Measuring Mother Earth: How Joe the
Kid Became Tyrrell of the North
by Heather Robertson
McClelland & Stewart (2007), 334 pp.


Halfway between history and hero worship, Heather Robertson’s biography of Toronto-born explorer and geologist Joseph Burr Tyrrell brings to life both the romance and the hardships of northern exploration at the turn of the twentieth century. Tyrrell’s first job was with the Geological Survey of Canada, and the country’s hunger for mineral wealth and consternation over Arctic sovereignty soon sent him west and north “to run his eyes and hands over Earth’s skin and bones.” In 1893, Tyrrell embarked on an eightman expedition by canoe to chart the Barren Lands of what is now the eastern Northwest Territories and southcentral Nunavut. His team spent three gruelling if often enchanted months north of 60 — we watch through Tyrrell’s eyes as a shoreline apparently covered in waving grasses resolves into “a restless, milling mass of caribou, their antlers seeming to float above them like a forest of bleached branches” — culminating in a hungry race down a solidifying Hudson Bay.

Tyrrell went on to an almost comically unlucky career in minerals. He visited Dawson City at the height of the gold rush and abandoned his young family to pursue the first of several failed mining schemes. After frustrating years alone in Ottawa, Tyrrell’s wife issued an ultimatum, and he headed back east. Casting around in Edwardian Ontario’s burgeoning mineral belt, the ever-arrogant Tyrrell finally struck it rich with a gold mine in Kirkland Lake, which bought him the status he’d felt was his due since his early voyages into the interior.

Robertson’s narrative meanders into biographical sketches of peripherally related scientists and adventurers, sometimes at tiresome length. The atheistic Tyrrell was a minor player in post-Darwinian geological politics; though his discovery of early “Dinosaurian bones” offers a momentary thrill, his scholarly work doesn’t leap off the page. But despite these asides, Robertson communicates the era’s mystique. Outbound on a field mission as a young man, Tyrrell rides the rails to “the end of steel.” Through his wonder, we glimpse a vanished world.