Pirates and Pathfinders is a Canadian elementary school textbook, originally published in 1947 (revised in 1963) by Clarke, Irwin, & Company.
The book was a history textbook, intended for "the intermediate grades of the elementary schools".
The book was divided into seven chapters: The book was also well furnished with maps, including a series in which areas of the world were progressively revealed from being obscured with brown ink, showing the different areas of the world that Europeans had explored.
[3] The heroic narratives presented by it, coupled with its copious and dramatic illustrations, have made the book a vivid memory for some Canadians who attended English speaking elementary schools during the period in which it was in use.
The Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism chose this textbook by name as a bad example,[5] observing its Anglocentric bias; the commission's reviewers found that the book "devotes 60 per cent of its text to the achievements of British explorers alone and completely ignores the French.