Canada’s 90 Greatest Explorers: Vital insights

Roberta Bondar* (FRCGS)
1945- | Sault Ste. Marie, Ont.

By Jill Heinerth
RCGS Explorer-in-Residence 

Her fresh-pressed tan flight suit was adorned with new Canadian space emblems that matched her red turtleneck. It was in 1983, as I graduated from high school, that I got to see what a Canadian woman astronaut looked like. That might seem inconsequential today, but when the National Research Council of Canada created the Canadian Astronaut Program and selected Roberta Bondar in the first class, I was elated. Here was an example of a woman exploring her fullest potential in a male-dominated niche. Of 4,300 applicants for the first crew spots, only 11 per cent were women. 

In the photo, Bondar just looks like part of the team, outfitted in the same flight suit as her five male colleagues. But she had already blasted through the glass ceiling of space. Serving as the first neurologist in orbit, her expertise would be instrumental to medical research both on and off Earth. 

In January 1992, she flew on Space Shuttle Discovery while Canadians celebrated their second fellow citizen in space. But that eight-day mission encouraged more than an interest in space flight and the study of medicine: it stimulated new explorations in artistic expression. After her career in space, Bondar studied nature photography at the celebrated Brooks Institute of Photography, Calif., later publishing several books and participating in national and international photographic exhibitions. She also established The Roberta Bondar Foundation, a non-profit that supports conservation and environmental stewardship through art. 

Roberta Bondar’s example has inspired a new generation of multi-disciplinary explorers who are able to communicate about our natural world through talents that merge the science of the extremes with fine art. It was her exploration of outer space that inspired me to dive deep into the planet, exploring the water-filled recesses and deep oceans of inner space.  

*Representing all Canadian astronauts. Since the country’s space program was founded in 1983, 14 Canadians have earned spots as CSA astronauts, flying on 17 missions and frequently serving in mission control and other critical roles. 

Knud Rasmussen
1879-1933 | Cross-Arctic 

By Wade Davis
RCGS Honorary Vice-President

A colleague of Rasmussen’s once remarked: “No matter whether it was Greenlanders or [Inuit] in Canada and Alaska, he came as one of them. They unfolded their soul to the greatness and warmth of his being, and in return he received their simple tales of life and its struggles with the mysterious powers, their wild legends and fine poetry.” Raised a product of two worlds, fluent in both Greenlandic and Danish, Rasmussen was accepted equally by shaman and scientist. As a person, he preferred hardship to boredom, danger to inactivity, the knife blade of hunger to the dull satisfaction of gluttony. Most importantly, he was an explorer of both place and people, and this is what made him great. 

Above all, he was curious about the entire civilization of the “Polar Eskimo.” Between 1912 and 1933, he launched the seven Thule expeditions from the Arctic trading station he had built at Cape York, Greenland. (Over more than 20 years of harrowing travel and exploration, only two men died on Rasmussen’s watch. Few could match such a record.) It was the Fifth Thule Expedition (1921-24) that established him as the greatest scholar in the history of Arctic ethnography, for he had conceived to “attack the great primary problem of the origin of the Eskimo race.” In three and a half years, he travelled more than 30,000 kilometres, traversed the top of North America and became the first to cross the Northwest Passage by dogsled. There had been nothing like it since Lewis and Clark. From this expedition came a 10-volume account condensing his insights and discoveries, natural history, prehistory and archeology, linguistics and ethnography. 

Unlike so many other explorers, he had no interest in self-aggrandizing yet pointless adventures. The history and culture of the Inuit was his Holy Grail.  

*Rasmussen spent less than three years in Canada, but his discovery of the interrelation of Inuit across the Arctic was so momentous, we are fast-tracking his “citizenship” and including him here. — Ed.