David Thompson. Tom Shardlow

life of London’s poor. Most orphans were street urchins, stealing and scavenging to eat and hiding to escape the law. Without family support they were guttersnipes and fell easy prey to London’s unsavoury underworld. David, poor and without a father, was among the usual candidates for the gallows, but at Grey Coat, charity had intervened.

      The boy washed smuts from the outside windows and front door of his school. Armed with a rag and a pail of cold water, he carefully scrubbed the door’s wooden panels. He even worked his wet cloth into the corners of the iron hinges in a futile effort to remove the stains. The insidious black fallout from the city’s innumerable coal fires coated everything. It darkened the stone fences, iron gates, and headstones of church graveyards. It coated the walls of Westminster Abbey and settled on the ramshackle hovels of Whitechapel. The soot leached from wet cobble of the market square and drained into black pools in dark alleyways. It shrouded the palace rooftop and stained the backs of white horses pulling fine carriages. It settled on docks and painted warships tied in the river Everything was blackened. On bad days the city’s airborne fume even crept into the school and into the fabric of his clothing.

      Worse yet, it blotted the pages of his schoolbooks. After wiping each windowpane, he wrung his rag out onto the cobble. He was careful to keep the splash, now mixed with the street’s horse dung, from soiling his newly washed uniform. But this was impossible. The small thirteen-year-old boy was jostled and nudged in the crowded street by a troupe of jugglers rushing from the market square. He spilled dirty wash water onto his white leggings, yet still he hurried to finish the windows. Now he needed enough time to wash out his clothes before the school assembled for the evening meal.

      Cleanliness was essential at Grey Coat. Keeping clean prevented the cane, and anything that helped avoid a painful beating from that stiff rod was worth the attempt. The “rod of chastisement,” as it was sometimes called, was not really a rod or a cane, the orphans reasoned, trying to comfort themselves, but only a dried willow branch. It measured a metre long and was just thicker than the big finger on the headmaster’s podgy hands. The cane was worn smooth from its use on the backs and hands of schoolboys who were found unclean or who broke a rule. And yet, this school may have been only slightly less forgiving than other Charity Schools in the year 1783, and David knew he was fortunate to be here. These few boys, including David, must have felt transported, as if by divine intervention, into another world.

      Within Grey Coat’s secure walls, the boys were able to share in the best their era had to offer. Under the tutelage of the school’s knowledgeable clergy, they found themselves to be living in the age of the Enlightenment. They learned of famous Englishmen like Edward Jenner, who had originated a technique he called vaccination, which prevented the dreaded disease smallpox. They heard about the astronomer Edmond Haley, who predicted the coming of comets and forecasted heavenly events that, until then, were only known to the Almighty. They knew James Watt was developing an engine powered by steam. Thomas Adams, a favourite teacher, took them to street demonstrations like the one on the new phenomenon called electricity. The boys saw the first simple generators produce loud cracklings and sparks that ignited trays of heated spirits to the cheers and amazement of onlookers.

      Grey Coat’s training emphasized mathematics, astronomy, and maritime studies used for navigation. The school was preparing its students for service in His Majesty’s Navy. The boys were taught about the Royal Society and they learned of John Harrison, whose chronometer was revolutionizing navigation. The students were enthralled by the accounts of Captain Cook who, with sextant and compass, had recently charted unknown Pacific waters. They fantasized that one day, they too might be part of some new exploration. But their reality was, at best, a future in the navy. The navy was in constant need of replacements for those lost in battle, and it was difficult to recruit sailors with enough education to help navigate a fighting ship. Davids chances of becoming an explorer were as remote to him as the throne of England.

      Before supper there was an assembly for inspection, and the headmaster examined each boy to look for unwashed hands or soiled shirts. Either infraction could mean no supper and often a caning for good measure. Discipline at the school was harsh, but applied according to the customs of the day. After supper, the orphans sat studying at wooden tables. This was where they spent most of their time when they weren’t cleaning windows, sweeping halls, or scrubbing potatoes. They had little time to do anything else, but sometimes, secretly, using a ruler as a cutlass and a candle as a pistol, they played at quelling mutinies and skewering Spaniards. Some were destined to become midshipmen and would have a chance, although a remote one, of becoming junior ship’s officers like some other Grey Coat boys before them. They were told the King needed trained officers to repress the revolt in the American colonies and to quiet uprisings in India. They would be ready.

      For David, now in his final year at Grey Coat, these promises of the navy seemed distant. It had all changed, he remembered, on that cold morning last January. David and Sam had stood nervously in front of the headmaster’s desk. Neither boy was sure why he had been summoned. David half expected a caning, and his mind raced over recent events as he tried to think of what infraction he could have committed. They were seniors, and he knew they would be sent off to sea by summertime. But that was still months away. Just the same, he quietly hoped this was their call to join the navy as midshipmen or, even better, as expedition crew members.

      “Master Thompson. Master McPherson,” the headmaster barked from his high-backed chair. “The Navy Board has informed me that with peace again this year, they will not be in need of Grey Coat boys at this time. However, the school has made a generous payment of five pounds sterling to the Hudson’s Bay Company for each of you. I have accordingly arranged that you both shall be taken into that company’s care and service. You will be apprentice clerks to the fur trade and posted in the New World for seven years. I trust you will find Rupert’s Land agreeable and will represent your school well.”

      The headmaster’s words could not have been more disappointing. David was heartbroken, but he knew there was no use in complaining. He remained silent.

      “There is plenty of time to prepare before you are to be taken to the Hudson’s Bay ship, Prince Rupert. Your vessel doesn’t depart till June, which is six months from now.”

      The headmaster rose from his chair, reached forward, and briefly shook both boys’ hands. “Be sure you are ready and God be with you.”

      Six months was a long time to brood over their disappointment. For Sam, it was too long. He had slipped off quietly in the night, choosing the perilous life of a London street orphan over the uncertain fate waiting for him on the frozen shores of Rupert’s Land. David knew the cruel streets of London as well as any of the boys did. He hoped Sam would change his mind and somehow find his way to the Prince Rupert before she sailed. David put these memories and these hopes from his mind and returned to his books.

      There were only eighteen to twenty days out of a year that David and the other boys were allowed time of their own. Most often David spent his free time in the old abbey at Westminster where Grey Coat housed its students. There, in one of the many ancient stonewalled cloisters, he could curl up and read. He loved reading adventure books like Gulliver’s Travels, Arabian Tales , and Robinson Crusoe. Books like these were scarce, and the few the school had were only there by the good will of charitable donors.

      From the abbey he sometimes walked to nearby London Bridge or St. James’s Park. If he felt adventurous, he could find his way across the market square in the morning when the rumble of wooden handcarts and the crow of roosters were just beginning. Vendors would be starting to set up stations with live poultry and fresh produce stands. He could bump past a cheesemonger arranging his stall and, leaving the market, slip down narrow lanes. He could wander toward the docksides where the morning fog from the river was pungent and still held the scent of the night before. It was thick with the smell of alcohol and stale tobacco that drifted from empty drinking cellars and alehouses. The stench of urine seeped out of dark alcoves and slatternly lanes. The docksides were a place of violence and misery, notorious for drunkards, thieves, and press gangs, but early morning would find most incapacitated or asleep. Yet, some would lay on doorsteps and others