Peter Pond, one of the original North West Company partners, opened the Lake Athabasca region to the fur trade in 1778. Largely uneducated and untrained in surveying, Pond nevertheless harboured a dream of discovering a North West Passage. This map, which is based on one drawn by Pond in 1787, combines the known features of the lakes and waterways between Hudson Bay, Red River and Great Slave Lake, with features taken from Captain Cook's Pacific coastal charts. The map indicates almost nothing west of the Rocky Mountains. This "unknown" was the great flaw in Pond's conception of western North American geography, some 950 kilometres of largely mountainous terrain is omitted. In the north Pond premised that a river (1) known to flow west out of Great Slave Lake (the Mackenzie River) was connected with the non-existent "Cook's River" (2), an error on Cook's map. If Pond's theory had been true an all-water North West Passage would have been discovered. At point three on the map, Pond wrote: "Here the water ebbs and flows according to the account of the Natives and they know of no land further to the Northward." Pond's ideas and knowledge were absorbed by a dynamic young Scot, Alexander Mackenzie, his second in command at Fort Chipewyan in 1788-1789. Using Fort Chipewyan as a base, Mackenzie in 1789 attempted to prove Pond's theory.
Courtesy: National Film Board of Canada after a map in the National Map Collection, Public Archives of Canada (11618)
