especially with the ever-increasing number of recreational canoeists heading north to find true wilderness.
Upon his retirement in 1971, Eric undertook to work on contract for the mapping branch of Energy, Mines and Resources, to update the maps and correct the deficiencies with respect to rapids and waterfalls. He was able to affect much improvement in the maps, using his own meticulous notes and the many contacts he had with recreational canoeists in the field, or more correctly, on the water.
In gratitude for this work, and for his pioneering efforts in making popular recreational canoeing in the Barren Lands, the North West Territorial Council caused a river to be named in his honour.
The Citation from the NWT Council is pretty dramatic; it reads that:
“A river in the remote northwestern sector of the Keewatin Region be named “Morse River” in honour of Eric Morse, a well known and respected wilderness traveller.”
The Morse River is located at the co-ordinates Lat 65 degrees 3'N — Long 100 degrees 45'W.
Eric says he has not seen this particular river, although he has canoed within the region. “This is an honour I treasure,” he said. “I am on the map of the Northwest Territories where I have had some of my best canoeing!”
Eric finds some great satisfaction in being the only living Canadian to have a river named in his honour, inasmuch as when the Geographical Names Board had the sole jurisdiction for geographical names, its first criteria was that the named be dead. Of course, by his own admission, Eric is very much alive!
On one of his expeditions along the canoe routes and in the Arctic Barren Lands, his delightful wife, Pam, acted as chief of provisioning, and the cook for up to eight people on wilderness trips. Of course, she also was the bowman, or is it “person,” in his canoe, and she paddled every mile with him. “We didn’t suffer in the food department,” Eric said. Supplies were purchased from Hudson Bay posts. Eric wrote on this subject in the Canadian Geographical Journal of May 1967. It was called “Summer Travel in the Canadian Barren Lands.” Bugs were, of course, a bother, but his best advice was to keep up wind and use Bug-Off only when necessary.
It is also interesting to note that Eric influenced the mighty Hudson Bay Company to go into the U-Paddle business. Although now discontinued, it was possible, just like the car-rental firms, to pick up a rental canoe at one Hudson Bay post and leave it at another post at the end of the journey.
On the subject of canoes, I was silly enough to ask him if he had a favourite type of canoe. In his typical precise way he said that it all depended on use — to take the girlfriend around the lake, or for serious northern work.
He favoured the “Grumman Aluminum” — 17 feet — weighing in at 75 lbs. “I needed a canoe that was virtually indestructible and did not get heavier as it absorbed water,” he said. As any true purist will appreciate, Eric had an amusing remark on wood vs. aluminum. “I crossed an emotional threshhold when I went from a wooden canoe to aluminum,” he said.
Now in his eighties, Eric says his days of active canoeing are past, but in his books and articles he has left a great deal of himself, and it is there for anyone to read. He would indeed encourage you to do so, but even better, he’d be the first to urge you go off into the wilderness and enjoy, as he surely did in years gone by.
Perhaps we should head north and have a look at the Morse River. It would be nice to say we saw our neighbour’s river!