Vanished Beyond the Map: The Mystery of Lost Explorer Hubert Darrell
Oct 2025 · Penguin
Ebook
320
Pages
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infoThis book will become available on October 7, 2025. You will not be charged until it is released.
About this ebook
Canada’s greatest modern-day explorer sets out into the arctic wilderness to solve a mystery more than 100 years old.
In November 1910, explorer Hubert Darrell vanished in the uncharted wilds of the Northwest Territories. A prospector who had been swept up in the Klondike Gold Rush, Darrell later made his name as an expert guide, trapper, and restless wanderer who ventured where few others dared. At a time when travel by dogsled in the North was the norm, Darrell became legendary for traversing alone and on foot thousands of kilometres; ranging over mountains and across windswept tundra from Alaska to Hudson Bay. During his epic journeys, he helped rescue sailors trapped in sea ice, led Mounties on their patrols, and even guided some of the era’s most famous explorers. Roald Amundsen, the first person to reach the South Pole, held Darrell in awe, remarking once that with men like him, he could go to the moon. Contemporaries regarded Darrell as the hardiest, most competent explorer of his day. Alone, Darrell set off to map a remote region of the western Arctic near the Anderson River but never returned. Despite clues reported by Inuit trappers and Mounted Police inquiries, his fate remains a mystery. While his disappearance sparked headlines around the world, ironically soon Darrell’s name would also vanish from the history books, just as surely as he had in the wild.
Yet Darrell left behind a trail of letters, journals, and hand-drawn maps. With these faded clues and his zeal for adventure, Adam Shoalts retraces Darrell’s forgotten routes through the wilderness, searching for cabin ruins and old campsites. He unearths water-stained records and tracks down elderly individuals in the hopes that they might remember someone who’d known Darrell. Part detective story, part biography, and part first-person adventure narrative, Vanished Beyond the Map combines expeditions with historical research to solve one of exploration history’s enduring cold cases—the mystery of Hubert Darrell.
In November 1910, explorer Hubert Darrell vanished in the uncharted wilds of the Northwest Territories. A prospector who had been swept up in the Klondike Gold Rush, Darrell later made his name as an expert guide, trapper, and restless wanderer who ventured where few others dared. At a time when travel by dogsled in the North was the norm, Darrell became legendary for traversing alone and on foot thousands of kilometres; ranging over mountains and across windswept tundra from Alaska to Hudson Bay. During his epic journeys, he helped rescue sailors trapped in sea ice, led Mounties on their patrols, and even guided some of the era’s most famous explorers. Roald Amundsen, the first person to reach the South Pole, held Darrell in awe, remarking once that with men like him, he could go to the moon. Contemporaries regarded Darrell as the hardiest, most competent explorer of his day. Alone, Darrell set off to map a remote region of the western Arctic near the Anderson River but never returned. Despite clues reported by Inuit trappers and Mounted Police inquiries, his fate remains a mystery. While his disappearance sparked headlines around the world, ironically soon Darrell’s name would also vanish from the history books, just as surely as he had in the wild.
Yet Darrell left behind a trail of letters, journals, and hand-drawn maps. With these faded clues and his zeal for adventure, Adam Shoalts retraces Darrell’s forgotten routes through the wilderness, searching for cabin ruins and old campsites. He unearths water-stained records and tracks down elderly individuals in the hopes that they might remember someone who’d known Darrell. Part detective story, part biography, and part first-person adventure narrative, Vanished Beyond the Map combines expeditions with historical research to solve one of exploration history’s enduring cold cases—the mystery of Hubert Darrell.
About the author
ADAM SHOALTS is a historian, archaeologist, geographer, and Westaway Explorer-in-Residence at the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. Shoalts holds a PhD from McMaster University where his research examined the influence Indigenous oral traditions had on fur traders in the subarctic and Pacific Northwest. He is also the author of the national bestsellers Alone Against the North, A History of Canada in Ten Maps, Beyond the Trees, The Whisper on the Night Wind, and Where the Falcon Flies. He enjoys long walks in the woods. Follow his adventures on Facebook and Instagram.
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