Her Majesty’s Archers

In August 1822, Captain Henry Bayfield, an astute and meticulous surveyor in the service of the Royal Navy, was at work mapping all of Lake Huron, in the course of which useful endeavour the twenty-seven-year-old delineated a kind of sixth “great lake” and christened it Georgian Bay, in honour of the British sovereign, George IV.

At almost the same moment as that vast body, filled with fresh water and beautiful islands, was being so named, another vast body, this time comprising the dissipated blubber and stretched flesh that constituted the consecrated mortal frame of the King himself, was en route to Scotland for the first state visit by a reigning monarch since Charles II travelled north in 1651. There to greet George IV and to orchestrate the entire procession through the northern realm was the novelist Sir Walter Scott, who more or less created out of the subsequent royal...