1884	Robert J. Flaherty is born in Iron Mountain, Michigan, USA	Robert Flaherty as a boy with his family
1896	Flaherty travels to Ontario, Canada with his father mining for gold Even in my youth I was always exploring new country. My father was a mining engineer and, in manner of speaking we were a nomad family. We moved from one gold-mining camp to another in various parts of Canada. I was then about 12 years of age. I learnt to track and hunt rabbits from the Indians and I had an Indian dog-team and toboggan. It was frontier country where the Indians were much more primitive than they are now
	It was from these experiences that Flaherty's idealism, his love of the 'primitive', and his fascination with the different ways of native life developed.

1898	His parents attempt to provide a structured education and Flaherty attends Upper Canada College in Toronto.

1900

Unhappy at school Flaherty returns to explorations with his father.

As I grew up, even in my teens, I went on prospecting expeditions with my father, or with his men, often for months at a time, travelling by canoe in summer and by snow-shoe in winter. It was sometimes new country, country that hadn’t been seen before, the then little known hinterland of Northern Ontario

1902	Flaherty attends the Michigan College of Mines where he meets Francis Hubbard to whom he becomes engaged. He is expelled from the college after only seven months.

1907

Over the next years Flaherty works for various companies but always in a capacity that feeds and encourages his impulse for exploration: searching for iron-ore with U.S. Steel, prospecting for marble along the west coast of Vancouver Island, surveying the vast territory owned by the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, and prospecting for a small mining syndicate above Lake Huron.

1910

In Toronto, Flaherty meets Sir William Mackenzie who employs him to explore the Nast Islands of Gulf Hazard along the sub-arctic coast of Hudson Bay. The expedition is a failure in the sense that what iron-ore Flaherty had been able to find was too lean to be economically valuable. However from his contacts with the Innuits Flaherty is led to believe that there may be more important iron ore stores to be found on a group of unexplored islands known as the Belchers a hundred miles to the west.

1913	After surveying the Ungava Peninsula by sledge with Innuit companions Flaherty returns to Southern Canada where Mackenzie equips him with ship, crew and supplies for an expedition to the Belcher islands. One piece of equipment Mackenzie provides is particularly important:
	Just as I was leaving, Sir William said to me casually , "Why don’t you get one of these new-fangled things called a motion picture camera?" So I bought one but with no other thought really than of taking notes on our exploration. We were going into really interesting country, we’d see interesting people . I had no thought of making a film for theatres. I knew nothing whatsoever about films
	Flaherty also commented that at the time	the only thought I had in connection with the use of the motion camera was to compile visual notes of the exploration
	(This is only one of several accounts of the incident. Robert Griffith's book, authorised by Flaherty, gives the impression that the idea to take a camera was Flaherty's.)

1914	Wintering in Newfoundland Flaherty begins to experiment with his Bell & Howell camera:
	February came, cold but glowing clear and calm. Then we began our films. We did not want for co-operation. The women vied with one another to be starred. Igloo building, conjuring, dances, sledging and seal-hunting were run off as the sunlit days of February and March wore on
	The summer saw the Belcher Islands finally reached and mapped - the Canadian government later named the largest of the group ‘Flaherty Island’