David Thompson was Hudson’s Bay Company’s most famous geographer (who later worked for the rival North West Company, becoming a partner and manager). Thompson was Welsh and some claim his maps are more accurate than George Vancouver’s, which were legend (as to latitude, Vancouver did have a clock, but may not have then mastered it
as one uses his longitudes at their own risk). Thompson was known to native peoples as Koo-Koo-Sint or “the Stargazer.” Over his career, he traveled 56,000 miles across North America, mapping 1,900,000 million square miles. For this historic feat, Thompson has been described as the “greatest land geographer who ever lived.” Not that all his maps were factual; the one shown below has a phantom “Caledonia River” running through today’s Living History Farm. He corrected this mistake on all his maps in 1814. Thompson never ventured into the Puget Sound area. And he did not have the advantage of the Navy’s chronometers to determine longitude. They were far too fragile. He used 2 methods, each of which took many hours. The 1st was to use a telescope and to note the exact time of an eclipse of one of Jupiter’s moons – not an easy feat in the often-cloudy Northwest. The 2nd was to measure “lunar distance.” One measured the angle between the moon and 2 fixed stars, a procedure that took at least 3 hours for each record, lying on one’s back looking at the stars … when you walk 56,000 miles. They say history puts one asleep. In Thompson’s case this might have been true.
https://www.historylink.org/File/9010
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EccSnNgQP7c
https://lewis-clark.org/people/david-thompson/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Thompson_(explorer)
https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/thompson_david/
https://www.plc215.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Hudson-Bay-Company-the-Welsh.pdf
If David Thompson walked 10 miles a day through brush, mountains, streams, wind and rain, how many years of continuous walking would that have been?
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