By Susan Noakes, CBC News
Consider David Thompson, the boy taken from a charity home in London in 1784 to work for the Hudson’s Bay Co. in the New World.
He loses the sight in one eye to snowblindness while wintering on the shores of Hudson’s Bay and breaks a leg that heals badly, leaving him with a limp. Yet he walks and paddles across Canada several times, learns numerous First Nations languages and records thousands of pages about everything that met his eye during his travels – from native customs to the habits of polar bears and the way ice crystals form at different temperatures.
Thompson’s story is the leaping-off point for Kanata, the first novel by Toronto writer Don Gillmor. Gillmor has been a magazine journalist, children’s author and creator of nonfiction (including the family memoir The Desire of Every Living Thing). He came across Thompson’s writings while researching the book Canada: A People’s History, a companion volume to the 2000-2001 CBC-TV series.
Read full book review on The CBC.
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