CHAPTER XIV

1688-1710

WHAT BECAME OF RADISSON? NEW FACTS ON THE LAST DAYS OF THE FAMOUS

PATHFINDER

What became of Radisson? It seems impossible that the man, who set

France and England by the ears for a century, and led the way to the

pathfinding of half America, should have dropped so completely into

oblivion that not a scrap is recorded concerning the last twenty-five

years of his life. Was he run to earth by the bailiffs of London, like

Thackeray’s “Virginian?” Or did he become the lion tamed, the eagle

with its wings clipped, to be patronized by supercilious nonentities?

Or did he die like Ledyard of a heart broken by hope deferred?

Radisson, the boy, slim and swarth as an Indian, running a mad race for

life through mountain torrents that would throw his savage pursuers

off the trail—we can imagine; but not Radisson running from a London

bailiff. Leading flotillas of fur brigades up the Ottawa across Lake

Superior to the Great Northwest—he is a familiar figure, but not

stroked and petted and patronized by the frowzy duchesses of Charles

the Second’s slovenly court. Yet from the time Radisson ceased to come

to Hudson Bay during Iberville’s raids, he drops as completely out of

history as if he had been lost in Milton’s Serbonian Bog. One historian

describes him as assassinated in Quebec, another as dying destitute.

Both statements are guesses, but from the dusty records of the Hudson’s

Bay Company—many of them undisturbed since Radisson’s time—can be

gleaned a complete account of the game pathfinder’s life to the time of

his death.

The very front page of the first minute book kept by the Company,

contains account of Radisson—an order for Alderman Portman to pay

Radisson and Groseillers £5 a year for expenses—chiefly wine and fresh

fruit, as later entries show. There were present at this meeting of

the Company, adventurers of as romantic a glamor as Robert Louis

Stevenson’s heroes or a Captain Kidd. There was the Earl of Craven,

married to the Queen of Bohemia. There was Ashley, ambitious for the

earldom that came later, and with the reputation that “he would rob the

devil, himself, and the church altars.” It was Ashley, when Chancellor

of the Exchequer, who charged a bribe of £100 to every man appointed

in the government services, though he concealed his peculations

under stately manners and gold lace. Notoriety was the stock in trade

of the court beauties at that time, and Ashley’s wife earned public

notice by ostentatiously driving in a glass coach that was forever

splintering in collision with some other carriage or going to bits

over the clumsy cobblestones. Old Sir George Carterett of New Jersey

was now treasurer of the Navy. Sir John Robinson was commander of the

Tower. Griffith was known as the handsome dandy of court balls. Sir

John Kirke, the Huguenot, was a royal pensioner of fighting blood,

whose ancestors had captured Quebec. The meeting of the Hudson’s Bay

Adventurers was held at the house of Sir Robert Viner, Lord Mayor of

London, renowned for the richest wife, the finest art galleries, the

handsomest conservatories in England. It was to Viner’s that Charles

the Second came with his drunken crew to fiddle and muddle and run the

giddy course, that danced the Stuart’s off the throne. Mr. Young was a

man of fashion as well as a merchant, so famous for amateur acting that

he often took the place of the court actors at a moment’s notice.

[Illustration:

Radisson’s House on Seething Lane in 1679. (1) St. Olave Hart’s Church;

(2) Radisson’s House: (3) Pepys’ House. ]

These were Radisson’s associates, the Frenchman’s friends when he

came to London fresh from the wilderness in his thirtieth year with

the exploration of the North and the West to his credit. None knew

better than he, the money value of his discoveries. And Radisson

knew the way to this land. By the lifting of his hand, he could turn

this wealth into the coffers of the court adventurers. If the fur

trade was a gamble—and everything on earth was gamble in the reign

of Charles—Radisson held the winning cards. The gamesters of that

gambling age gathered round him like rooks round a pigeon, to pick

his pockets—politely and according to the codes of good breeding, of

course—and to pump his brain of every secret, that could be turned

into pounds sterling—politely, also, of course. Very generous, very

pleasant, very suave of fair promises were the gay adventurers, but

withal slippery as the finery of their silk ruffles or powdered

periwigs.

Did Radisson keep his head? Steadier heads have gone giddy with the

sudden plunge from wilderness ways to court pomp. Sir James Hayes,

Prince Rupert’s secretary, declares in a private document that the

French explorer at this time “_deluded_ the daughter of Sir John Kirke

into secretly marrying him,” so that Radisson may have been caught in

the madcap doings of the court dissipations when no rake’s progress was

complete unless he persuaded some errant damsel to jump over the back

wall and elope, though there was probably no hindrance in the world to

ordinary lovers walking openly out of the front door and being married

properly. The fact that Radisson was a penniless adventurer and a

Catholic, while his bride was the daughter of a rich Puritan, may have

been the explanation of the secrecy, if indeed, there is any truth at

all in the rumor repeated by Hayes.

For seven years after he came to London, the love of wilderness places,

of strange new lands, clung to Radisson. He spent the summers on Hudson

Bay for the Company, opening new forts, cruising up the unknown coasts,

bartering with new tribes of Indians, and while not acting as governor

of any fur post, seems to have been a sort of general superintendent,

to keep check on the Company’s officers and prevent fraud, for when the

cargoes arrived at Portsmouth, orders were given for the Captains not

to stir without convoy to come to the Thames, but for “_Mr. Radisson

to take horse_” and ride to London with the secret reports. During the

winters in London, Sir John Robinson of the Tower and Radisson attended

to the sales of the beaver, bought the goods for the next year’s

ships, examined the cannon that were to man the forts on the bay and

attended to the general business of the Company. Merchants, who were

shareholders, advanced goods for the yearly outfit. Other shareholders,

who owned ships, loaned or gave vessels for the voyage. Wages were

paid as money came in from the beaver sales. So far, Radisson and his

associates were share and share alike, all laying the foundations of a

future prosperity. Radisson and his brother-in-law drew from the beaver

sales during these seven years (1667-1673) £287, about $2,000 each for

living expenses.

But now came a change. The Company’s ships were bought and paid for,

the Company’s forts built and equipped—all from the sales of the

cargoes brought home under Radisson’s superintendence. Now that profits

were to be paid, what share was his? The King had given him a gold

chain and medal for his services, but to him the Company owed its

existence. What was his share to be? In a word, was he to be one of the

Adventurers or an outsider? Radisson had asked the Adventurers for an

agreement. Agreement? A year passed, Radisson hung on, living from hand

to mouth in London, receiving £10 one month, £2 the next, an average

of $5 a week, compelled to supplicate the Company for every penny he

needed—a very excellent arrangement for the Gentlemen Adventurers. It

compelled Radisson to go to them for favors, instead of their going

to Radisson; though from Radisson’s point of view, the boot may have

seemed to be on the wrong leg. Finally, as told in a preceding chapter

the committee met and voted him “£100 _per ann. from the time of his

arrival in London_, _and if it shall please God to bless this company

with good success_, _they will then resume the consideration of Mr.

Radisson_.” One hundred pounds was just half of one per cent. of the

yearly cargoes. It was the salary of the captains and petty governors

on the bay.

Radisson probably had his own opinion of a contract that was to depend

more on the will of Heaven than on the legal bond of his partners. He

quit England in disgust for the French navy. Then came the raids on

Nelson, the order of the French Court to return to England and his

resumption of service with the Hudson’s Bay Company up to the time

Iberville drove the English from the bay and French traders were not

wanted in the English service.

For changing his flag the last time, such abuse was heaped on Radisson

that the Hudson’s Bay Company was finally constrained to protest:

“_that the said Radisson doth not deserve those ill names the French

give him. If the English doe not give him all his Due, he may rely on

the justice of his cause._”

Indeed, the English company might date the beginning of the French

raids that harried their forts for a hundred years from Radisson’s

first raid at Port Nelson; but they did not foresee this.

The man was as irrepressible as a disturbed hornets’ nest—break up his

plans, and it only seemed to scatter them with wider mischief. How

the French Court ordered Radisson back to England has already been

told. He was the scapegoat for court intrigue. Nothing now was too

good for Radisson—with the English. The Adventurers presented him with

a purse “_for his extraordinary services to their great liking and

satisfaction_.” A dealer is ordered “_to keep Mr. Radisson in stock

of fresh provisions_,” and the Company desires “_that Mr. Radisson

shall have a hogshead of claret_” presumably to drown his memory of

the former treatment. My Lord Preston is given a present of furs for

persuading Radisson to return. So is “Esquire Young,” the gay merchant

of Cornhill, who was Radisson’s best friend in England, and Sir James

Hayes, who had been so furious against him only a few months before,

begs Monsieur to accept that silver tankard as a token of esteem from

the Adventurers (£10 4s, I found it cost by the account books.)

Only one doubt seemed to linger in the minds of the Company. In spite

of King Louis’ edict forbidding French interlopers on Hudson’s Bay,

secret instructions of an opposite tenor were directing Iberville’s

raiders overland. If Radisson was to act as superintendent on the bay,

chief councillor at Port Nelson, the Company must have bonds as well

as oath for his fidelity, and so the entry in the minute books of 1685

records: “_At this committee, Mons. Pierre Radisson signed and sealed

the covenants with the company, and signed a bond of £2,000 to perform

covenants with the company, dated 11 May.... Dwelling at the end of

Seething Lane in Tower Street._”

I think it was less than ten minutes from the time I found that entry

when I was over in Seething Lane. It is in a part of old London

untouched by the Great Fire running up from the famous road to the

Tower, in length not greater than between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, New

York. Opening off Great Tower Street, it ends at Crutched Friars. At

the foot of the lane is the old church of All Hallows Barking, whose

dial only was burned by the fire; at the top, the little antiquated

church of St. Olave Hart’s, whose motley architecture with leaning

walls dates from the days of the Normans. If Radisson lived “_at the

end of Seething Lane_,” his house must have been just opposite St.

Olave Hart’s, for the quaint church with its graveyard occupies the

entire left corner. In this lane dwelt the merchant princes of London.

Samuel Pepys, Secretary to the Navy, who thought his own style of

living “mighty fine”—as he describes it—preening and pluming himself

on the beautiful panels he had placed in his mansion, must have been a

near neighbor of Radisson’s; for in the diarist’s description of the

fire, he speaks of it coming to Barking Church “at the bottom of our

lane.” But a stone’s throw away is the Tower, in those days commanded

by Radisson’s friend, Sir John Robinson. The Kirkes, the Colletons,

Griffith the dandy of the balls, Sir Robert Viner, the rich Lord-Mayor;

Esquire Young of Cornhill—all had dwellings within a few minutes’ walk

of Seething Lane.

The whereabouts of Radisson in London explain how the journals of his

first four voyages were lost for exactly two hundred years and then

found in the Pepys Collection of the Bodleian Library. He had given

them either directly or through the mutual friend Carterett, to his

neighbor Pepys, who was a keen collector of all matter appertaining to

the navy, and after being lost for years, the Pepys Collection only

passed to the Bodleian in recent days.

The place where Radisson lived shows, too, that he was no back-stairs

sycophant hanging on the favor of the great, no beggarly renegade

hungry for the crumbs that fell from the tables of those merchant

princes. It proves Radisson a front-door acquaintance of the Gentlemen

Adventurers. Sir Christopher Wren, the famous architect who was a

share-holder in the Hudson’s Bay Company at this time, thought himself

well paid at £200 a year for superintending the building of St. Paul’s.

Radisson’s agreement on returning to the Adventurers from France,

was for a salary of £50 a year, paid quarterly, £50 paid yearly and

dividends—running as high as 50 per cent.—on £200 of stock—making in

all, practically the same income as a man of Wren’s standing.

Second-rate warehouses and dingy business offices have replaced the

mansions of the great merchants on Seething Lane, but the two old

churches stand the same as in the days of Radisson, with the massive

weather-stained stone work uncouth, as if built by the Saxons, inner

pillars and pointed arches showing the work of the Normans. Both have

an antique flavor as of old wine. The Past seems to reach forward and

touch you tangibly from the moldering brass plates on the walls, and

the flagstone of the aisles so very old the chiseled names of the

dead below are peeling off like paper. The great merchant princes—the

Colletons, the Kirkes, the Robinsons, Radisson’s friends—lie in effigy

around the church above their graves. It was to St. Olave’s across the

way, Pepys used to come to hear Hawkins, the great Oxford scholar,

also one of the Adventurers—preach; and a tablet tells where the body

of Pepys’ gay wife lies. From the walls, a memorial tablet to Pepys,

himself, smiles down in beplumed hat and curled periwig and velvet

cloak, perhaps that very cloak made in imitation of the one worn in

Hyde Park by the King and of which he was—as he writes—“so mighty

proud.” The roar of a world’s traffic beats against the tranquil

walls of the little church; but where sleeps Radisson, the Catholic

and alien, in this Babylon of hurrying feet? His friends and his

neighbors lie here, but the gravestones give no clue of him. Pepys,

the annalist of the age, with his gossip of court and his fair wife

and his fine clothes—thought Radisson’s voyages interesting enough as

a curio but never seems to have dreamed that the countries Radisson

discovered would become a dominant factor in the world’s progress when

that royal house on whose breath Pepys hung for favor as for life, lay

rotting in a shameful oblivion. If the dead could dream where they lie

forgotten, could Radisson believe his own dream—that the seas of the

world are freighted with the wealth of the countries he discovered;

that “_the country so pleasant, so beautiful ... so fruitful ... so

plentiful of all things_”—as he described the Great Northwest when he

first saw it—is now peopled by a race that all the nations of Europe

woo; that the hope of the empire, which ignored him when he lived, is

now centered on “that fair and fruitful and pleasant land” which he

discovered?

For ten years Radisson continued to go to the bay, Esquire Young acting

as his attorney to draw the allowance of £100 a year and the dividends

on £200 stock for Radisson’s wife, Mary Kirke. The minutes contain

accounts of wine presented to Mr. Radisson, of furs sent home as a gift

to Mistress Radisson, of heavy guns bought for the forts on the advice

of Mr. Radisson, of a fancy pistol delivered to Monsieur Radisson. Then

a change fell.

The Stuarts between vice and folly had danced themselves off the

throne. The courtiers, who were Adventurers, scattered like straws

before the wind. The names of the shareholders changed. Of Radisson’s

old friends, only Esquire Young remained. Besides, Iberville was now

campaigning on the bay, sweeping the English as dust before a broom.

Dividends stopped. The Company became embarrassed. By motion of the

shareholders, Radisson’s pension was cut from £100 to £50 a year. In

vain Esquire Young and Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough, now governor

of the Company, urged Radisson’s claims. The new shareholders did not

know his name.

These were dark days for the old pathfinder. He must have been

compelled to move from Seething Lane, for a petition describes him as

in the Parish of St. James “in a low and mean condition” in great want

and mental distress lest his family should be driven to the poorhouse.

It was at this period three papers were put on file that forever place

beyond dispute the main facts of his life. He filed a suit in Chancery

against the Company for a resumption of his full salary pending the

discontinuance of dividends. He petitioned Parliament to make the

continuance of the Company’s charter dependent on recognition of his

rights as having laid the foundations of the Company. And he took an

oath regarding the main episodes of his life to be used in the treaty

of peace with France. A fighter he was to the end, though haunted by

that terrible Fear of Want which undermined his courage as no Phantom

Fright ever shook him in the wilderness. No doubt he felt himself

growing old, nearly seventy now with four children to support and

naught between them and destitution but the paltry payment of £12 10s a

quarter.

Again the wheel of fortune turned. Radisson won his suit against the

Company. His income of £100 was resumed and arrears of £150 paid.

Also, in the treaty pending with France, his evidence was absolutely

requisite to establish what the boundaries ought to be between Canada

and Hudson Bay; so the Adventurers became suddenly very courteous,

very suave, very considerate of the old man they had kept standing

outside their office door; and the committee of August 17, 1697, bade

“_the secretary take coach and fetch Mr. Radisson who may be very

useful at this time as to affairs between the French and the Company_.”

The old war horse was once more in harness. In addition to his salary,

gratuities of £10 and £8 and £20 “for reliable services” are found in

the minutes. Regularly his £50 were paid to him at the end of each

year. Regularly, the £12 10s were paid each quarter to March 29, 1710.

When the next quarter came round, this entry is recorded in the minute

book:

“_Att A Comitte the 12th July 1710_—

_The Sec is ordered to pay Mr. Radisson’s widow as charity the sum of

six pounds._”

Between the end of March and the beginning of July, the old pathfinder

had set forth on his last voyage.

But I think the saddest record of all is the one that comes nineteen

years later:

“_24 Sept. 1729 Att A Comitte_—

_The Sec. is ordered to pay Mrs. Radisson, widow of Mr. Peter Esprit

Radisson, who was formerly employed in the company’s service, the sum

of £10 as charity, she being very ill and in very great want, the

said sum to be paid her at such times as the Sec. shall think most

convenient._”

This was the widow of the man who had explored the West to the

Mississippi; who had explored the North to Nelson River; who had twice

saved New France from bankruptcy by the furs he brought from the

wilderness, and who had laid the foundations of the most prosperous

chartered company the world has ever known.

_Notes on Chapter XIV._—It need scarcely be explained that the data

for this chapter are all drawn from thousands of sheets of scattered

records in Hudson’s Bay House, London. Within the limits of this book,

it is quite impossible to quote all the references of this chapter.

Details of Radisson’s early life are to be found in “_Pathfinders of

the West_.” One of Radisson’s petitions has been given in a former

chapter. Another of his petitions runs as follows:

“Copy of Peter Esprit Radisson’s peticon to ye Parleamt. presented ye

11th of March 1697-8.

“To ye Hon’ble the Knights Citizens & Burgesses in Parliament

Assembled——

“The Humble Peticon of Peter Esprit Radisson Humbly sheweth

“That your petitioner is a native of France, who with a brother of his

(since deceased) spent many years of their youths among the Indians in

and about Hudson’s Bay, by reason whereof they became absolute masters

of the trade and language of the said Indians in those parts of America

“That about the year 1666 King Charles the Second sent yr. Pet’r and

his said brother with two ships on purpose to settle English colonies &

factories on the sd. Day, wh. they effected soe well by the said King’s

satisfaction that he gave each of them a gold chain & medell as a marke

of his Royale favour & recommended them to the Comp’y of Adventurers of

England Trading unto Hudson’s Bay to be well gratified and rewarded by

them for their services aforesaid.

“That since the death of yr. Petr. Brother, the sd. compy have settled

on your Petr: six actions in the joint stock of ye sd. compy and one

hundred pounds per annum during yr. Petr: life

“That your Petr is now 62 years of age (being grown old in the compys

service) & hath not recd any Benefits of the sd. six shares in the

compys stock for more than 7 years last past & hath had nothing but the

sd. 100 pds. Per annum to maintain himselfe and four small children all

borne in England.

“That during the late Reign a Price was set upon your Petr head by the

French & several attempts were made upon him to assassinate him & that

for none other reasons but for quitting his owne country & serving the

compy.

“That your Petr: dares not return to his Native country for the reasons

aforesaid: & seeing all his subsistance depends on the sd. compy & is

shortly to Determine with the life of your Petr and his four smalle

children must consequently fall to be maintained by the Alms of the

Parish altho’ the company hath had many thousand pounds effects by his

procurement & some that he conceives he had himselfe a good tytle to——

“Your Petr therefore most humbly prays that this House will comiserate

the condition of yr. Petr said children, and whereas he hath now the

said six actions & £100 only for his life, that you will Vouchsafe to

direct a provisoe in the Bill depending to grant the sd. annuity to be

paid quarterly & the dividends of the sd. Actions as often as any shall

become due to your Petr: his Heirs for Ever during the joint stock of

the said compy.

“And yr. Petr shall forever pray

“PETER ESPRIT RADISSON.”

The occasion of this petition by Radisson was when the Stuarts had

lost the throne and the Company was petitioning for a confirmation of

its royal charter by an act of Parliament. “The many thousand pounds

which he conceived himself to have a title to,” refers to 1684, when

the French Court compelled him to turn over all the £20,000 in his fort

at Nelson to the English. That beaver had been procured in the trade

of goods for which Radisson and Groseillers and young Chouart and La

Fôrest and De la Chesnay and Dame Sorrell had advanced the money. As a

matter of fact, the Company never gave Radisson any stock. They simply

granted him the right to dividends on a small amount of stock—a wrong

which he was powerless to right as he dared not return to France. It

was during Iberville’s raids that the Company stopped paying Radisson

dividends or salary, when he filed a suit against them in Chancery and

won it. It is quite true the Company was unable to pay him at this

time, but then they had their own niggardly policy to thank for having

driven him across to France in the first place.

* * * * *

When the Company presented a bill of damages against France for the

raids, Radisson’s evidence was necessary to prove that the French King

gave up all claims to the bay when he ordered Radisson back to England,

so the old man was no longer kept cooling his heels in the outer halls

of the Company’s Council Room. The bill of damages was made up as

follows:

1682—Port Nelson taken with Gov. Bridgar & Zechariah Gillam &

5 men perished. £25,000 1684—damage to trade at Nelson. 10,000

1685—_Perpetuana_ taken with 14 seamen. 5,000 loss of life and wages.

1,255 1686—forts captured at the bottom of the bay 50,000 loss in

trade. 10,000 1688—loss of _Churchill_ Captain Bond _Young—Stimson_

15,000 cargo to Canada. 70,000 1692—forts lost. 20,000 _______ £206,255

The French King had said, “You may rely on me getting out of this

affair,” and the bill of damages, however absurdly exaggerated, was

never paid. The French raiders proved an expensive experiment.

* * * * *

Radisson’s other affidavit was made to prove that the French had

quitted all pretensions to the bay when he was ordered back to Nelson.

The French responded by denying that he had ever been ordered back

to Nelson and by calling him “a liar,” “a renegade,” “a turn coat.”

To this, the English answered in formal memorial: “The Mr. Radisson

mentioned in this paper doth not deserve the ill names heaped upon

him,” following up with the proof that the French had sent him back to

England.

* * * * *

The real reason that the Company were so remiss to Radisson in

his latter days was their own desperate straits. Besides, the old

shareholders of the Stuart days had scattered like the wind. Radisson

was unknown to the new men, so completely unknown that in one committee

order his wife is spoken of as Madam Gwodet (Godey) instead of Mary

Kirke. Now Madam Godey was the damsel whom Lord Preston offered to

Radisson in marriage (with a dowry) despite the fact that he already

had a wife—if he would go back from Paris to London. De la Potherie

tells the story and adds that Radisson married her—another of the

numerous fictions about the explorer. This mass of notes may give the

impression that I am a protagonist of Radisson. My answer is that he

badly needs one, when such staunch modern defenders of his as Drs.

Bryce, and Dionne, and Judge Prudhomme refuse to excuse him for his

last desertion of the French flag. In that case, Radisson was as much a

victim of official red tape as Dreyfus in modern days.

PART III

1700-1820

The Search for the North-West Passage, the Fall of France, the

Inlanders, the Coming of the Colonists and the Great Struggle with the

North-West Company of Montreal.

CHAPTER XV

1699-1720

THE FIRST ATTEMPT OF THE ADVENTURERS TO EXPLORE—HENRY KELSEY PENETRATES

AS FAR AS THE VALLEY OF THE SASKATCHEWAN—SANFORD AND ARRINGTON,

KNOWN AS “RED CAP,” FOUND HENLEY HOUSE INLAND FROM ALBANY—BESET FROM

WITHOUT, THE COMPANY IS ALSO BESET FROM WITHIN—PETITIONS AGAINST THE

CHARTER—INCREASE OF CAPITAL—RESTORATION OF THE BAY FROM FRANCE

The Peace of Ryswick in 1697, which decreed that war should cease on

Hudson Bay, and that France and England should each retain what they

chanced to possess at the time of the treaty—left the Adventurers of

England with only one fort, Albany, under doughty old Governor Knight,

and one outpost, New Severn, which refugees driven to the woods had

built out of necessity.

Back in ’85 when Robert Sanford had been ordered to explore inland, he

had reported such voyages impracticable. The only way to obtain inland

trade, he declared, was to give presents to the Indian chiefs and

attract the tribes down to the bay. Now that the French had swept the

English from the bay, Sanford was driven to the very thing he had said

could not be done—penetrating inland to intercept the Indian fleets of

canoes before they came down to the French. With one Arrington, known

as Red Cap on the bay, and a man, John Vincent, Sanford year after year

went upstream from Albany through Keewatin toward what is now Manitoba.

By 1700, Henley House had been built one hundred and fifty miles inland

from Albany. The French war was proving a blessing in disguise. It had

awakened the sleeping English gentlemen of the bay and was scattering

them far and wide. The very year the French came overland, 1686,

Captain Abraham had sailed north from Nelson to Churchill—“a faire wide

river,” he describes it, naming it after the great Marlborough; and

now with only Albany as the radiating point, commanded by old Governor

Knight, sloops under the apprentice boy, young Henry Kelsey, under Mike

Grimmington and Smithsend, sailed across to the east side of the bay,

known as East Main (now known as Ungava and Labrador) and yearly traded

so successfully with the wandering Eskimo and Montagnais there that

in spite of the French holding the bay, cargoes of 30,000 and 40,000

beaver pelts were sent home to England.

But the honors of exploration at this period belong to the ragamuffin,

apprentice lad, Henry Kelsey. He had come straight to Nelson before the

French occupation from the harum-scarum life of a London street arab.

At the fur posts, discipline was absolutely strict. Only the governor

and chief trader were allowed to converse with the Indians. No man

could leave the fort to hunt without special parole. Every subordinate

was sworn to unquestioning obedience to the officer above him. Servants

were not supposed to speak unless spoken to. Written rules and

regulations were stuck round the fort walls thick as advertisements

put up by a modern bill poster, and the slightest infraction of these

martinet rules was visited by guardroom duty, or a sound drubbing at

the hands of the chief factor, or public court-martial followed by

the lash. It was all a part of the cocked hat and red coat and gold

lace and silk ruffles with which these little kings of the wilderness

sought to invest themselves with the pomp of authority. It is to the

everlasting credit of the Company’s governors that a system of such

absolute despotism was seldom abused. Perhaps, too, the loneliness

of the life—a handful of whites cooped up amid all the perils of

savagery—made each man realize the responsibility of being his

brother’s keeper.

Henry Kelsey, the apprentice boy, fresh from the streets of London,

promptly ran amuck of the strict rules at Nelson. He went in and out

of the fort without leave, and when gates were locked, he climbed the

walls. In spite of rules to the contrary, he talked with the Indians

and hunted with them, and when Captain Geyer switched him soundly for

disobedience, he broke bars, jumped the walls, and ran away with a

party of Assiniboines. About this time, came the French to the bay. The

Company was moving heaven and earth to induce servants to go inland

for trade when an Indian runner brought a message on birch bark from

Kelsey. He had been up Hayes River with the Indians and now offered to

conduct an exploration on condition of pardon. Geyer not only pardoned

the young renegade but welcomed him back to the fort bag and baggage,

Indian wife and all the trumpery of an Indian family. The great Company

issued Kelsey a formal commission for discovery, and the next year on

July 15, 1691, as the Assiniboines departed from Deering’s Point where

they camped to trade at Nelson, Kelsey launched out in a canoe with

them.

Radisson and young Chouart had been up this river some distance; but

as far as known, Kelsey was the first white man to follow Hayes River

westward as far as the prairies. The weather was exceedingly dry, game

scarce, grass high and brittle, the tracks hard to follow whether of

man or beast. Within a week, the Indians had gone up one hundred and

seventy miles toward what are now known as Manitoba and Saskatchewan,

but only two moose and one partridge had been killed, and provisions

were exhausted. Leaving the Indians, Kelsey pushed forward across

country following the trail of an encampment to the fore. At the end

of a thirty mile tramp through brushwood of poplars and scrub birch,

he came to three leather tepees. No one was in them. Men and women

were afield hunting. Ravenous with hunger, Kelsey ransacked provision

bags. He found nothing but dried grass and was fain to stay his

hunger with berries. At night the hunters came in with ten swans and

a moose. Here, Kelsey remained with them hunting till his party came

up, when all advanced together another one hundred and thirty miles

to the Assiniboine camping place. There were only twenty-six tents

of Assiniboines. In a fray, the main party of Assiniboine hunters

had slain three Cree women, and had now fled south, away from Cree

territory. By the middle of August, Kelsey and his hunters were on the

buffalo plains. All day, the men hunted. At night, the women went out

to bring in and dress the meat. Once, exhausted, Kelsey fell sound

asleep on the trail. When he awakened, there was not even the dust of

the hunt to guide him back to camp. From horizon to horizon was not

a living soul; only the billowing prairie, grass neck high, with the

lonely call of birds circling overhead. By following the crumpled grass

and watching the sky for the reflection of the camp fires at night,

Kelsey found his way back to the Assiniboines. Another time, camp fire

had been made of dry moss. Kelsey was awakened to find the grass round

him on fire and the stock of his musket blazing. With his jackknife

he made a rude gunstock for the rest of the trip. Hunting with an

Indian one day, the two came unexpectedly on a couple of grizzly bears.

The surprise was mutual. The bears knew no fear of firearms and were

disposed to parley, but the hunters didn’t wait. The Indian dashed for

a tree; Kelsey for hiding in a bunch of willows, firing as he ran. The

bears mistook the direction of the shot and had pursued the Indian.

Kelsey’s charge had wounded one bear, and with a second shot, he now

disabled the other, firing full in its face. The double victory over

the beast of prey most feared by the Indians gained him the name of

Little Giant—_Miss-top-ashish_.

From Kelsey’s journal, it is impossible to follow the exact course of

his wanderings. Enemies, who tried to prove that the English Company

deserved no credit for exploration, declared that he did not go

farther than five hundred miles from the bay, seventy-one by canoe,

three hundred through woods overland, forty-six across a plain, then

eighty-one more to the buffalo country. From his own journal, the

distance totals up six hundred miles; but he does not mention any large

river except the Hayes, or large lake; so that after striking westward

he must have been north of Lake Winnipeg and the Saskatchewan, but not

so far north and west as Athabasca. This would place his wanderings in

the modern province of Saskatchewan.

It was the 24th of August before he joined Washa, chief of the

Assiniboines, and took up lodgings amid the eighty tents of the tribe.

Solemnly, the peace pipe was smoked and, on the 12th of September,

Kelsey presented the Assiniboine chief with the present of a lace coat,

a cap, a sash, guns, knives, powder and shot, telling the Indians

these were tokens of what the white men would do if the Indians proved

good hunters; but on no account must the tribes war on one another,

or the white man would give the enemy guns, which would exterminate

all fighters. Washa promised to bring his hunt down to the bay,

which tribal wars prevented for some years. Hudson’s Bay traders,

who followed up Kelsey’s exploration—aimed for the region now known

as Cumberland House, variously called Poskoyac and Basquia—westward

of Lake Winnipeg, so there is little doubt it was in this land that

the Hudson’s Bay boy first hunted and camped. With Kelsey, the result

was instant promotion. His wife went home to England, where she was

regularly paid his salary, and he rose to a position second only to the

venerable old Governor Knight, commander of the entire bay.

Meanwhile, the French were having their own troubles in the captured

forts. War had broken out again, and was going against France in

Marlborough’s victories. The French might hold the bay, but not a

pound of provisions could be sent across seas on account of English

privateers. The French garrisons of Hudson Bay were starving. Indians,

who brought down pelts from the Pays d’en Haut or upcountry—could

obtain no goods in barter and having grown dependent on the whiteman’s

firearms, were in turn reduced to straits.

Lagrange, a gay court adventurer, had come out in 1704 to Nelson, which

the French called Bourbon, with a troop of pleasure-seeking men and

women for a year’s hunting. For one year, the drab monotony of post

life was enlivened by a miniature Paris. Wines from the royal cellars

flowed like water. The reckless songs of court gallants rang among

the rafters, and the slippered feet of more reckless court beauties

tripped the light dance over the rough-timbered floors of the fur

post. It was a wild age, and a wild court from which they came to this

wilderness—reckless women and reckless men, whose God was Pleasure.

Who knows what court intrigue was being hidden and acted out at Port

Nelson? Poor butterflies, that had scorched their wings and lost their

youth, came here to masquerade! Soldiers of fortune, who had gambled

their patrimony in the royal court and stirred up scandal, rusticating

in a little log fort in the wilderness! The theme is more romantic than

the novelist could conceive.

But war broke out, and Lagrange’s gay troop scattered like leaves

before the wind. Iberville was dead in Havana. La Fôrest of the

Quebec Fur Company had gone back to the St. Lawrence. Jeremie, the

interpreter, had gone to France on leave, in 1707, and now in 1708,

when the French garrisons were starving and the high seas scoured by

privateers—Jeremie came back as governor, under the king. He at once

dispatched men to hunt. Nine bushrangers had camped one night near

a tent of Crees. The Indians were hungry, sullen, resentful to the

whitemen who failed to trade guns and powder as the English had traded.

At the fort, they had been turned away with their furs on their hands.

It is the characteristic of the French trader that he frequently

descends to the level of the Indian. Jeremie’s nine men were, perhaps,

slightly intoxicated after their supper of fresh game and strong

brandy. Two Indian women came to the camp and invited two Frenchmen to

the Indian tents. The fellows tumbled into the trap like the proverbial

country jack with the thimblerigger. No sooner had they reached the

Indian tepees than they were brained. Seizing the pistols and knives of

the dead men, the Indians crept through the thicket to the fire of the

bush-rovers. With unearthly yells they fell on the remaining seven and

cut them to pieces. One wounded man alone escaped by feigning the rigor

of death, while they stripped him naked, and creeping off into hiding

of the bushes while the savages devoured the dead. Waiting till they

had gone, the wounded man crawled painfully back by night—a distance

of thirty miles—to Jeremie, at an outpost. Jeremie quickly withdrew

the garrison from the outpost, retreated within the double palisades

of Nelson (Bourbon) shot all bolts, unplugged his cannon and awaited

siege; but Indians do not attack in the open. Jeremie held the fort

till events in Europe relieved him of his charge.

* * * * *

In spite of French victories, as long as Mike Grimmington and Nick

Smithsend were bringing home cargoes of thirty thousand beaver a year,

the English Adventurers prospered. In fact, within twenty years of

their charter’s grant, they had prospered so exceedingly that they

no longer had the face to declare such enormous dividends, and on

September 3, 1690, it was unanimously decided to treble their original

stock from £10,500 to £31,500. The reasons given for this action were:

that there were furs of more value than the original capital of the

Company now in the Company’s warehouses; that the year’s cargo was of

more value than the original capital of the Company; that the returns

in beaver from Nelson and Severn alone this year exceeded £20,000; that

the forts and armaments were of great value, and that the Company had

reasons to expect £100,000 reparation from the French.

Immediately after the decision, a dividend of 25 per cent. was declared

on the trebled stock.

Such prosperity excited envy. The fur buyers and pelt workers and skin

merchants of London were up in arms. People began to question whether

a royal house, which had been deposed from the English throne, had any

right to deed away in perpetuity public domain of such vast wealth

to court favorites. Besides, court favorites had scattered with the

ruined Stuart House. Newcomers were the holders of the Hudson’s Bay

Company stock. What right had these newcomers to the privileges of such

monopoly? Especially, what was the meaning of such dividends, when the

Company regularly borrowed all the money needed for working operations?

As late as 1685, the Company had borrowed £2,000 at 6 per cent. from

its own shareholders, and after French disasters began to injure its

credit in the London market, it regularly sent agents to borrow money

in Amsterdam.

The Company foresaw that the downfall of the Stuarts might affect its

monopoly and in 1697 had applied for the confirmation of its charter

by Parliament. Against this plea, London fur buyers filed a counter

petition: (1) It was too arbitrary a charter to be granted to private

individuals. (2) It was of no advantage to the public but a mere

stockjobbing concern, £100 worth of stock selling as high as £300, £30

as high as £200. (3) Beaver purchased in Hudson Bay for 6d sold in

London for 6s. (4) Monopoly drove the Indians to trade with the French.

(5) The charter covered too much territory.

To which the Company made answer that not £1,000 of stock had changed

hands in the last year, which was doubtless true; for ’97 was the

year of the great defeat. The climate would always prevent settlement

in Hudson Bay, and most important of all—England would have lost all

that region but for the Hudson’s Bay Company. In its mood at the time,

that was a telling argument with the English Parliament. Negotiations

were in progress with France for a permanent treaty of peace. If the

Hudson’s Bay Company were dissolved, to whom would all the region

revert but to those already in possession—the French? And if the

impending war broke out, who would defend the bay from the French but

the Company?

By act of Parliament, the charter of the English Adventurers was

confirmed for a period of seven years. And more—when an act was passed

in 1708 to encourage trade to America, a proviso was inserted that the

territory of the Company should not be included in the freedom of trade.

From the time France was beaten in the continental wars, the English

Adventurers never ceased to press their claims against France for the

restoration of all posts on Hudson Bay and the payment of damages

varying in amount from £200,000 to £100,504. Memorials were presented

to King William, memorials to Queen Anne. Sir Stephen Evance, the

goldsmith, who had become a heavy shareholder through taking stock in

payment for his ships chartered to the bay—had succeeded Marlborough as

governor in 1692, but the great general was still a friend at Court,

and when Evance retired in 1696, Sir William Trumbull, Secretary of

State, became governor. Old Governor Knight came from Albany on the

bay, in 1700, to go to France with Sir Bibye Lake and Marlborough to

press the claims of the English fur traders against France. For the

double claims of restoration and damages, France offered to trade all

the posts on the south shore for all the posts on the west shore. The

offer was but a parley for better terms. Both English and French fur

traders knew that the best furs came from the west posts. Negotiations

dragged on to 1710. It was subterraneously conveyed to the English fur

traders that France would yield on one point, but not on both: they

could have back the bay but not the indemnity; or the indemnity but

not the bay. The English fur traders subterraneously conveyed to the

commissioners in Holland, that they would accept the restoration of the

bay and write off the indemnity bill of £100,000 as bad debts. Such was

the Peace of Utrecht, 1713, as it affected the fate of the Hudson’s Bay

Company.

One point was left unsettled by the treaty. Where was the boundary

between bushrangers of New France working north from the St. Lawrence,

and the voyageurs of the Hudson’s Bay Company, working south from James

Bay? A dozen different propositions were made, but none accepted. The

dispute came as a heritage to modern days when Quebec and Ontario

wrangled out their boundaries, and Ontario and Manitoba competed

for Keewatin, and finally the new province of Saskatchewan disputed

Manitoba for a slice giving access to a seaport on Hudson Bay.

The settlement came just in time to save the Company from bankruptcy.

The Adventurers had no money to pay their captains. Grimmington and

Smithsend accepted pay of £200 apiece in bonds. Yet this same Company

so often accused of avarice and tyranny to servants borrowed money to

pay £20 each to the seamen surviving the terrible disasters of ’97, and

donated a special gratuity to Captain Bailey for bringing the books of

Nelson safely home. Sir Stephen Evance became governor again in 1700

and transferred £600 of his own stock to Captain Knight as wages for

holding Albany. Captains would now accept engagements only on condition

of being ransomed if captured, at the Company’s expense; and no ship

would leave port without a convoy of frigates.

June 2, 1702, the secretary is ordered to pay the cost of making a

scarlet coat with lace, for _Nepanah-tay_, the Indian chief, come home

with Captain Grimmington.

November 5, 1703, Captain Knight is ordered to take care of the little

Indian girl brought home by Captain Grimmington. It is ordered at the

same time that tradesmen’s bills shall be paid “as long as the money

lasts,” but that seamen’s wages be paid up to date. Orders are also

issued for the gunsmith “to stamp no barrell nor locks with ye compy’s

marker that are not in every way good and perfect.”

Henry Kelsey is now employed at £100 per annum either “to go up

country”—meaning inland—or across to East Main (Labrador). When Mike

Grimmington is not on the bay in his frigate, he is sent to Russia with

beaver, bringing back cargoes of leather. Fullerton takes Knight’s

place at Albany, with a scale of wages running from £10 to £16 a year

for apprentices with a gratuity of 20s a month if they prove worthy;

and to Fullerton and the captains of the vessels are sent twenty-three

hogsheads of liquor to keep up their courage against the French in

1710. Outward bound the same year, Mike Grimmington, the veteran of a

hundred raids, falls desperately ill. Like the Vikings of the North,

he will not turn back. If vanquished, he will be vanquished with face

to foe. So he meets his Last Foe at sea, and is vanquished of Death

on June 15—within a few weeks of Radisson’s death—and is buried at

Harwich. Learning the news by coureur, the Governing Committee promptly

vote his widow, Anne, a gift of £100 and appoints the son, Mike

Grimmington, Jr., an apprentice. Sir Bibye Lake, who had helped to

secure the favorable terms of the peace treaty, is voted governor in

1713.

In no year at this period did the sales of furs exceed £100,000 but

big cargoes are beginning to come in again, and the Company is able

to declare a dividend of 10 per cent. in 1718. Before the French war,

the forts had been nothing but a cluster of cabins palisaded. Now the

Adventurers determine to strengthen their posts. For the time, Rupert

and Severn are abandoned, but stone bastions are built in 1718 at Moose

and Albany and Nelson (now known as York) and Churchill. Inland from

Albany, Henley House is garrisoned against the French overlanders. At

East Main on Slude River a fort is knocked together of driftwood and

bowlder and lime.

In spite of increased wages and peace, the Adventurers have great

difficulty procuring servants. The war has made known the real perils

of the service. Mr. Ramsay is employed in 1707 and Captain John

Merry in 1712 to go to the Orkneys for servants—fourteen able-bodied

seamen in the former year, forty in the latter, and for the first

time there come into the history of the Northwest the names of those

Orkney families, whose lives are really the record of the great domain

to which they gave their strength—the Belchers and Gunns, and the

Carruthers, and the Bannisters, and the Isbisters and the Baileys,

generation after generation, and the Mackenzies, and the Clarkes

and the Gwynnes’s. Some came as clerks, some as gunners, some as

bush-lopers. The lowest wage was 12s a month with a gratuity of £2 on

signing the contract. But this did not suffice to bring recruits fast

enough for the expanding work of the Company, and there comes jauntily

on the scene, in 1711, Mr. Andrew Vallentine of matrimonial fame with

secret contracts to supply the Company with apprentices if the Company

will supply the dowries for the brides of the said apprentices. As told

in a former chapter, “_all proposals to be locked up in ye Iron Chest

in a Booke Aparte_.” Dr. Sacheverell, the famous divine, performed the

marriage ceremonies; and from an item surreptitiously smuggled into

the general minutes of the Company’s records instead of “the Booke

Aparte,” I judge that the marriage portions were on a scale averaging

some £70 and £100 each. A Miss Evance is named as one of the brides,

so that the affair was no common listing of women for the marriage

shambles such as Virginia and Quebec witnessed, but a contract in which

even a relative of the Company’s governor was not ashamed to enter.

Business flourished—as told elsewhere. The marriage office had to have

additional apartments in “the Buttery” until about 1735, when lawsuits

and the death of Mr. Vallentine caused a summary shutting down of the

enterprise. It had accomplished its aim—brought recruits to the Company.

By 1717 Kelsey, the aforetime apprentice, had become governor of

Churchill at £200 a year. One William Stewart and another apprentice,

Richard Norton, were sent inland from Churchill to explore and make

peace between the tribes. How far north they proceeded is not known—not

farther than Chesterfield Inlet, where the water ran with a tide like

the sea, and the Indians by signs told legends of vast mines. Kelsey

had heard similar tales of mines over on the Labrador coast. Thomas

Macklish, who had gone up Nelson River beyond Ben Gillam’s Island,

heard similar tales. Each of these explorers, the Company rewarded with

gratuities ranging from £20 to £100. There were legends, too, at Moose

and Rupert of great silver mines toward Temiscamingue—the field of the

modern cobalt beds.

The Company determined to inaugurate a policy of search for mineral

wealth and exploration for a passage to the South Sea. Old Captain

Knight—now in his eighties—had gone back to the bay to receive the

posts from the French under Jeremie. He had returned to England and

was, in 1718, ordered on a voyage of exploration. He demanded stiff

terms for the arduous task. His salary was to be £400 per annum.

He was to have one-tenth profit of all minerals discovered and all

new trade established, which was not in furs, such as whale hunting

and fishing. He was to be allowed to accept such presents from the

evacuating French as he saw fit, and was not to be compelled to winter

on the bay. The contract was for four years with the proviso in case of

Knight’s death, Henry Kelsey was to be governor of all the bay. With a

Greenland schooner and a yawl for inland waters, Knight set sail on the

frigates bound from England, hopes high as gold miners stampeding to a

new field.

_Notes on Chapter XV._—The Sandford first sent inland from Albany was

a relative of Captain Gillam and was at one time put on the lists for

dismissal owing to Ben Gillam’s poaching.

* * * * *

_Robson_ casts doubt on Kelsey having gone inland from Nelson, but

Robson was writing in a mood of spite toward his former employers. The

reasons given for his doubt are two-fold: (1) Kelsey could not have

gone five hundred miles in sixty days; (2) in the dry season of July,

Kelsey could not have followed any Indian trail. Both objections are

absurd. Forty miles a day is not a high average for a good woodsman

or canoe-man. As to following a trail in July, the very fact that the

grass was so brittle, made it easy to follow recent tracks. Night camp

fire and the general direction of the land would be guides enough for a

good pathfinder, let alone the crumpled grasses left behind a horde of

wandering Indians.

* * * * *

Kelsey’s Journal is to be found in the Parliamentary Report of 1749. At

the time, it was handed over to Parliament, it was taken from Hudson’s

Bay House, and is no longer in the records of the Company. The exact

itinerary of the journey, I do not attempt to give. Each reader,

especially in the West, can guess at it for himself.

* * * * *

It is about this time that Port Nelson became known as York, in honor

of the Duke of York, former governor. Heretofore, dispatches were

headed “Nelson.” Now, they are addressed to “York.”

* * * * *

The account of French occupation is to be found in French Marine

Archives and in the _Relation of Jeremie, Bernard’s Voyages_.

* * * * *

Governor Knight paid £277 to the French for provisions left at Nelson.

It was the cargo of furs he sent home in 1714 that enabled the Company

to pay its long-standing debts and declare a dividend by 1718.

* * * * *

As York may soon be Manitoba’s seaport, it is worth noting that in

1715 Captain Davies spent the entire summer beating about and failed

to enter Hayes River for the ice. For this failure, he was severely

reprimanded by the Company.

* * * * *

In 1695 the lease was signed for thirty-five years for the premises on

Fenchurch Street, occupied till the Company moved to present quarters

in Lime Street.

* * * * *

The first map of the bay drawn for the Company was executed in 1684, by

John Thornton, for which he was paid £4.

* * * * *

It was in 1686 that the famous Jan Péré, the spy, was discharged from

prison and escaped to France.

* * * * *

All trace of young Chouart is lost after 1689, when he came to London

from Nelson.

CHAPTER XVI

1719-1740

OLD CAPTAIN KNIGHT BESET BY GOLD FEVER, HEARS THE CALL OF THE

NORTH—THE STRAITS AND BAY—THE FIRST HARVEST OF THE SEA AT DEAD MAN’S

ISLAND—CASTAWAYS FOR THREE YEARS—THE COMPANY BESET BY GOLD FEVER

INCREASES ITS STOCK—PAYS TEN PER CENT. ON TWICE-TREBLED CAPITAL—COMING

OF SPIES AGAIN

From the time of the first voyage up to Churchill River, in 1686, the

fur traders had noticed tribes of Indians from the far North, who wore

ornaments of almost pure copper. Chunks of metal, that melted down to

lead with a percentage of silver, were brought down to the fur post

at Slude River in Labrador on the east side of the bay. Vague tales

were told by the wandering Eskimo and Chippewyans at Churchill of a

vast copper mine somewhere on that river now known as Coppermine, and

of a metal for which the Indians had no name but which white man’s

avidity quickly recognized as gold dust coming from the far northern

realms of iceberg and frost known as Baffin’s Land. How true some of

these legends were has been proved by the great cobalt mines of modern

Ontario and placers of Alaska. But where lies the hidden treasure trove

from which the Indians brought down copper to Churchill, silver to

Slude River, and gold dust—if gold it was—from the snowy realm of the

Eskimo in the North? Those treasure stores have not yet been uncovered,

though science has declared that vast deposits of copper may be found

west of Chesterfield Inlet, and placers may at any time be uncovered in

Baffin’s Land.

The Hudson’s Bay charter had been granted in the first place for

“the discovery of a passage to the South Sea.” At this time, there

was great agitation in Russia for the discovery of the Straits of

Anian, that were supposed to lead through America from Asia to Europe.

Vitus Bering’s expedition to find these straits resulted in Russia’s

discovery of Alaska.

The English Adventurers now kept agents in Russia. They were aware

of the projects in the air at the Russian Court. Why not combine the

search for the passage to the South Sea with the search for the hidden

mines of Indian legends? Besides—the Company had another project in

the air. Richard Norton, the apprentice boy, had gone overland north

from Churchill almost as far as Chesterfield Inlet. Chesterfield

Inlet seemed to promise the passage to the South Sea; but what was

more to the point—the waters in this part of the bay offered great

opportunities for whale fisheries. With the threefold commission of

discovering mines, the passage to the South Sea, and a whale fishery,

old Captain Knight sailed from Gravesend on June 3, 1719, “_so God send

the good ships a successful Discovery and to return in safety—your

loving friends_”—ran the words of the commission.

Four ships there were in the fleet that sailed this year: _The Mary_,

frigate, under Captain Belcher, with Mike Grimmington, Jr., now chief

mate, a crew of eighteen and a passenger list of new servants for York

and Churchill, among them Henry Kelsey, to be governor during Knight’s

absence from Churchill; the frigate _Hudson’s Bay_ under Captain Ward,

with twenty-three passengers for the south end of the bay; and the

two ships for Knight’s venture: _The Discovery_, Captain Vaughan;

_The Albany_, Captain Bailey, with fifty men, all told, bound for the

unknown North, the three men, Benjamin Fuller, David Newman and John

Awdry going as lieutenants to Captain Knight. Henry Kelsey had left his

wife in London. Each of the captains had given bonds of £2,000 to obey

Knight in all things.

Knight himself is now eighty years of age—an old war horse limbering

up to battle at the smell of powder smoke—his ships loaded with

iron-hooped treasure casks to carry back the gold dust. The complete

frames of houses are carried to build a post in the North, and among

his fifty men are iron forgers, armorers, whalers from Dundee, and

a surgeon paid the unusual salary of £50 a year on account of the

extraordinary dangers of this voyage. Bailey was probably the son of

that Bayly, who was first governor for the Adventurers on the bay. A

seasoned veteran, he had passed through the famous siege of Nelson in

’97. When Knight had left Albany to come to England, Fullerton was

deputy and Bailey next in command. There was peace with France, but

that had not prevented a score of French raiders coming overland to

ambush the English. Bailey got wind of the raiders hiding in the woods

round Albany and shutting gates, bided his time. Word was sent to the

mate of his ship lying off shore, at the sound of a cannon shot to rush

to the rescue. At midnight a thunderous hammering on the front gates

summoned the English to surrender. Bailey gingerly opened the wicket at

the side of the gate and asked what was wanted.

“Entrance,” yelled the raiders, confident that they had taken the

English by surprise.

Bailey answered that the Governor was asleep, but he would go and

fetch the keys. The raiders rallied to the gate. Bailey put the match

lighters to the six-pounders inside and let fly simultaneous charges

across the platform where the raiders crowded against the gate. There

was instant slaughter, a wild yell, and a rush for cover in the woods,

but the cannon shot had brought the master of Bailey’s sloop running

ashore. Raiders and sailors dashed into each other’s faces, with the

result that the crew were annihilated in the dark. For some days the

raiders hung about the outskirts of the woods, burying the dead,

waiting for the wounded to heal, and hunting for food. A solitary

Frenchman was observed parading the esplanade in front of the fort.

Fullerton came out and demanded what he wanted. The fellow made no

answer but continued his solitary march up and down under the English

guns. Fullerton offered to accept him as a hostage for the others’ good

conduct, but the man was mute as stone. The English governor bade him

be off, or he would be shot. The strange raider continued his odd tramp

up and down till a shot from the fort window killed him instantly.

The only explanation of the incident was that the man must have been

crazed by the hardship of the raid and by the horrors of the midnight

slaughter.

Bailey, then, was the man chosen as the captain of _The Albany_ and

Knight’s right-hand man.

The ships were to keep together till they reached the entrance of the

straits, the two merchantmen under Ward and Belcher then to go forward

to the fur posts, Knight’s two ships straight west for Chesterfield

Inlet, where he was to winter. Two guineas each, the Adventurers gave

the crews of each ship that afternoon on June 3, at Gravesend, to drink

“_God-speed, a prosperous discovery, a faire wind, and a good sail_.”

* * * * *

As a railway is now being actually built after being projected on

paper for more than twenty-five years—from the western prairie to

a seaport on Hudson Bay, which has for its object the diversion of

Western traffic to Europe from New York to some harbor on Hudson Bay,

it is necessary to give in detail what the archives of the Hudson’s Bay

Company reveal about this route. Hudson Strait opens from the Atlantic

between Resolution Island on the north and the Button Islands on the

south. From point to point, this end of the strait is forty-five miles

wide. At the other end, the west side, between Digges’ Island and

Nottingham Island, is a distance of thirty-five miles. From east to

west, the straits are four hundred and fifty miles long—wider at the

east where the south side is known as Ungava Bay, contracting at the

west, to the Upper Narrows. The south side of the strait is Labrador;

the north, Baffin’s Land. Both sides are lofty, rocky, cavernous shores

lashed by a tide that rises in places as high as thirty-five feet and

runs in calm weather ten miles an hour. Pink granite islands dot the

north shore in groups that afford harborage, but all shores present

an adamant front, edges sharp as a knife or else rounded hard to have

withstood and cut the tremendous ice jam of a floating world suddenly

contracted to forty miles, which Davis Strait pours down at the east

end and Fox Channel at the west.

Seven hundred feet is considered a good-sized hill; one thousand feet,

a mountain. Both the north and the south sides of the straits rise two

thousand feet in places. Through these rock walls ice has poured and

torn and ripped a way since the ice age preceding history, cutting a

great channel to the Atlantic. Here, the iron walls suddenly break to

secluded silent valleys moss-padded, snow-edged, lonely as the day

Earth first saw light. Down these valleys pour the clear streams of

the eternal snows, burnished as silver against the green, setting the

silence echoing with the tinkle of cataracts over some rock wall, or

filling the air with the voice of many waters at noon-tide thaw. One

old navigator—Coates—describes the beat of the angry tide at the rock

base and the silver voice of the mountain brooks, like the treble and

bass of some great cathedral organ sounding its diapason to the glory

of God in this peopleless wilderness.

Perhaps the kyacks of some solitary Eskimo, lashed abreast twos

and threes to prevent capsizing, may shoot out from some of these

bog-covered valleys like seabirds; but it is only when the Eskimos

happen to be hunting here, or the ships of the whalers and fur traders

are passing up and down—that there is any sign of human habitation on

the straits.

Walrus wallow on the pink granite islands in huge herds. Polar bears

flounder from icepan to icepan. The arctic hare, white as snow but for

the great bulging black eye, bounds over the bowlders. Snow buntings,

whistling swans, snow geese, ducks in myriads—flacker and clacker and

hold solemn conclave on the adjoining rocks, as though this were their

realm from the beginning and for all time.

Of a tremendous depth are the waters of the straits. Not for nothing

has the ice world been grinding through this narrow channel for

billions of years. No fear of shoals to the mariner. Fear is of another

sort. When the ice is running in a whirlpool and the incoming tide

meets the ice jam and the waters mount thirty-five feet high and a

wind roars between the high shores like a bellows—then it is that the

straits roll and pitch and funnel their waters into black troughs where

the ships go down. “Undertow,” the old Hudson’s Bay captains called

the suck of the tide against the ice-wall; and that black hole where

the lumpy billows seemed to part like a passage between wall of ice

and wall of water was what the mariners feared. The other great danger

was just a plain crush, getting nipped between two icepans rearing

and plunging like fighting stallions, with the ice blocks going off

like pistol shots or smashed glass. No child’s play is such navigating

either for the old sailing vessels of the fur traders or the modern

ice-breakers propelled by steam! Yet, the old sailing vessels and the

whaling fleets have navigated these straits for two hundred years.

Westward of the straits, the shores dropped to low, sandy reaches at

Mansfield Island. Another five hundred miles across the bay brought the

ships to Churchill and York (Nelson).

Here, then, came Captain Knight’s fleet. And the terrific dangers of

his venture met him—as it were—on the spot. The records do not give

the exact point of the disaster, but one may guess without stretching

imagination that it was in the Upper Narrows where thirty-five feet of

lashing tide meet a churning wall of ice.

The ships were embayed, sails lowered, rudders unshipped, and anchors

put out for the night. Night did not mean dark. It meant the sunlight

aslant the ice fields and pools in hues of fire that tinted the green

waves and set rainbows playing in the spray. Gulls wheeled and screamed

overhead. Cascades tinkled over the ice walls. There was the deep

stillness of twilight calm, then the quiver of the ship’s timbers

forewarning the rising tide, then the long, low undertone of the ocean

depths gathering might to hurl against the iron forces of the ice. The

crews had been rambling over the ice but were now recalled to be on

the watch as the tide rose. Some were at the windlass ready to heave

anchors up at first opening of clear water; others ready to lower boats

and tow from dangers; others again preparing blasts of powder to blow

up the ice if the tide threatened to close the floes in a squeeze.

Captain Ward’s men must have been out on the ice, for it happened in

the twinkling of an eye as such wrecks always happened, and not a man

was lost. Two icepans reared up, smashed together, crushed the frigate

_Hudson’s Bay_, like an eggshell and she sank a water-logged wreck

before their eyes. Ward’s crew were at once taken on board by Belcher,

and when the ice loosened, carried on down to York and Albany. There

was a lawsuit against the Company for the wages of these men wrecked

outward bound and kept in idleness on the bay for thirteen months. The

matter was compromised by the Company paying ten months’ wages instead

of thirteen.

* * * * *

Captain Knight waited only long enough at Churchill to leave the fort

provisions. Then he set out on his quest to the north. This could

scarcely be described as foolhardy, for his ships carried the frames

for houses to winter in the North. From this point on, the story must

be pieced together of fragments. From the time Captain Knight left

Churchill, in 1719, his journal ceases. No line more came from the

game old pathfinder to the Company. The year 1719 passed, 1720, 1721,

still no word of him. Surely, he must have passed through the Straits

of Anian to the South Sea and would presently come home from Asia laden

with spices and gold dust for the Company. But why didn’t he send back

one of the little whaling boats to Churchill with word of his progress;

or why didn’t some of the men come down from the whaling station he

was to establish at Chesterfield Inlet? Henry Kelsey takes a cruise

on the sloop _Prosperous_ from York, in 1719, but finds no trace of

him. Hancock has been cruising the whaling seas on _The Success_ that

same summer, but he learns nothing of Knight. The whole summer of

1721, while whaling, Kelsey is on the lookout for the peaked sails of

Knight’s ships; but he sees never a sail. Napper is sent out again on

the sloop _Success_, but he runs amuck of a reef four days from Nelson

River and loses his ship and almost his life.

Three full years were long enough for Knight to have circumnavigated

the globe. By 1721, the Company was so thoroughly alarmed that it

bought _The Whalebone_, sloop—John Scroggs, master—and sent it from

Gravesend on the 31st of May to search for Knight. Two years Scroggs

searched the northwest coast of the bay, but the northwest coast of the

bay is one thousand miles in and out, and Scroggs missed the hidden

hole-in-the-wall that might have given up the secret of the sea. Norton

traveling inland with the Indians hears disquieting stories, and some

whalers chancing North, in 1726, discover a new harbor at the bottom of

which lie cannon, anchors, bits of iron, but it is not till fifty years

later that the story is learned in detail.

Here it is:

Knight steered for that western arm of the sea known as Chesterfield

Inlet. It was here that Norton had heard legends of copper mines and

seen evidences of tide water. Just south of Chesterfield Inlet is

a group of white quartz islands the largest five by twenty miles,

known as Marble Island, from the fact that it is bare of growth as a

gravestone. Bedford whalers of modern days have called it by another

name—Dead Man’s Island.

At the extreme east is a hole-like cavity in the rock wall where

Eskimos were wont to shoot in with their bladder boats and hide from

the fury of the northeast gale. One night as the autumn storms raged,

the Indians were amazed to see two huge shadows emerge from the lashing

hurricane like floating houses—driving straight as an arrow for the

mark to certain destruction between an angry sea and the rock wall.

If there were cries for help, they were drowned by the shrieks of the

hurricane. In the morning, when the storm had abated, the Indians saw

that the shadows had been whitemen’s ships. The large one had struck on

the reefs and sunk. The other was a mass of wave-beaten wreckage on the

shore, but the white men were toiling like demons, saving the timbers.

Presently, the whites began to erect a framework—their winter house. To

the wondering Eskimos, the thing rose like magic. The Indians grasped

their kyacks and fled in terror.

It need scarcely be told—these were Knight’s treasure-seekers, wrecked

without saving a pound of provisions on an island bare as a billiard

ball twenty miles from the mainland. How did the crews pass that

winter? Their only food must have been such wild cranberries as they

could gather under the drifting snows, arctic hares, snowbirds,

perhaps the carcass of an occasional dead porpoise or whale. When the

Indians came back in the summer of 1720, there were very few whitemen

left, but there was a great number of graves—graves scooped out of

drift sand with bowlders for a tombstone. The survivors seemed to be

starving. They fell like wild beasts on the raw seal meat and whale oil

that the Eskimos gave them. They seemed to be trying to make a boat out

of the driftwood that had been left of that winter’s fuel. The next

time the Eskimos visited the castaways, there were only two men alive.

These were demented with despair, passing the time weeping and going

to the highest rock on the island to watch for a sail at sea. Their

clothes had been worn to tatters. They were clad in the skins of the

chase and looked like madmen. From the Indians’ account, it was now

two years from the time of the wreck. What ammunition had been saved

from the ships, must have been almost exhausted. How these two men kept

life in their bodies for two winters in the most bitterly cold, exposed

part of Hudson Bay, huddling in their snow-buried hut round fires of

moss and driftwood, with the howling north wind chanting the death song

of the winding sheet, and the scream of the hungry were-wolf borne to

their ears in the storm—can better be imagined than described.

Why did not they try to escape? Possibly, because they were weakened

by famine and scurvy. Surely Bering’s Russians managed better when

storm cast them on a barren island while they were searching this same

mythical passage. They drifted home on the wreckage. Why could not

these men have tried to escape in the same way? In the first place,

they did not know they were only twelve miles from the main coast. Cast

on Marble Island in the storm and the dark, they had no idea where they

were, except that it was in the North and in a harbor facing east. Of

the two last survivors, one seemed to be the armorer, or else that

surgeon who was to receive £50 for the extraordinary dangers of this

voyage, for he was constantly working with metal instruments to rivet

the planks of his raft together. But he was destined to perish as his

comrades. When his companion died, the man tried to scoop out a grave

in the sand. It was too much for his strength. He fell as he toiled

over the grave and died among the Eskimo tents. So perished Captain

Knight and his treasure-seekers, including the veteran Bailey—as

Hudson had perished before them—taken as toll of man’s progress by the

insatiable sea. Not a secret has been wrested from the Unknown, not a

milepost won for civilization from savagery, but some life has paid

for the secret to go down in despair and defeat; but some bleaching

skeleton of a nameless failure marks where the mile forward was won.

The lintel of every doorway to advancement is ever marked with some

blood sacrifice.

Whalers in 1726, saw the cannon and anchors lying at the bottom of the

harbor, also casks with iron hoops—that were to bring back the gold

dust. Hearne, in 1769, could count where the graves had been scraped up

by the wolves, and he gathered up the skeletons along the beach to bury

them in a common grave. Latterly, oddly enough, that island was the

rendezvous of Northern whalers—where they came from the far North to

bury their dead and set up crosses for those who lie in the sea without

a grave. It was known as Dead Man’s Island.

* * * * *

After giving an account of three wrecks in four years, I hope it may

not seem inconsistent to say that I believe the next century will see

a Hudson’s Bay route to Europe. What—you say—after telling of three

wrecks in four years? Yes—what Atlantic port does not have six wrecks

in ten years? New York and Montreal have more. If the Hudson’s Bay

route is not fit for navigation, the country must make it fit for

navigation. Of telegraphs, shelters, light-houses, there is not now

one. Canals have been dug for less cause than the Upper Narrows of

Hudson Straits. If Peter the Great had waited till St. Petersburg

was a fit site for a city, there would have been no St. Petersburg.

He made it fit. The same problem confronts northwest America to-day.

It is absurd that a population of millions has no seaport nearer than

two thousand miles. Churchill or York would be seaports in the middle

of the continent. Of course, there would be wrecks and difficulties.

_The wrecks are part of the toll we pay for harnessing the sea. The

difficulties are what make nations great._ One day was the delay

allowed the fur ships for the straits. Who has not waited longer than

one day to enter New York harbor or Montreal?

* * * * *

Meanwhile, moneybags at home were counting their shekels. A wild

craze of speculation was sweeping over England. It was a fever of

getting-something-for-nothing, floating wild schemes of paper capital

to be sold to the public for pounds, shillings and pence. In modern

language it would be called “wild-catting.” The staid “old Worthies”—as

the Adventurers were contemptuously designated—were caught by the

craze. It was decided on August 19, 1720, to increase the capital of

the Company from £31,500 to £378,000 to be paid for in subscriptions of

10 per cent. installments. Before the scheme had matured, the bubble

of speculation had collapsed. Money could neither be borrowed nor

begged. The plan to enlarge the stock was dropped as it stood—with

subscriptions to the amount of £103,950 paid in—which practically meant

that the former capital of £31,500 had been trebled and an additional

10 per cent. levied.

On this twice-trebled capital of £103,950, dividends of 5 per cent.

were paid in 1721; of 8 per cent. in 1722; of 12 per cent. in 1723 and

’24; of 10 per cent. from 1725 to 1737, when the dividends fell to 8

per cent. and went up again to 10 per cent. in 1739. From 1723, instead

of leaving the money idle in the strong box, it was invested by the

Company in bonds that bore interest till their ships came home. From

1738, the Bank of England regularly advanced money for the Company’s

operations. Sir Bibye Lake was governor from the time he received such

good terms in the French treaty. The governor’s salary is now £200, the

deputy’s £150, the committeemen £100 each.

It was in February, 1724, that a warehouse was leased in Lime Street at

£12 a year, the present home of the Company.

In four years, the Company had lost four vessels. These were replaced

by four bigger frigates, and there come into the service the names

of captains famous on Hudson Bay—Belcher, and Goston, and Spurell,

and Kennedy, and Christopher Middleton, and Coates, and Isbister,

with officers of the names of Inkster, and Kipling, and Maclish, and

MacKenzie, and Gunn, and Clement. Twice in ten years, Captain Coates is

wrecked in the straits, on the 26th of June, 1727, outward bound with

all cargo and again on the frigate _Hudson’s Bay_ in 1736, when “_we

sank_,” relates Coates, “_less than ten minutes after we were caught by

the ice_.”

From being an apprentice boy traveling inland to the Indians, Richard

Norton has become governor of Churchill, with an Indian wife and

half-Indian sons sent to England for education. Norton receives orders,

in 1736, once more to explore Chesterfield Inlet where Knight had

perished. Napper on _The Churchill_, sloop, and Robert Crow on _The

Musquash_ carry him up in the summer of 1737. Napper dies of natural

causes on the voyage, but Chesterfield Inlet is found to be a closed

arm of the sea, not a passage to the Pacific; and widow Napper is

voted fifty guineas from the Company. Kelsey dies in 1729, and widow

Kelsey, too, is voted a bounty of ten guineas, her boy to be taken as

apprentice.

In 1736, Captain Middleton draws plans for the building of a fine new

post at Moose and of a stone fort at Eskimo Point, Churchill, which

shall be the strongest fort in America. The walls are to be sixteen

feet high of solid stone with a depth of twenty-four feet solid masonry

at base. On the point opposite Eskimo Cape, at Cape Merry, named after

the deputy governor, are to be blockhouses ten feet high with six great

guns mounted where watch is to be kept night and day.

Moose will send up the supply of timber for Churchill, and the Company

sends from London sixty-eight builders, among whom is one Joseph

Robson, at £25 a year, who afterward writes furious attacks on the

Company. Barely is Moose completed when it is burned to the ground,

through the carelessness of the cook spilling coals from his bake oven.

Two things, perhaps, stirred the Company up to this unwonted activity.

Spies were coming overland from St. Lawrence—French explorers working

their way westward, led by La Vérendrye. “_We warn you_,” the Company

wrote to each of its factors at this time, “_meet these spies very

civily but do not offer to detain them and on no account suffer such to

come within the gates nor let the servants converse with them, and use

all legal methods to make them depart and be on your guard not to tell

the company’s secrets_.”

Then in 1740, came a bolt from the blue. Captain Christopher Middleton,

their trusted officer, publicly resigned from the service to go into

the King’s navy for the discovery of a Northwest Passage through

Hudson Bay.

_Notes on Chapter XVI._—Of Baffin’s Land, Dr. Bell, who personally

explored Hudson Bay in 1885 for the Dominion Government, says: “These

ancient grounds probably contain rich placer gold in the valleys of the

streams.” The mica mines of Baffin’s Land were being mined in 1906.

* * * * *

The name of the captain, who perished with Knight, is our friend Bailey

of the Iberville siege; not Barlow, as all modern histories copying

from Hearne and 1749 Parl. Report give. The minutes of the H. B. C.

show that Barlow is a misprint for Berley, and Berley for Bailey, which

name is given repeatedly in the minutes in connection with this voyage.

* * * * *

The account of Bering’s efforts to find the Straits of Anian and of his

similar fate will be found in “_Vikings of the Pacific_.”

* * * * *

All the printed accounts of Knight’s disaster say he wintered at

Churchill in 1719-20. This is wrong, as shown by the unprinted

records of H. B. C. He sailed at once for the North. All printed

accounts—except Hearne’s—give the place of disaster as the west end of

Marble Island. This is a mistake. It was at the east end as given in

the French edition of Hearne. Hearne it is, who gives the only account

of Bailey’s defense of Albany in 1704, only Hearne calls Bailey,

Barlow, which the records show to be wrong.

* * * * *

An almost Parallel wreck to that of Knight’s took place at Gull Island

off Newfoundland twenty-five years ago. A whole shipload of castaways

perished on a barren island in sight of their own harbor lights, only

in the case of Gull Island, the castaways did not survive longer than

a few weeks. They lived under a piece of canvas and subsisted on

snow-water.

* * * * *

It was not till 1731 that Knight’s Journals as left at Churchill were

sent home to London. They cease at 1719.

* * * * *

Richard Norton first went North by land in 1718. His next trip was

after Knight’s death; his next, by boat as told in this chapter.

* * * * *

In 1723, Samuel Hopkins was sent home in irons from Albany for three

times absconding over the walls to the woods without Governor Myatt’s

leave. Examined by the committee, he would give no excuse and was

publicly dismissed with loss of wages. Examined later privately, he

was re-engaged with honor—which goes to prove that Myatt may have been

one of those governors, who ruled his men with the thick end of an oar.

* * * * *

At this period, servants for the first time were allowed to go to the

woods to trap and were given one half the proceeds of their hunt.

CHAPTER XVII

1740-1770

THE COMPANY’S PROSPERITY AROUSES OPPOSITION—ARTHUR DOBBS AND THE

NORTHWEST PASSAGE AND THE ATTACK ON THE CHARTER—NO NORTHWEST PASSAGE IS

FOUND BUT THE FRENCH SPUR THE ENGLISH TO RENEWED ACTIVITY

For fifty years, the Company had been paying dividends that never went

lower than 7 per cent. and generally averaged 10. These dividends

were on capital that had been twice trebled. The yearly fur sales

yielded from £20,000 to £30,000 to the Adventurers—twice and three

times the original capital, which—it must be remembered—was not all

subscribed in cash. French hunters had been penetrating America from

the St. Lawrence. Bering had discovered Alaska on the west for Russia.

La Vérendrye had discovered the great inland plains between the

Saskatchewan and the Missouri, for France. It was just beginning to

dawn on men’s minds what a vast domain lay between the plantations of

the Atlantic seaboard and the Western Sea. It was inevitable that men

should ask themselves whether Charles II. had any right to deed away

forever that vast domain to those court favorites and their heirs known

as the Hudson’s Bay Company. To be sure, Parliament had confirmed the

charter when the Stuart House fell; but the charter had been confirmed

for only seven years. Those seven years had long since expired, and

the original stock of the fur company had passed from the heirs of the

original grantees to new men—stock speculators and investors. With

the exception of royalty, there was not a single stockholder of the

Hudson’s Bay Company by 1740, who was an heir of the original men named

in the original charter. Men asked themselves—had these stockholders

any right to hold monopoly against all other traders over a western

domain the size of half Europe? The charter had been granted in the

first place as a reward for efforts to find passage to the South Sea.

What had the Company done to find a passage to the Pacific? Sent Knight

and his fifty men hunting gold sands in the North, where they perished;

and dispatched half a dozen little sloops north of Chesterfield Inlet

to hunt whales. This had the Adventurers done to earn their charter,

and ever since sat snugly at home drawing dividends on twice-trebled

capital equal to 90 per cent. on the original stock, intrenched behind

the comfortable feudal notion that it was the manifest design of an

All Wise Providence to create this world for the benefit of the few who

can get on top and exploit the many to the profit of the aforesaid few.

We, whose modern democracy is working ten-fold worse injustice by

favors to the few against the many, must have a care how we throw

stones at that old notion. Feudalism in the history of the race—had

its place. It was the system by which the bravest man led the clan and

ruled because he was fittest to rule as well as to protect. Of all

those rivals now yelping enviously at the Company’s privileges—which

could point to an ancestor, who had been willing to brave the perils

of a first essay to Hudson Bay? We have seen how even yet the Company

could obtain servants only by dint of promising bounties and wives and

dowries; how the men under command of the first navigators balked and

reared and mutinied at the slightest risk; how—in spite of all we can

say against feudalism—it was the spirit of feudalism, the spirit of the

exclusive favored few, that faced the first risks and bought success by

willing, reckless death, and later fought like demons to hold the bay

against France.

* * * * *

It was one Arthur Dobbs, a gentleman and scholar, who voiced the

general sentiment rising against the privileges of the Company. Dobbs

had been bitten by that strange mania which had lured so many and was

yet to lure more brave seamen to their death. He was sure there was a

Northwest Passage. Granted that; and the sins of the fur traders became

enormities. Either they had not earned their charter by searching the

Northwest Passage, or if they had found it, they had kept the discovery

a secret through jealousy of their trade. Dobbs induced the Admiralty

to set aside two vessels for the search. Then he persuaded Captain

Middleton, who had for twenty years navigated Hudson Bay, to resign the

service of the Company and lead the government expedition of 1741-2.

Around this expedition raged a maelstrom of ill feeling and false

accusations and lies. The Company were jealous of their trade and

almost instantly instructed their Governing Committee to take secret

means to prevent this expedition causing encroachment on their rights.

This only aroused the fury of the Admiralty. The Company were given

to understand that if they did not do all they could to facilitate

Middleton’s search, they might lose their charter. On this, the Company

ordered their factors on the bay to afford Middleton every aid, but

judging from the factors’ conduct, it may be surmised that secret

instructions of another nature were sent out.

When Middleton came to Churchill in July on _The Furnace Bomb_ and

_Discovery_, he found buoys cut, harbor lights out and a governor mad

as a hornet, who forbade the searchers to land, or have any intercourse

with the Indians. Taking two Indians as guides, Middleton proceeded

north as far as 66°—in the region of Rowe’s Welcome beyond Chesterfield

Inlet. Here, he was utterly blocked by the ice, and the expedition

returned to England a failure.

It was at this point the furor arose. It was charged that the Company

had bribed Middleton with £5,000 not to find a passage; that he had

sailed east instead of west; that he had cast the two Indian guides

adrift at Marble Island with scant means of reaching the main shore

alive; and that while wintering in Churchill he had been heard to say,

“That the Company need not be uneasy, for if he did find a passage, no

one on earth would be a bit the wiser.” The quarrel, which set England

by the ears for ten years and caused a harvest of bitter pamphlets that

would fill a small library—need not be dealt with here.

Middleton knew there was no passage for commercial purpose. That the

Admiralty accepted his verdict may be inferred from the fact that he

was permanently appointed in the king’s service; but Dobbs was not

satisfied. He hurled baseless charges at Middleton, waged relentless

pamphlet war against the Company and showered petitions on Parliament.

Parliament was persuaded to offer a reward of £20,000 to any one

finding a passage to the Pacific. Dobbs then formed an opposition

company, opened subscriptions for a capital of £10,000 in one hundred

shares of £100 each for a second expedition, and petitioned the king

for a grant of all lands found adjacent to the waters discovered, _with

the rights of exclusive trade. Exclusive trade!_ There—the secret was

out—the cloven hoof! It was not because they had not earned their

charter, that the Adventurers had been assailed; but because rivals,

themselves, wanted rights to exclusive trade. To these petitions, the

Company showered back counter-memorials; and memorials of special

privileges becoming the fashion, other merchants of London, in 1752,

asked for the grant of all Labrador; to which the Company again

registered its counter-memorial.

The furor materialized in two things: the expedition of the Dobbs

Company to find the Northwest Passage in 1746-47, and the Parliamentary

Inquiry, in 1748-49, to look into the rights and workings of the

Adventurers’ charter.

_The Dobbs_ galley, under Captain Moore was one hundred and eighty

tons; _The California_, Captain Smith, one hundred and forty tons;

and to the crews of both, rewards for the discovery of the Passage to

the South Sea were to be given ranging from £500 for the captains to

£200 to be divided among the sailors. Henry Ellis went as agent for the

Dobbs Company. The name of _The California_ was indicative of where

these argonauts hoped to sail. Oddly enough, that Captain Middleton,

whom the Dobbs forces had so mercilessly belabored—accompanied the

explorers some distance westward from the Orkneys on _The Shark_ as

convoy against French pirates. After leaving Middleton, one of the

vessels suffered an experience that very nearly finished Arthur Dobbs’

enterprise. “Nothing had occurred,” writes Ellis, “till the 21st of

June, at night, when a terrible fire broke out in the great cabin of

_The Dobbs_, and quickly made progress to the powder room, where there

were not less than thirty-six or forty barrels of powder besides other

combustibles. It is impossible to express the consternation. Every one

on board had every reason to expect that moment was their last. You

might hear all varieties of sea-eloquence, cries, prayers, curses,

scolding, mingled together. Water was passed along by those who still

preserved their reason, but the crew were for hoisting out the boats.

Lashings were cut, but none had patience to hoist them out. The ship

was head to wind, the sails shaking and making a noise like thunder,

then running right before the wind and rolling, every one on deck

waiting for the blast to put an end to our fears.”

The fire was put out before it reached the powder, but one can guess

the scare dampened the ardor of the crew. Very little ice was met in

Hudson Straits and by August 19, the vessels were at Marble Island.

The season was too late to go on north, so the ships sailed to winter

at York (Nelson) on Hayes River. Here, the usual quarrels took place

with the Hudson’s Bay people—buoys and flag signals being cut down as

the ships ran through the shoals of Five-Fathom Hole, five miles up

Hayes River. A fort called Montague House was built for the winter on

the south side, the main house being a two-story log-barracks, the

outbuildings, a sort of lean-to, or wooden wigwam banked up with snow,

where the crews could have quarters. The harbor was frozen over by

October 8. Heavy fur clothing was then donned for the winter, but in

spite of precautions against scurvy—exercise, the use of spruce beer,

outdoor life—four men died from the disease before ice cleared from

Hayes River in June.

It need not be told here that no passage was found. As the boats

advanced farther and farther north of Rowe’s Welcome toward Fox

Channel, the hopelessness of the quest became apparent. Before them

lay an ice world, “As gloomy a prospect,” writes Ellis, “as ever

astonished mortal eyes. The ragged rocks seemed to hang above our

heads. In some places there were falls of water dashing from cliff to

cliff. From others, hung icicles like the pipes of a vast organ. But

the most overwhelming things were the shattered crags at our feet,

which appeared to have burst from the mountains through the power of

the frost—amazing relics of the wreck of nature.” In October of 1747,

the ships were back on the Thames.

* * * * *

If Dobbs’ Expedition had found a Northwest Passage, the history of

the Adventurers would close here. With the merchants of London a

unit against the charter and the Admiralty open to persuasion from

either side, there can be no doubt that the discovery of a way to

China through Hudson Bay would have sounded the death knell of the

Company. But the Dobbs Expedition was a failure. The Company’s course

was vindicated, and when the Parliamentary Committee of 1748-49 met,

affairs were _judiciously_ and I must believe _intentionally steered_

away from the real question—the validity of the charter—to such side

issues as the Northwest Passage, the state of the Indians, whether the

country could be inhabited or not, questions—it will be noticed—on

which no one was competent to give evidence but the Company itself.

Among other evidence, there was quietly laid on the table the journals

of one Joseph La France, a French wood-rover who had come overland

from Michilimackinac to Hudson Bay. This record showed that France

was already on the field in the West. La Vérendrye and his sons were

on their way to the Rockies. Three forts were already built on the

Assiniboine. Such evidence could have only one influence on Parliament.

If Parliament took away the charter from the Company—declared, in fact,

that the charter was not legal—who would hold the vast domain against

France? The question of the abstract right did not come up at all. Does

it ever in international affairs? The question was one for diplomacy,

and diplomacy won. It was better for England that the Adventurers

should remain in undisturbed possession; and the Company retained its

charter.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, that activity among the French fur traders stirred up the

old Company as all the home agitation could not. Each of the forts,

Churchill farthest north, York on Hayes River, Albany, and Henley

House up Albany River, Moose (Rupert lay dismantled these years)

and Richmond Fort on the east side of the bay, were strengthened by

additions to the garrisons of from thirty to fifty men. Each of the

four frigates sent out by the Company had a crew of fifty men, among

whom was one young sailor, Samuel Hearne, of whom more anon. Every

year took out more cannon for the forts, more builders for Churchill,

now a stone-walled fort strong as Quebec. Joseph Isbister, who had

been governor at Albany and made some inland voyages from Churchill,

was permanently appointed, from 1770, as agent at Quebec to watch what

rival fur traders were doing; and when he died, Hugh Findlay succeeded

him. A new house was rushed up on Severn River in 1756, to attract

those Indians of Manitoba where the French were established. Lest other

merchants should petition for Labrador, the Slude River Station was

moved to Richmond Fort and Captain Coates appointed to survey the whole

east coast of Hudson Bay, for which labor he was given a present of

£80. Poor Coates! This was in 1750. Within a year, he is hauled up for

illicit trade and dismissed ignominiously from the service; whereat he

suicides from disgrace. Eight years later, Richmond Fort is closed at

a loss of £20,000, but it has shut the mouths of other petitioners for

Labrador.

It is in 1757, too, that the Company inaugurates its pension

system—withholding 5 per cent. of wages for a fund. As if Joseph La

France’s journal had not been alarming enough, there comes overland

to Nelson, in 1759, that Jan Ba’tiste Larlée, a spy whom the English

engage and vote a wig (£1 5s) “_to keep him loyal_.”

At Henley House up Albany River, pushing trade to attract the Indians

away from the French, is that Andrew Graham, whose diary gives such

a picture of the period. Richard Norton of Churchill is long since

dead. Of his half-breed sons educated in England, William has become

a captain; Moses, from being sailor under Middleton, wins distinction

as explorer of Chesterfield Inlet and rises to become governor at

Churchill. Among the recruits of the increasing garrisons are names

famous in the West—Bannister’s and Spencer’s and Flett’s. By way of

encouraging zeal, the Company, in 1770, increases salaries for chief

traders to £130 a year, for captains to £12 a month with a gratuity

of £100 if they have no wreck. Each chief trader is to have added to

his salary three shillings for every twenty beaver sent home from

his department; each captain, one shilling sixpence for every twenty

beaver brought safely to England. As these bounties amounted to £108

and £150 a year, they more than doubled salaries. I am sorry to say

that at this period, brandy began to be plied freely. French power had

fallen at Quebec in 1759. French traders were scattered through the

wilds—birds of passage, free as air, lawless as birds, too, who lured

the Indians from the English by the use of liquor. If an English trader

ventured among Indians, who knew the customs of the French, and did not

proffer a keg of watered brandy, he was apt to be forthwith douched

“_baptized_”—the Indians called it.

But the greatest activity displayed by the English at this time was

inland from the bay. If Joseph La France could come overland from

Lake Superior, English traders could be sent inland. Andrew Graham is

ordered to keep his men at Severn and Albany moving up stream. One

Isaac Butt is paid £14 for his voyaging, and in 1756 the Company votes

£20 to Anthony Hendry for his remarkable voyage from York to the Forks

of the Saskatchewan—the first Englishman to visit this now famous

region. Hendry’s voyage merits a detailed account in the next chapter.

_Notes to Chapter XVII._—The list of governors at this period is: Sir

Bibye Lake, 1712-1743; Benjamin Pitt, 1743-1746, when he died; Thomas

Knapp, 1746-1750; Sir Atwell Lake, 1750-1760; Sir William Baker,

1760-1770; Bibye Lake, Jr., 1770-1782.