Legacy & Lineage

Dr. John Rae did not out-equip the Royal Navy in the Arctic. He out-learned it, by adopting the methods of the people who already lived there.

In 1821 the Hudson's Bay Company handed forty percent of the fur trade to its field officers. Chief Factors were owner-operators, and the structure still holds.

The HBC had no coins, so it built a unit of account out of one prime beaver pelt, published the standard, and recorded every spread as overplus.

In 1799 the Hudson’s Bay Company had 530 men working its posts across North America. 416 of them came from Orkney, a small archipelago off the north coast of Scotland.

I come from two sides that never should have met. A Chilean side out of Concón on the Pacific coast, and a Métis-Scottish side out of the Hudson’s Bay Company fur trade and the Cariboo.

The Hamilton crest is an oak tree with a saw driven through the trunk. Above it, a ducal coronet. Around it, on the strap and buckle, a single word.

My great-grandfather Ismail Machuca built four businesses in Concón, Chile. A barbershop. A colectivo, the shared-route taxi that moves working people around a Chilean city.

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.

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…

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.