Britain who charted Canada honoured at home

Britain who charted Canada honoured at home
By Ian Herbert
Published: 29 June 2007
Independent UK

To the native Indians who came to respect him, he was simply Koo-koo-sint - "You Who Looks at the Stars" - because he always used a sextant, which they considered to have spiritual powers.

To the millions of Canadian schoolchildren who have since been taught of his exploits, he is "Map Man", the explorer whose bravery and resolve were instrumental in charting their country's official boundary with the United States.

But only yesterday, 150 years after his death, was David Thompson - one of greatest adventurers and geographers, who tramped, canoed and rode more than 50,000 miles and surveyed 1.8 million square metres of Canada's vast emptiness - properly remembered in Britain, the land of his birth.

Perhaps fittingly for an adventurer who spent most of his life in vast tracts of wilderness which no man had traversed, very few images of Thompson exist. To one contemporary witness he was "just another son from another penniless family on his way to a job in North America with the company".

Yet the story of Thompson's journey from childhood destitution to courage in the near impenetrable Rocky Mountains is extraordinarily vivid. Yesterday it led Ray Mears, the television presenter and modern-day survival expert, to unveil a green plaque - an award which celebrates the endeavours of Westminster residents - at Grey Coat Hospital School, where Thompson was a pupil until he was selected for a seven-year apprenticeship by the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) and left for Canada.

Thompson had been sent to the charity school in the 1770s, after his father, a Welsh migrant, died and his mother was left struggling for money. The education was rudimentary but the boy eventually moved up to the Grey Coat mathematical school where he learnt the basic navigation skills which would form the basis of his future career. In 1784, aged 14, he sailed for Fort Churchill on Hudson Bay, never to see the land of his birth again.

He would later recall in David Thompson's Narrative how he wore a beaver coat against a "cold so intense that everything is shivered by it". Fatefully, he broke a leg in a sledding accident and used his recuperation to refine his mathematical, astronomical and surveying skills. "Now I could make of this uncharted land a known quality and to this end I kept for 60 years records of all observations of each journey made," he wrote.

And so began the wanderings of an already respected horseman and hunter, who had a talent for producing accurate maps. Thompson was given gradual rein by the Hudson Bay Company to venture into the Indian-occupied terrain west of the Great Lakes with orders to open up routes for fur traders. He was just 26 when a prized route to Lake Athabaska was discovered, by way of the Nelson, Burntwood, and Churchill rivers and Reindeer Lake.

If these and other journeys had been undetaken on the southern side of the border that he charted, Hollywood would have made a movie years ago, complete with love element telling how, in 1799, the 28-year-old Thompson met and married a Métis girl half his age whose Scottish father later abandoned them and left for Britain. Thompson's marriage to Charlotte Small lasted for the 57 years until his death. She and some of their 13 children accompanied him on many of his toughest forays.

The perils they faced after leaving their home - Rocky Mountain House - included warring Indian tribes and grizzly bears. But no sight was quite so forbidding as the Rocky Mountain range as Thompson approached it during his attempt to follow the course of the Columbia river and open up the route to fur traders. "The [Rockies] came into sight like shining white clouds on the horizon; as we proceeded they rose and formed an impassable barrier, even to an eagle," he wrote.

There were times when all seemed lost. "The water was up to my middle and filled with drift ice, some pieces of which struck me," he wrote in another diary entry. "I found on coming out of the water my capote [blanket] and leggings frozen stiff."

It took Thompson four years, but he eventually became the first European to follow the 1,232-mile Columbia - North America's fourth-largest river - from source to the sea. At the river's end, he helped to create a network of British fur trade posts before leaving the mountains and settling in Montreal, where he concentrated on his life's work: his 1814 Great Map of the Northwest, including the Rockies and the Colombia river system.

The Map Man's story ends as it begins - in destitution. The HBC refused to buy Thompson's maps; he squandered money on poor investments and was forced to sell his precious sextant. He died impoverished in 1857, at the age of 86. His beloved wife survived him by just three months.

In 1957, 100 years after his death, the Canadian government honoured Thompson with a postage stamp and the David Thompson Highway in Alberta was named in his honour.

Marion Parsons, former headteacher at his old London school, led calls for a greater awareness of a hero who had braved "dark, dreary and intensely cold winters and the hot summers with the swarms of mosquitoes, whose attacks made even the dogs howl". The current head, Rachel Allard, described Thompson as "a truly remarkable man" and hoped the plaque would increase recognition on this side of the Atlantic.

Britain, it seems, is finally awakening to the achievements of one of its greatest explorers.