When thirty gentlemen of Henry VIII’s court signed on for a sea tour of Newfoundland, they didn’t quite get what they bargained for: starvation, cannibalism and piracy.
One of the first officers of the newly formed North-West Mounted Police, Francis Dickens, son of novelist Charles Dickens, was noted for his famous parentage, if not much else.
While thousands of eastern Europeans poured into Canada to settle the prairie west, a few hundred elected to return to their roots and build an agricultural utopia in the new Soviet Russia. Utopian, it wasn’t.