Koo-koo Sint, the Stargazer

David Thompson was perhaps the greatest mapmaker who ever lived. During his lifetime he walked and paddled something in the range of 90,000 kilometres and mapped nearly five million square kilometres, about 20% of North America. He was the third to reach the Pacific, after Mackenzie (first) and Lewis and Clark (second).

Unlike most other white explorers, Thompson admired the First Nations, lived among them, and learned their languages and cultures. Among them he was famed for using celestial navigation and earned the name Koo-koo sint, “the Stargazer”. When he was 29 he married Charlotte Small, a metis girl of 13. Together they had thirteen children, five of them born while exploring. Their marriage lasted 57 years.

Thompson is one of my favourites on my list of 500 Famous Dropouts (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/500-dropouts-critical-lesson-professional-success-bowley-jd-llm-tbhze/?trackingId=erNKOvsQSQq%2FwmT2puKXHw%3D%3D) , his life a professional success but in many ways a personal failure. Notwithstanding his world-class achievements, he died blind and penniless, the inconsolable Charlotte dying of grief less than three months later.

There is much for professionals to learn from Thompson, both “what to do” and “what not to do”.

Thompson was born in abject poverty in Westminster, England, the son of recent Welsh immigrants. His father died when David was just two years old and his mother, unable to raise him, placed him in an institution for destitute children. Soon he excelled at mathematics, navigation and surveying.

When he was fourteen he was recruited by the Hudson’s Bay Company and became an apprentice fur trader at what is now Churchill, Manitoba. Before he was nineteen he’d had a serious fracture of the tibia, leaving him with a life-long limp, and lost the sight of his right eye, neither of which injuries was conducive to exploration and map-making.

In those days it was customary for the Company to present the completing apprentice with a gift of fine clothing. Thompson asked that, rather, he be given a set of surveying instruments. He was given both.

In 1797 the Company ordered him to stop surveying and concentrate on fur trading. In response, Thompson walked 130 kilometres through the snow to join the upstart competitor, the North West Company. Before long, in recognition of his contributions, he was made partner and sent again and again into the West to create maps of the plains, the mountains, and the coast, some of which remained in use into the 20th Century, so great was their detail and accuracy.

Like all professionals who excel, Thompson was keenly aware of his Giftings, and focused relentlessly on them, sometimes at high personal cost. He sought training wherever he could get it and allied himself with those who could support and complement his work. And notwithstanding the rigors and hardships, he threw himself back into the work again and again, some would say addictively, because it energized him as much as it enthralled him. Like nearly every great professional, he couldn’t imagine doing anything else. It was a joy, not a job.

Thompson cared for his family and cared for the First Nations people among whom he lived, but he did not care enough for himself. Among other things, he invested poorly and squandered his lifetime earnings and shares of the company, spending his last years dependent on the largess of others and dying penniless. He died estranged from his oldest son. Destitute, he sold his maps to a publishing house for a pittance, and they promptly removed his name and inserted their own, robbing Thompson of the recognition he deserved.

I recognise too much of myself in David Thompson, although I am not as accomplished. Thompson was world-class in his achievements, but as a loner and a dreamer, failed to take counsel on important matters outside his own expertise. That cost him not only the comfort he deserved in his later years, but also the recognition.

So, yes, while it’s absolutely essential for professional greatness to focus sharply on one’s Giftings, we can never forget that there’s a whole other dimension to our lives in which we won’t have the skills necessary to excel. Particularly for loners and dreamers, the need is critical to surround ourselves with trustworthy individuals who are Gifted in their own right but in areas where we lack the capacity, the time, or the inclination to pay sufficient attention.