In my family tree there is a man named John Rae Hamilton. A Hamilton, carrying the explorer’s name, placed there deliberately, generations back, the way you’d set a compass bearing for someone who hasn’t been…
The Hudson’s Bay Company was chartered in 1670. For the next two centuries it operated trading posts across an entire continent while a message to London took the better part of a year, round trip. No phone.
Before John Rae was the man who found the Northwest Passage’s last link, he was a member of the Lodge of Stromness in Orkney. That detail gets left out of the explorer stories. It shouldn’t be.
