Canada in 1816. The British Empire has vanquished Napoleon, but at what cost England, completely drained, seeks other avenues of sustenance for its impoverished people. It is within this context that the Scottish Lord Selkirk sends settlers and former soldiers of the Meuron and de Watteville regiments to reinforce his colony by the Red River, nowadays Winnipeg, Manitoba. The diary of Lieutenant Frederic de Graffenried tells the epic of this adventurous expedition. The reader is taken along on three of the five Great Lakes, through the dangerous rapids and hard tedium of portages, through...