TV survival expert Ray Mears has been exploring the Canadian wilderness in his latest TV series – and he's been following in the footsteps of Frances Barkley of Bridgwater, writes John Hudson

T omorrow evening on BBC2 brings the final episode of Northern Wilderness, in which the bushcraft and survival king Ray Mears completes his exploration of Canada's most remote and beautiful landscape.

The Pacific coast of British Columbia was cut off from the rest of the country until a route was forged through the Rockies, and it grew up with cultures, skills and an atmosphere all its own.

This is a place where native American totem poles once dominated the scene and people relied on the sea, and Ray was delighted to find that the arts of making steam-bent fish hooks and dug-out canoes are far from dead.

All in all, then, a far-flung, exotic spot – but when she was researching the area, producer Julia Foot kept stumbling across the name of Frances Barkley, a remarkable woman from Bridgwater who first made her mark on the Pacific coast more than 200 years ago, and still does.

"Have you looked into Frances's voyage?" Bristol born, bred and based Julia asked West Country Life.

"We weren't able to use it in Northern Wilderness, since it just didn't fit in with what Ray does – but I was amazed to hear about her achievements."

And so were we when, taking Julia's advice, we started investigating the story of Frances Hornby Trevor, born in 1769, the twin daughter of the Rev Dr John Trevor, who was the rector of Otterhampton, near Bridgwater.

After many moves and a convent education on the Continent, she left school at 17 to marry William Charles Barkley, merchant trader captain of a vessel named the Loudoun, in Ostend in October 1786.

He was already an old hand in the Far East and West Indies, but this was his first command – and six weeks after the wedding, with the ship renamed the Imperial Eagle, they set sail on a round-the-world adventure that would last for years.

During that time Frances would become the first woman to circumnavigate the world twice, and the first European woman to set foot on Hawaii, British Columbia, Vietnam and Alaska.

On the Canadian West Coast, Barkley traded with the formidable Chief Maquinna and grew rich transporting sea otter skins across the Pacific from Vancouver Island to China.

It's incredible to think of a young English couple earning their living in this way at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, but all the evidence points to an uncanny knack of communicating with people from a wide range of cultures.

In the Sandwich Islands Frances took aboard a maidservant, Winée, who, if we're looking for even more superlatives, became the first Hawaiian, or "Kanaka", to reach British Columbia.

They arrived in the Imperial Eagle at Nootka Sound in June 1787, and hit the natives between the eyes in a variety of ways.

At 400 tons, the Imperial Eagle was the largest ship ever to have entered Friendly Cove, but the natives were likely to have been just as impressed by Frances's extraordinary red-gold hair.

Legend has it that her tresses saved the day when the Barkleys were captured by hostile South Sea natives. Curious women supposedly loosed her hair, "which fell like a shower of gold" – at which point one and all bowed down before her as a goddess.

In Canada they were lucky to be befriended by Dr John Mackey, who had arrived in the previous year and stayed on. By the time the Barkleys met him he had "gone native", dressed in filthy otter skins. But he was a friendly presence there, and a European completely trusted by the native Americans.

Barkley Sound, Imperial Eagle Channel, Trevor Channel, Loudoun Channel and Hornby Peak are all reminders to this day of what virgin territory this part of Earth was to Old World explorers.

Having made a profit of £10,000 for his backers, Captain Barkley sailed on to Mauritius, where he learned the East India Company was taking legal action against the owners of the Imperial Eagle, including one John Meares.

Their answer was to sell the ship from under the Barkleys, who stayed on in Mauritius for more than a year, during which Frances gave birth to their first child, a son.

In among endless legal wrangling, the horrible Meares got hold of Barkley's nautical gear and ship's log, and went on to claim the other man's achievements as his own.

"Captain Meares, with the greatest effrontery, published and claimed the merit of my husband's discoveries therein contained, besides inventing lies of the most revolting nature tending to vilify the person he thus pilfered," Frances Barkley wrote in her memoirs.

Chief Maquinna, a shrewd judge of character, called Meares "Aita-aita", or "the liar".

Nevertheless, by fair means or foul, the rotter also made his mark on the Pacific coastline, and tomorrow night we shall see the unrelated Ray Mears talking to us from Meares Island.

The Barkleys continued to trade around the world, with shares of both good fortune and calamity.

They reached Portsmouth two years after leaving Ostend – via a shipwreck off Holland – but seven months later they were on their travels again, to Alaska via India.

On their 11-month voyage to Calcutta Frances gave birth to a baby girl during a violent gale off the Cape of Good Hope.

Barkley left India just after Christmas, 1791, and while Frances could have stayed in Bengal, "where I was to have Servants, Palanqueens and every Luxury", she chose to sail with her husband.

The baby died at sea – "the victim of our folly" as Frances so poignantly put it – and "A Leaden Box was prepared for her remains in order that they be kept until we could inter her in consecrated ground in some Dutch settlement."

It was a blighted expedition in other ways. Attempts to trade in Siberia were stymied by Russian officialdom, and they met resistance when they entered the ancestral waters of the fractious Tlingits off Alaska.

Having gained fewer pelts than they had hoped for, the Barkleys reached China in March 1793 and then headed for their old haunt of Mauritius — unaware that France and England were again at war.

The French confiscated their ship the Halcyon and they temporarily became prisoners. An American sailed the vessel to the United States, and it was only after more expensive negotiations that they got her back again. With their travelling days through, the Barkleys settled back in England and were sufficiently comfortably-off to raise a family in modest luxury.

Captain Barkley died in 1832, aged 72. Frances lived on until 1845, early Victorian times, and in 1836 wrote a book of Reminiscences in which there is not a single complaint about the conditions and disappointments she endured through nearly seven years at sea.

And how is Frances Barkley remembered today? The Blake Museum in Bridgwater is not over-blessed with material on her, but the town's industrious local historian Roger Evans devoted a chapter to her in Somerset's Forgotten Heroes (Dovecote Press, 2004).

In British Columbia there is a book, The Remarkable World of Frances Barkley, 1769-1845, written by Beth Hill and published by Gray's Publishing of Sidney BC, and this is widely available on bookseller websites.

Finally, the coastal ship MV Frances Barkley carries summer freight and passengers across the waters first seen by her namesake more than 200 years ago.

"We named her in tribute to a young woman of openness and courage," say her owners, and we can only say Amen to that.

Ray Mears Northern Wilderness, BBC2, 8pm tomorrow.