1674-1685
IF RADISSON CAN DO WITHOUT THE ADVENTURERS, THE ADVENTURERS CANNOT DO
WITHOUT RADISSON—THE ERUPTION OF THE FRENCH ON THE BAY—THE BEGINNING OF
THE RAIDERS
While Radisson became once more a man without habitat or country, the
Hudson’s Bay Adventurers were in the very springtime of wonderful
prosperity. Despite French interlopers coming overland from the St.
Lawrence, the ships of 1679 brought home cargoes totaling 10,500
beaver, 1,100 marten, 200 otter, 700 elk and a vast quantity of such
smaller furs as muskrat and ermine. Cash to the value of half the
Company’s capital lay in the strong box as a working fund, and by 1681
dividends to the value of just twice the Company’s stock had been paid
to the shareholders. The first speculation in the stock began about
this time, the shares changing hands at an advance of 33 per cent.
and a new lot of shareholders coming in, among whom was the famous
architect—Christopher Wrenn. At this time, too, one, Mr. Phillips, was
expelled as a shareholder for attempting to conduct a private trade
through members of the crews. Prince Rupert continued to be governor
till the time of his death, in 1682, when James, Duke of York, was
chosen to succeed. At first, the governing committee had met only
before the ships sailed and after they returned. Committee meetings
were now held two or three times a week, a payment of 6s 8d being made
to each man for attendance, a like amount being levied as a fine for
absence, the fines to be kept in a Poor Box for the benefit of the
service.
Bayly, who had been governor on the south coast of Hudson’s Bay, when
Radisson left, now came home in health broken from long exposure, to
die at Mr. Walker’s house on the Strand, whence he was buried with
full military honors, the crew of _The John and Alexander_ and the
Adventurers marching by “torch light” to St. Paul’s Churchyard.
Hudson Bay—let it be repeated—can be compared in size only to the
Mediterranean. One governor could no more command all the territory
bordering it than one ruler could govern all the countries bordering
the Mediterranean. Nixon was commissioned to succeed Bayly as governor
of the South Shore—namely of Rupert and Moose Rivers, territory
inland about the size of modern Germany, which the new governor was
supposed to keep in order with a force of sixteen men from the crew
of _The John and Alexander_ and garrison of eight men at each of the
two forts—thirty-two men in all, serving at salaries ranging from $60
(£12) to $100 (£20) a year, to police a barbarous pre-historic Germany;
and the marvel is, they did it. Crime was almost unknown. Mr. Nixon’s
princely salary as governor, poohbah, potentate, was £200 a year, and
it is ordered, May, 1680, “that a cask of canary be sent out as a
present to Governor Nixon.”
On the West Coast, it will be remembered, Lyddell had gone out as
governor. That vague “West Coast”—though the Adventurers did not know
it—meant a region the size of Russia. Lyddell was now succeeded by
Sargeant, the bluffest, bravest, halest, heartiest of governors that
ever donned the gold lace and pompous insignia of the Adventurers.
Sargeant’s garrison never at any time numbered more than forty and
usually did not exceed twelve. His fort was on an island at the mouth
of Albany River, some one hundred miles north of Moose. It will be
recalled that Radisson had traveled three hundred miles farther up
the west coast to Port Nelson. The Company now decided to appoint
a governor for that region, too, and John Bridgar was commissioned
to go out in 1682 with Captain Gillam on the ship _Prince Rupert_—a
bad combination, these two, whose chief qualification seemed to be
swashbuckler valor, fearlessness of the sea, ability to break the
heads of their men and to drown all remorse pottle deep in liquor.
How did they rule, these little potentates of the wilds? With all the
circumstance and pomp of war, couriers running beforehand when they
traveled, drums beating, flags flying, muskets and cannon roaring
salutes, a bugler tootling to the fore of a governor dressed in
gaudiest regimentals, a line of white servants marching behind, though
they were so poor they wore Indian garb and had in their hearts the
hatred of the hireling for a tyrant; for over them the Company had
power of life and death without redress. All very absurd, it seems, at
this long distant time, but all very effective with the Indians, who
mistook noise for power and display for greatness.
By royal edict, privateers were forbidden to go to Hudson Bay, whether
from England or New England. Instead of two small ships borrowed from
the Admiralty, the Adventurers now had four of their own and two
chartered yearly—_The Prudent Mary_, and _Albermarle_ frigate and
_Colleton_ yacht outward bound, _The Prince Rupert_ and _John and
Alexander_ and _Shaftsbury_—which was wrecked—homeward bound, or _vice
versa_. And there began to come into Company’s records, grand old names
of grand old mariners—Vikings of the North—Mike Grimmington, who began
before the mast of _The Albemarle_ at thirty shillings a month, and
Knight, of whose tragic fate more anon, and Walker, who came to blows
with Governor Sargeant, outward bound. Those were not soft days for
soft men. They were days of the primordial when the best man slept in
his fighting gear and the victory went to the strong.
When Captain James had come out to follow up Hudson’s discoveries, he
had left his name to James Bay and discovered Charlton Island, some
forty miles from the South Shore. Now that the Company had so many
ships afloat, Charlton Island became the rendezvous. The ships, that
were to winter on the bay, went to their posts, but to Charlton Island
came the cargoes for those homeward bound.
* * * * *
To Port Nelson, then, came Governor Bridgar on _The Prince Rupert_ with
Captain Gillam, in August, of 1682. Mike Grimmington is now second
mate. Gillam must have been to Port Nelson before on trading ventures,
but Governor Bridgar’s commission was to establish that fort which
for two centuries was to be the battleground of Northern traders and
may yet be the great port of Northern commerce. The whole region was
called Nelson after Admiral Button’s mate, but it was to become better
known as Fort Bourbon, when possessed by the French; as York, when it
repassed to the English.
Shifting shoals of sand-drift barred the sea from the main coast for
ten miles north and south, but across the shoals were gaps visible
at low tide, through which the current broke with the swiftness of a
river. Gillam ordered small boats out to sound and stake the ship’s
course by flags erected in the sand at half tide. Between these flags,
_The Prince Rupert_ slowly moved inland. Inside the sand-bar, the coast
was seen to be broken by the mouths of two great rivers—either one
a miniature St. Lawrence, on the north the Nelson, on the south the
Hayes. It was on the Hayes to the south that the Adventurers finally
built their fur post, but Bridgar and Gillam now pushed _The Prince
Rupert’s_ carved prow slowly up the northern river, the Nelson. The
stream was wide with a tremendous current and low, swampy, wooded
banks. Each night sails were reefed and men sent ashore to seek a good
site or sign of Indians. Night after night during the whole month of
September, John Calvert, Robert Braddon, Richard Phineas, Robert Sally
and Thomas Candy punted in and out of the coves along the Nelson,
lighting bonfires, firing muskets, spying the shore for footstep of
native. On the ship, Bridgar ordered the cannon fired as signals to
distant Indians and for the first time in history the roar of heavy
guns rolled across the swamps. Winter began to close in early. Ice
was forming. Nipping frosts had painted the swamp woods in colors of
fire. One afternoon toward October when _The Prince Rupert_ was some
seventeen miles from the sand-bar, gliding noiselessly with full-blown
sails before a gentle wind, the smoke of an Indian signal shot skyward
from the south shore.
In vain Bridgar fired muskets all that afternoon and waved flags,
to call the savages to the ship. A solitary figure, seeming to be a
spy, emerged from the brushwood, gazing stolidly at the apparition
of the ship. Presently, two or three more figures were discovered
moving through the swamp. The next morning Governor Bridgar ordered
the gig-boat lowered, and accompanied by Gillam and an escort of six
sailors—rowed ashore. First impressions count much with the Indians. On
such occasion, Hudson’s Bay Company officers never failed of pompous
ostentation—profusion of gold lace, cocked hats for officers, colored
regimentals for underlings, a bugler to the fore, or a Scotchman
blowing his bagpipes, with a show of burnished firearms and helmets.
On rowed the gig-boat toward the imperturbable figure on the shore.
Some paces out, the boat grated bottom and stuck in the sand. A sailor
had jumped to mid-waist in water to drag the craft in, when the stolid
figure on the sand suddenly came to life. With a leap, leveled musket
covering the incoming boat, the man had bounded to the water’s edge and
in purest English shouted—“Halt!”
“We are Hudson’s Bay Company men,” protested Bridgar standing up.
“But I,” answered the figure, “am Radisson, and I hold possession of
_all_ this region for France.”
If the Frenchman had been Vesuvius suddenly erupted under some idling
tourists, or if a ghost arisen from the ground, the English could not
have been more astonished. They had thought they had finished with
the troublesome Frenchman, and behold him, here, in possession with a
musket leveled at their heads and three men commanding ambushed forces
behind.
With a show of hollow courage, Bridgar asked permission to land
and salute the commander of the French forces. One can guess with
what love, they fell on each other’s necks. Radisson’s courage rose
recklessly as if the danger had been so much wine. These three men were
his officers, he said. His fort was some distance away. He had two
ships but expected more. How many men had he? Ah, there his English
failed, but his broken French conveyed the impression of forces that
could wipe the English out of existence. Gillam and Bridgar, who could
not speak one word of French, looked glum enough. To test this brave
show of valor, they invited him on board _The Prince Rupert_ to dine.
Radisson accepted with an alacrity that disarmed suspicion, but he took
the precaution of inviting two English sailors to remain on shore with
his French followers. What yarns were spun over the mess room table of
_The Prince Rupert_ that day! Radisson enquired for all his own friends
of London, and Bridgar in turn heard what Radisson had been doing in
the French navy all these eight years. Who knew Port Nelson better than
Radisson? They asked him about the current of the river. He advised
them to penetrate no farther for fear of a clash with the French forces
and to forbid their men marauding inland in order to avoid trouble with
the Indians.
[Illustration: Copy of Robson’s drawing of York Harbor. The positions
of Radisson’s fort, Ben Gillam’s Island and the H. B. C. ship are
written in.]
Could any one guess that the astute Frenchman, boasting of ships and so
recklessly quaffing toasts at the table of his enemies—was defenseless
and powerless in their hands? His fort was not on this river but on
the Hayes across the swamp to the south—a miserable collection of
log shacks with turf roofs, garrisoned by a mere handful of mutinous
sailors. His fear was not that the English would clash with the
French forces, but that they would learn how weak he was. And another
discovery added the desperation of recklessness to the game. Radisson
and Groseillers had come to the bay but a month before on two miserable
ships with twenty-seven men. Musketry firing had warned Radisson of
some one else at Port Nelson. Twenty-six miles up Nelson River on
Gillam Island, he had discovered to his amazement, poachers who were
old acquaintances—Ben Gillam, son of the Company’s captain, with John
Outlaw, come in _The Bachellors’ Delight_ from Boston, on June 21, to
poach on the Company’s fur preserve. It was while canoeing down stream
from the discovery of the poachers that Radisson ran full-tilt into
the Company’s ship. Here, then, was a pretty dilemma—two English ships
on the same river not twenty miles apart, the French south across the
swamp not a week’s journey away. Radisson was trapped, if they had
but known. His only chance was to keep _The Prince Rupert_ and _The
Bachellors’ Delight_ apart, and to master them singly.
If Bridgar had realized Radisson’s plight, the Frenchman would have
been clapped under hatches in a twinkle, but he was allowed to leave
_The Prince Rupert_. Bridgar beached his ships on the flats and
prepared to build winter quarters. Ten days later, Radisson dropped
in again, “to drink health,” as he suavely explained, introducing
common sailors as officers and firing off muskets to each cup quaffed,
to learn whether the Company kept soldiers “on guard in case of a
surprise.” Governor Bridgar was too far gone in liquor to notice the
trick, but Captain Gillam rushed up the decks of _The Prince Rupert_
with orders for the French to begone. Gillam and Radisson had been
enemies from the first. Gillam was suspicious. Therefore, it behooved
Radisson to play deeper. The next time he came to the ship he was
accompanied by the Captain’s son, Ben, the poacher, dressed as a
bushranger. There was reason enough now for the old captain to keep his
crew from going farther up the river. If Ben Gillam were discovered in
illicit trade, it meant ruin to both father and son. When some of his
crew remarked the resemblance of the supposed bushranger to the absent
son, Captain Gillam went cold with fright.
Falsity, intrigue, danger, were in the very air. It lacked but the
spark to cause the explosion; and chance supplied the spark.
Two of the Company men ranging for game came on young Gillam’s ship.
They dashed back breathless to Governor Bridgar with word that there
was a strange fort only a few miles away. Bridgar thought this must
be the French fort, and Captain Gillam had not courage to undeceive
him. Scouts were sent scurrying. Those scouts never returned. They had
been benighted in a howling blizzard and as chance would have it, were
rescued by Radisson’s spies. While he waited for their return, worse
disaster befell Bridgar. Storm and ice set the tide driving in Nelson
River like a whirlpool. _The Prince Rupert_ was jammed, ripped, crushed
like an eggshell and sunk with loss of all provisions and fourteen men,
including old Captain Gillam. Mike Grimmington, the mate, escaped.
Governor Bridgar was left destitute and naked to the enemy without
either food or ammunition for the remainder of his crew to face the
winter. The wretched man seems to have saved nothing from the wreck but
the liquor, and in this he at once proceeded to drown despair. It was
Radisson who came to his rescue. Nothing more was to be feared from
Bridgar. Therefore, the Frenchman sent food to the servants of his
former friends. Without his aid, the entire Hudson’s Bay crew would
have perished.
Cooped up in the deplorable rabbit hutches that did duty as barracks,
and constantly besotted with liquor, Governor Bridgar was eking out a
miserable winter when he was electrified by another piece of chance
news. A thunderous rapping awakened the cabin one winter night.
When the door was opened, there stumbled in a disheveled, panting
Scotchman with an incoherent plea for help. The French were attacking
Ben Gillam’s fort. For the first time, Bridgar learned that the fort
up stream was _not_ French but English—the fort of Ben Gillam, the
poacher; and all his pot valor resolved on one last, desperate cast
of the dice. To be sure, the other ship was a poacher; but she was
English. If Bridgar united with her, he might beat Radisson. He would
at least have a ship to escape to the Company’s forts at the lower end
of Hudson Bay, or to England. Also, he owed his own and his crew’s life
to Radisson; but he owed his services to the Company, and the Company
could best be served by treachery to Radisson and alliance with that
scalawag sailor adventurer—Ben Gillam, whose ship sailed under as many
names as a pirate and showed flags as various as the seasons. Better
men than Bridgar forced to choose between the scalawag with the dollar
and honor with ruin, have chosen the scalawag with the dollar.
Men sent out as scouts came back with unsatisfactory tales of having
failed to capture Ben Gillam’s ship, but they were loaded with food
for Bridgar from Radisson. Bridgar only waited till spies reported
that Radisson had left Gillam’s fort to cross the marsh to French
headquarters. Then he armed his men—cutlass, bludgeon, such muskets
as Radisson’s ammunition rendered available—and set out. It was a
forced tramp in midwinter through bitter cold. The men were an ill-clad
rabble. They were unused to this cold with frost that glittered sharp
as diamond-points, and had not yet learned snowshoe travel over the
rolling drifts. Frost-bitten, plunging to their armpits in snow, they
followed the iced river bed by moonlight and sometime before dawn
presented themselves at the main gate of Ben Gillam’s palisaded fort.
Never doubting but Gillam’s sentry stood inside, Bridgar knocked. The
gate swung open before a sleepy guard. In rushed Bridgar’s men. Bang
went the gates shut. In the confusion of half-light and frost smoke,
armed men surrounded the English. Bridgar was trapped in his own trap.
Not Gillam’s men manned the poacher’s fort, but Radisson’s French
sailors. Ben Gillam and his crew had long since been captured and
marched across the swamp to French headquarters. Bridgar and his crew
were the prisoners of the French in the poacher’s fort.
The rest of the winter of 1682-83 belongs to the personal history of
Radisson and is told in his life. Between despair and drink, Bridgar
was a madman. Radisson carried him to the French fort on Hayes River,
whence in a few weeks he was released on parole to go back to his own
rabbit hutch of a barracks. When spring came, between poachers and
Company men, the French had more English prisoners than they knew what
to do with. To make matters worse, one of the French boats had been
wrecked in the ice jam. It was decided to send some of the English
prisoners on the remaining boat to Moose and Rupert River at the south
end of the bay, and to carry the rest on the poacher _Bachellors’
Delight_ to Quebec. Outlaw and some of the other poachers would take
no chance of going back to New England to be arrested as pirates.
They went in _The Ste. Anne_ to the foot of James Bay and joined the
Hudson’s Bay Company. Bridgar, too, was to have gone to his company’s
forts on James Bay, but at the last moment he pretended to fear the
ice floes on such a slender craft and asked to go with Radisson on
_The Bachellors’ Delight_ to Quebec. Giving the twelve refugees on
_The Ste. Anne_ each four pounds of beef, two bushels of oatmeal and
flour, Radisson dispatched them for the forts of James Bay on August
14th. He had already set fire to Bridgar’s cabins on Nelson River
and destroyed the poachers’ fort on Gillam Island, Bridgar, himself,
asking permission to set the flame to Ben Gillam’s houses. Leaving
Groseillers’ son, Chouart, with seven Frenchmen to hold possession of
Port Nelson, Radisson set sail with his prisoners on _The Bachellors’
Delight_. A few miles out, a friendly Englishman warned him of
conspiracy. Bridgar and Ben Gillam were plotting a mutiny to cut the
throats of all the Frenchmen and return to put the garrison at Port
Nelson to the sword; so when Bridgar asked for the gig-boat to attempt
going six hundred miles to the forts at the south end of the bay,
Radisson’s answer was to order him under lock the rest of the voyage.
At Quebec, profound disappointment awaited Radisson. Frontenac had
given place to De la Barre as governor of New France, and De la Barre
knew that a secret treaty existed between France and England. He would
lend no countenance to Radisson’s raid. _The Bachellors’ Delight_ was
restored to young Gillam and Radisson ordered to France to report all
he had done. Young Gillam was promptly arrested in Boston for poaching
on Hudson Bay. Within a few years, he had turned pirate in earnest, or
been driven to piracy by the monopolistic laws that gave every region
for trade to some special favorite of the English crown. About the time
Captain Kidd of pirate fame was arrested at Boston, one Gillam of _The
Prudent Sarah_ was arrested, too. By wrenching off his handcuffs and
filing out the bars of his prison window with the iron of the handcuff,
Gillam almost escaped. He was leaping out of the prison window on old
Court Street when the bayonet of a guard prodded him back. With Captain
Kidd, he was taken to England and tried for crimes on the high seas.
There, he drops from history.
[Illustration: Silver Fox Skins, Trapped by Hunters in the Employment
of J. K. Cornwall, Lesser Slave Lake Athabasca.]
As for Bridgar, he no sooner whiffed Governor De la Barre’s fear of
consequences for what Radisson had done, than he set two worlds ringing
with vauntings of the vengeance England would take. Putting through
drafts on the Hudson’s Bay Company for money, he hired interpreters,
secretaries, outriders, and assumed pomp that would have done credit to
a king’s ambassador. Sailing to New England with Ben Gillam, he cut a
similar swath from Boston to New York, riding like a Jehu along the old
post road in a noisy endeavor to rehabilitate his own dignity. Then he
sailed for England where condign humiliation lay in wait. The Company
was furious. They refused to honor his drafts and would not pay him one
penny’s salary from the day he had surrendered to Radisson. The wages
of the captured servants, the Company honored in full, even the wages
of the dead in the wreck of _The Prince Rupert_. Bridgar was retained
in the service, but severely reprimanded.
_Notes on Chapter IX._—Practically the entire contents of this chapter
are taken from the documents in Hudson’s Bay House, London. Details
of the Company’s affairs are from the Minute Books, of the fracas
with Radisson, from the affidavits of John Outlaw, who first went
to the bay as a poacher with young Gillam, and from the affidavits of
Bridgar’s crew.
It has always been a matter of doubt whether Gillam Sr. survived the
wreck of _The Prince Rupert_. The question is settled by the fact that
his wages are “payable to an attorney for his heirs.” If he had lived,
it was ordered that he was to be arrested for complicity in piracy with
his son.
The ultimate fate of Ben Gillam I found in the Shaftesbury collection
of papers bearing on Captain Kidd. His name is variously given as
“William” and “James,” but I think there can be little doubt of his
identity from several coincidences. In the first place, the Gillam
whom Mr. Randolph arrested for piracy (and was given a present by the
Company for so doing) was the Gillaum later arrested in connection
with Captain Kidd. Also Gillam’s boat was known under a variety of
names—_Bachellors’ Delight_, _Prudent Sarah_, and the master of _The
Prudent Sarah_ was arrested in connection with Captain Kidd. The
minutes of the Hudson’s Bay Company show that the Boston owners of
Gillam’s boat sued for the loss of this trip against the Hudson’s Bay
Company, and lost their suit. This was the first test of the legality
of the Hudson’s Bay Company monopoly, and the courts upheld it.
Radisson’s life as given in _Pathfinders of the West_ and _Heralds of
Empire_ affords fuller details of the fray from the Frenchman’s point
of view. It is remarkable how slightly his record differs from the
account as contained in the official affidavits.
As to the distance of Charlton Island from the main coast—it puzzled me
how the sailing directions for the ships that were to rendezvous there
gave the distance of the island from the main coast as anything from
twenty to eighty miles. The explanation is the point on the south coast
that is considered.