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.

The controversy between the Company and Dobbs fills volumes. Ellis
and Dobbs need not be taken seriously. They were for the time maniacs
on the subject of a passage that had no existence except in their own
fancy. Robson is different.

Having been a builder at Churchill, he knew the ground, yet we find
him uttering such absurd charges as that the Company purposely sent
Governor Knight to his death and were glad “that the troublesome fellow
was out of the way.” This is both malicious and ignorant, for as Robson
knew, the Northwest Passage played a very secondary part in Knight’s
fatal voyage. The Company just as much as Knight was infatuated with
the lure of gold-dust. Perhaps, it will some day prove not so foolish
an infatuation. Gold placers have been found in Klondike. Indian legend
says they also exist in the ices of the East.

The Parliamentary Report for 1749 is an excellent example of
investigating “off the beat.” The only thing of value in the report is
Joseph La France’s Journal. It is valuable not as a voyage—for this
trip was well tracked from the days of Radisson and Iberville—but as
a description of the French posts on the Saskatchewan, which Hendry
visited—Pachegoia or Pasquia or the Pas and Bourbon—and as helping to
identify the Indians, whom Hendry met.

La Vérendrye voyages are not given here, because not relative to the
subject. His life will be found in “Pathfinders of the West.”

The Canadian Archives give Hendry’s name as Hendey. It is spelt Hendry
in the H. B. C. minutes.

In 1746 the warehouse on Lime Street was purchased for £550. This
year, too, comes a letter to the Company from Captain Lee of Virginia,
warning that a French pirate of two hundred and fifty men, which
captured him, is on the lookout for the fur ships.

Sharpe was the lawyer who engineered the Parliamentary Inquiry of 1749.
I find his charges in the Minutes £250 and £505.

John Potts was the trader of Richmond, when Coates was captain.

In 1766, Samuel Hearne’s name appears as on the pay roll of _The Prince
Rupert_.

Whale fisheries were now flourishing on the bay, for which each captain
received a bounty of 25 per cent. on net proceeds.

In 1769, the Company issued as standard of trade 3 marten, 1 beaver;
2 fox, 3 beaver; gray fox, 4 beaver; white fox, ½ beaver; 1 otter, 1
beaver.

CHAPTER XVIII

1754-1755

THE MARCH ACROSS THE CONTINENT BEGINS—THE COMPANY SENDS A MAN TO
THE BLACKFEET OF THE SOUTH SASKATCHEWAN—ANTHONY HENDRY IS THE FIRST
ENGLISHMAN TO PENETRATE TO THE SASKATCHEWAN—THE FIRST ENGLISHMAN TO
WINTER WEST OF LAKE WINNIPEG—HE MEETS THE SIOUX AND THE BLACKFEET AND
INVITES THEM TO THE BAY

Nothing lends more romantic coloring to the operations of the fur
traders on Hudson Bay than the character of the men in the service.
They were adventurers, pure and simple, in the best and the worst
sense of that term. Peter Romulus, the foreign surgeon, rubbed elbows
with Radisson, the Frenchman. A nephew of Sir Stephen Evance—come out
under the plain name, Evans—is under the same roof as a niece of the
same governor of the Company, who has come to the bay as the doweried
wife of an apprentice. Younger sons of the English gentry entered the
service on the same level as the Cockney apprentice. Rough Orkney
fishermen—with the thick burr of the North in their accent, the iron
strength of the North in their blood, and a periphery of Calvinistic
self-righteousness, which a modern gatling gun could not shoot
through—had as bedfellows in the fort barracks soft-voiced English
youths from the south counties, who had been outlawed for smuggling,
or sent to the bay to expiate early dissipations. And sometimes this
curious conglomeration of human beings was ruled in the fort—ruled with
the absolute despotism of the _little_ king, of course—by a drunken
half-breed brute like Governor Moses Norton, whose one qualification
was that he could pile up the beaver returns and hold the Indians’
friendship by being baser and more uncivilized than they. The theme is
one for song and story as well as for history.

Among the flotsam and jetsam cast on Hudson Bay in the seventeen
hundred and fifties was one Anthony Hendry, a boy from the Isle of
Wight. He had been outlawed for smuggling and sought escape from
punishment by service on the bay. He came as bookkeeper. Other
servants could scarcely be driven or bribed to go inland with the
Indians. Hendry asked permission to go back to their country with the
Assiniboines, in 1754. James Isham was governor of York Fort at the
time. He was only too glad to give Hendry permission.

Four hundred Assiniboines had come in canoes with their furs to the
fort. Leather wigwams spread back from the Hayes River like a town of
mushrooms. Canoes lay in hundreds bottom-up on the beach, and where
the reddish blue of the campfire curled up from the sands filling
the evening air with the pungent smell of burning bark, Assiniboine
voyageurs could be seen melting resin and tar to gum the splits in the
birch canoes. Hunters had exchanged their furs for guns and ammunition.
Squaws had bartered their store of pemmican (buffalo) meat for gay
gewgaws—red flannels and prints, colored beads, hand mirrors of
tin—given at the wicket gate of the fort.

Young Hendry joined the encampment, became acquainted with different
leaders of the brigades, and finally secured an Assiniboine called
Little Bear as a guide to the country of the Great Unknown River,
where the French sent traders—the Saskatchewan. It was the end of June
before the Indians were ready to break camp for the homeward voyage.
By looking at the map, it will be seen that Nelson and Hayes rivers
flow northeast from the same prairie region to a point at the bay
called Port Nelson, or Fort York. One could ascend to the country of
the Assiniboines by either Hayes River or Nelson. York Fort was on
Hayes River. The Indians at that time usually ascended the Hayes River
halfway, then crossed westward to the Nelson by a chain of rivers and
lakes and portages, and advanced to the prairie by a branch of the
Nelson River known as Katchawan to Playgreen Lake. Playgreen Lake is
really a northern arm of Lake Winnipeg. Instead of coming on down to
Lake Winnipeg, the Assiniboines struck westward overland from Playgreen
Lake to the Saskatchewan at Pasquia, variously known as Basquia and
Pachegoia and the Pas. By cutting across westward from Playgreen Lake
to the main Saskatchewan, three detours were avoided: (1) the long
detour round the north shore of Lake Winnipeg; (2) the southern bend
of Saskatchewan, where it enters the lake; (3) the portage of Grand
Rapids in the Saskatchewan between Lake Winnipeg and Cedar Lake. It is
necessary to give these somewhat tedious details as this route was to
become the highway of commerce for a hundred years.

Up these waters paddled the gay Indian voyageurs, the foam rippling
on the wake of their bark canoes not half so light as the sparkling
foam of laugh and song and story from the paddlers. Over these long
lonely portages, silent but for the wind through the trees, or the hoot
of the owl, or flapping of a loon, or a far weird call of the meadow
lark—a mote in an ocean of sky—the first colonists were to trudge,
men and women and children, who came to the West seeking that freedom
and room for the shoulder-swing of uncramped manhood, which home lands
had denied. Plymouth Rock, they call the landing place of the Pilgrim
Fathers. Every portage up Hayes River was a Plymouth Rock to these
first colonists of the West.

On June 26, then, 1754, Hendry set out with the Assiniboines for the
voyage up Hayes River. At Amista-Asinee or Great Stone Rock they
camped for the first night, twenty-four miles from York—good progress
considering it was against stream at the full flood of summer rains.
Fire Steel River, Wood Partridge River, Pine Reach—marked the camps for
sixty miles from York. Four Falls compelled portage beyond Pine Reach,
and shoal water for another twenty-five miles set the men tracking, the
crews jumping out to wade and draw the lightened canoes up stream.

July 1, Hendry was one hundred and thirteen miles from York. Terrific
rains, hot and thundery, deluged the whole flotilla, and Hendry learned
for the first time what clouds of huge inland mosquitoes can do.
Mosquito Point, he called the camp. Here, the Hayes broke into three or
four branches. Hendry’s brigade of Assiniboines began to work up one of
the northwestward branches toward the Nelson. The land seemed to be
barren rock. At camping places was neither fish nor fowl. The voyageurs
took a reef in their belts and pressed on. Three beaver afforded some
food on Steel River but “we are greatly fatigued,” records Hendry,
“with carrying and hauling our canoes, and we are not well fed; but the
natives are continually smoking, which I find allays hunger.” Pikes and
ducks replenished the provision bags on Duck Lake beyond Steel River.
Twenty canoes of Inland Indians were met at Shad Falls beyond Cree
Lake, on their way to York. With these Hendry sent a letter to Governor
Isham. It was July 20 before Hendry realized that the labyrinth of
willow swamps had led into Nelson River. It must have been high up
Nelson River, in some of its western sources east of Playgreen Lake,
for one day later, on Sunday the 21st, he records: “We paddled two
miles up the Nelson and then came to Keiskatchewan River, on which the
French have two houses which we expect to see to-morrow.” He was now
exactly five hundred miles from York. “The mosquitoes are intolerable,
giving us peace neither day nor night. We paddled fourteen miles up the
Keiskatchewan west, when we came to a French house. On our arrival, two
Frenchmen came to the waterside and in a very genteel manner invited
me into their house, which I readily accepted. One asked if I had
any letter from my master and why I was going inland. I answered I
had no letter and was out to view the country; that I meant to return
this way in spring. He told me his master and men were gone down to
Montreal with the furs, and that they must detain me until his return.
However, they were very kind, and at night I went to my tent and told
Little Bear my leader. He only smiled and said: “They dare not detain
you.” Hendry was at the Pas on the Saskatchewan. If he had come up the
Saskatchewan from Lake Winnipeg, he would have found that the French
had another fort at the mouth of the river—Bourbon.

From now on, he describes the region which he crossed as Mosquito
Plains. White men alone in the wilderness become friends quickly. In
spite of rivalry, the English trader presented the French with tobacco;
the French in turn gave him pemmican of moose meat. On Wednesday, July
24, he left the fort. Sixteen miles up the Saskatchewan, Hendry passed
Peotago River, heavily timbered with birch trees. Up this region the
canoes of the four hundred Assiniboines ascended southward, toward the
western corner of the modern province of Manitoba. As the river became
shoal, canoes were abandoned seventy miles south of the Saskatchewan.
Packs strapped on backs, the Indians starving for food, a dreary march
began across country southwest over the Mosquito Plains. “Neither bird
nor beast is to be seen. We have nothing to eat,” records Hendry after
a twenty-six miles tramp. At last, seventy miles from where they had
left the canoes, one hundred and forty from the Saskatchewan, they came
on a huge patch of ripe raspberries and wild cherries, and luckily in
the brushwood killed two moose. This relieved the famine. Wandering
Assiniboines chanced to be encamped here. Hendry held solemn conference
with the leaders, whiffed pipes to the four corners of the universe—by
which the deities of North, South, East and West were called to witness
the sincerity of the sentiments—and invited these tribes down to York;
but they only answered, “we are already supplied by the French at
Pasquia.”

One hundred miles south of Pas—or just where the Canadian Northern
Railroad strikes west from Manitoba across Saskatchewan—a delightful
change came over the face of the country. Instead of brackish swamp
water or salt sloughs, were clear-water lakes. Red deer—called by the
Assiniboines _waskesaw_—were in myriads. “I am now,” writes Hendry as
he entered what is now the Province of Saskatchewan, “entering a most
pleasant and plentiful country of hills and dales with little woods.”

Many Indians were met, but all were strong partisans of the French.
An average of ten miles a day was made by the marchers, hunting red
deer as they tramped. On August 8, somewhere near what is now Red Deer
River, along the line of the Canada Northern, pause was made for a
festival of rejoicing on safe return from the long voyage and relief
from famine. For a day and a night, all hands feasted and smoked and
danced and drank and conjured in gladness; the smoking of the pipe
corresponding to our modern grace before meals, the dancing a way of
evincing thanks in rhythmic motion instead of music, the drinking
and conjuring not so far different from our ancestors’ way of giving
thanks. The lakes were becoming alkali swamps, and camp had to be
made where there was fresh water. Sometimes the day’s march did not
average four miles. Again, there would be a forced march of fifteen.
For the first time, an English fur trader saw Indians on horseback.
Where did they get the horses? As we now know, the horses came from
the Spaniards, but we must not wonder that when Hendry reported having
seen whole tribes on horseback, he was laughed out of the service as a
romancer, and the whole report of his trip discredited. The Indians’
object was to reach the buffalo grounds and lay up store of meat for
the winter. They told Hendry he would presently see whole tribes of
Indians on horseback—Archithinues, the famous Blackfoot Confederacy of
Bloods, Blackfeet, Piegans and Sarcees.

On the 15th of August, they were among the buffalo, where to-day the
great grooves and ruts left by the marching herds can still be seen
between the Saskatchewan and the Assiniboine Rivers toward Qu’ Appelle.
For the most part, the Indians hunted the buffalo with bow and arrow,
and at night there was often a casualty list like the wounded after a
battle. “_Sunday—dressed a lame man’s leg and he gave me for my trouble
a moose nose, which is considered a great delicacy among the Indians._”
“_I killed a bull buffalo_,” he writes on September 8, “_he was nothing
but skin and bones. I took out his tongue and left his remains to the
wolves, which were waiting around in great numbers. We cannot afford
to expend ammunition on them. My feet are swelled with marching, but
otherwise I am in perfect health. So expert are the natives buffalo
hunting, they will take an arrow out of the buffalo when the beasts are
foaming and raging and tearing the ground up with their feet and horns.
The buffalo are so numerous, like herds of English cattle that we are
obliged to make them sheer out of our way._”

Sometimes more dangerous game than buffalo was encountered. On
September 17, Hendry writes: “_Two young men were miserably wounded by
a grizzly bear that they were hunting to-day. One may recover but the
other never can. His arm is torn from his body, one eye gouged out and
his stomach ripped open._” The next day the Indian died.

The Assiniboines were marching southwest from the Pas toward the land
of the Blackfeet. They were now three hundred miles southwest of the
French House. To Hendry’s surprise they came to a large river with
high banks that looked exactly like the Saskatchewan. It was the South
Branch of the Saskatchewan, where it takes the great bend south of
Prince Albert. Canoes had been left far behind. What were the four
hundred Assiniboines to do? But the Indians solved the difficulty
in less than half a day. Making boats of willow branches and moose
parchment skin—like the bull-boats of the Missouri—the Assiniboines
rafted safely across. The march now turned west toward the Eagle River
and Eagle Hills and North Saskatchewan. The Eagle Indians are met and
persuaded to bring their furs to York Fort.

As winter approached, the women began dressing the skins for moccasins
and clothes. A fire of punk in an earth-hole smoked the skins. Beating
and pounding and stretching pelts, the squaws then softened the skin.
For winter wear, moccasins were left with the fur inside. Hendry
remarks how in the fall of the year, the women sat in the doors of
their wigwams “knitting moose leather into snow shoes” made of seasoned
wood. It was October before the Indians of the far Western plains were
met. These were the famous Blackfeet for the first time now seen by an
English trader. They approached the Assiniboines mounted and armed with
bows and spears. Hendry gave them presents to carry to their chief.
Hendry notes the signs of mines along the banks of the Saskatchewan. He
thought the mineral iron. What he saw was probably an outcropping of
coal. The jumping deer he describes as a new kind of goat. As soon as
ice formed on the swamps, the hunters began trenching for beaver—which
were plentiful beyond the fur trader’s hopes. When, on October the
11th, the marchers for the third time came on the Saskatchewan, which
the Indians called Waskesaw, Hendry recognized that all the branches
were forks of one and the same great river—the Saskatchewan, or as the
French called it, Christinaux. The Indian names for the two branches
were Keskatchew and Waskesaw.

For several days the far smoke of an encampment had been visible
southwest. On October the 14th, four riders came out to conduct Hendry
to an encampment of three hundred and twenty-two tents of Blackfeet
Indians “_pitched in two rows with an opening in the middle, where we
were conducted to the leader’s tent_.” This was the main tribe of which
Hendry had already met the outrunners. “_The leader’s tent was large
enough to contain fifty persons. He received us seated on a buffalo
skin attended by twenty elderly men. He made signs for me to sit down
on his right hand, which I did. Our leaders (the Assiniboines) set
several great pipes going the rounds and we smoked according to their
custom. Not one word was spoken. Smoking over, boiled buffalo flesh
was served in baskets of bent wood. I was presented with ten buffalo
tongues. My guide informed the leader I was sent by the grand leader
who lives on the Great Waters to invite his young men down with their
furs. They would receive in return, powder, shot, guns and cloth.
He made little answer: said it was far off and his people could not
paddle. We were then ordered to depart to our tents which we pitched a
quarter of a mile outside their lines._” Again invited to the leader’s
tent the next morning, Hendry heard some remarkable philosophy from
the Indian. “_The chief told me his tribe never wanted food as they
followed the buffalo, but he was informed the natives who frequented
the settlements often starved on their journey, which was exceedingly
true_,” added Hendry. Reciprocal presents closed the interview. The
present to the Assiniboine chief was a couple of girl slaves, one of
whom was murdered at York ten years afterward by an Indian in a fit of
jealousy.

Later, Hendry learned that the Assiniboines did not want these
Blackfeet of the far West to come down to the bay. Neither would the
Assiniboines hunt except for food. Putting the two facts together,
Hendry rightly judged that the Assiniboines acted as middlemen between
the traders and the Blackfeet.

By the end of October, Hendry had left the plains and was in a rolling
wooded land northwest of the North Saskatchewan. Here, with occasional
moves as the hunting shifted, the Indians wintered; his journal says,
“eight hundred and ten miles west of York,” moving back and forward
north and south of the river; but a comment added by Andrew Graham on
the margin of the journal, says he was in latitude 59°. This is plainly
a mistake, as latitude 59° is six degrees away from the Saskatchewan;
but eight hundred and ten miles from York along the Saskatchewan would
bring Hendry in the region between the modern Edmonton and Battleford.
It is to Hendry’s credit that he remained on good terms with the
Assiniboines. If he had been a weakling, he would easily have become
the butt of the children who infested the tents like imps; but he
hunted with the hunters, trapped with the trappers, and could outmarch
the best of them. Consequently, there is not a note in his journal of
that doleful whine which comes from the weakling run amuck of hard life
in a savage land.

When he met Indians hunting for the French forts, with true trader
instinct he bribed them with gifts to bring their furs down to Hudson
Bay. Almost the entire winter, camp moved from bend to bend or branch
to branch of the North Saskatchewan, heading gradually eastward. Toward
spring, different tribes joined the Assiniboines to go down to York.
Among these were “green scalps” and many women captives from those
Blackfeet Indians Hendry had met. Each night the scalps hung like flags
from the tent poles. The captives were given around camp as presents.
One hears much twaddle of the red man’s noble state before he was
contaminated by the white man. Hendry saw these tribes of the Far West
before they had met any white men but himself, and the disposal of
those captives is a criterion of the red man’s noble state. Whenever
one was not wanted—the present of a girl, for instance, resented by a
warrior’s jealous wives—she was summarily hacked to pieces, and not a
passing thought given to the matter. The killing of a dog or a beaver
caused more comment. On the value of life as a thing of worth in
itself, the Indian had absolutely no conception, not so much conception
as a domestic dog trained not to destroy life.

By spring, Hendry’s camp had dwindled down to a party of twelve. He now
had only two pounds of powder in his possession, but his party were
rich in furs. As the time approached to build canoes, the Assiniboines
began gathering at the river banks. Young men searched the woods for
bark. Old men whittled out the gun’els. Women pounded pemmican into
bags for the long voyage to the bay. The nights passed in riotous feast
and revel, with the tom-tom pounding, the conjurers performing tricks,
the hunters dancing, the women peeping shyly into the dance tent. At
such times, one may guess, Hendry did not spare of his scant supplies
to lure the Indians to York Fort, but he did not count on the effects
of French brandy when the canoes would pass the French posts.

Ice was driving in the river like a mill race all the month of April.
Swans and geese and pigeons and bluejays came winging north. There was
that sudden and wondrous leap to life of a dormant world—and lo!—it was
summer, with the ducks on the river in flocks, and the long prairie
grass waving like a green sea, and the trees bleak and bare against
the vaporous sky now clothing themselves in foliage as in a bridal veil
shot with sunlight.

The great dog feast was solemnly held. The old men conjured the powers
of the air to bless them a God-speed. Canoes were launched on April 28,
and out swung the Assiniboines’ brigade for Fort York. It was easier
going down stream than up. Thirty and forty miles a day they made,
passing multitudes of Indians still building their canoes on the river
banks. At every camp, more fur-laden canoes joined them. Hendry’s heart
must have been very happy. He was bringing wealth untold to York.

Four hundred miles down stream, the Blackfeet Indians were met and
with great pow-wow of trading turned their furs over to the crafty
Assiniboines to be taken down to York. There were now sixty canoes in
the flotilla and says Hendry “not a pot or kettle among us.” Everything
had been bartered to the Blackfeet for furs. Six hundred miles from
their launching place, they came to the first French post. This
distance given by Hendry is another pretty effective proof that he had
wintered near Edmonton, if not beyond it, for this post was not the
Pas. It was subordinate to Basquia or Pasquia.

Hendry was invited into the French post as the guest of the master.
If he had been as crafty as he was brave, he would have hurried his
Indians past the rival post, but he had to live and learn. While he was
having supper, the French distributed ten gallons of brandy among the
Assiniboines. By morning, the French had obtained the pick of the furs,
one thousand of the best pelts, and it was three days before the amazed
Hendry could coax the Indians away from his polite hosts. Two hundred
miles more, brought the brigade to the main French post—the Pas. Nine
Frenchmen were in possession, and the trick was repeated. “The Indians
are all drunk,” deplores Hendry, “but the master was very kind to me.
He is dressed very genteel but his men wear nothing but drawers and
striped cotton shirts ruffled at the hand and breast. This house has
been long a place of trade and is named Basquia. It is twenty-six feet
long, twelve wide, nine high, having a sloping roof, the walls log on
log, the top covered with willows, and divided into three rooms, one
for trade, one for storing furs, and one for a dwelling.”

Four days passed before the Indians had sobered sufficiently to go on,
and they now had only the heavy furs that the French would not take. On
June 1, the brigade again set out for York. Canoes were lighter now.
Seventy miles a day was made. Hendry does not give any distances on his
return voyage, but he followed the same course by which he had come,
through Deer Lake and Steel River to Hayes River and York, where all
arrived on the 20th of June.

To Hendry’s profound disgust, he was not again permitted to go inland.
In fact, discredit was cast on his report. “Indians on horseback!” The
factors of the bay ridiculed the idea. They had never heard of such a
thing. All the Indians they knew came to the fort in canoes. Indeed,
it was that spirit of little-minded narrowness that more than anything
else lost to the Company the magnificent domain of its charter. If the
men governing the Company had realized the empire of their ruling as
fully as did the humble servants fighting the battles on the field,
the Hudson’s Bay Company might have ruled from Atlantic to Pacific in
the North, and in the West as far south as Mexico. But they objected
to being told what they did not know. Hendry was “frozen” out of the
service. The occasion of his leaving was even more contemptible than
the real cause. On one of his trading journeys, he was offered very
badly mixed brandies, probably drugged. Being a fairly good judge of
brandies from his smuggling days, Hendry refused to take what Andrew
Graham calls “such slops from such gentry.” He quit the service in
disgust.

The Company, as the minutes show, voted him £20 gratuity for his
voyage. Why, then, did the factors cast ridicule on his report?
Supposing they had accepted it, what would have been entailed? They
must capture the furs of that vast inland country for their Company. To
do that, there must be forts built inland. Some factor would be ordered
inland. Then, there would be the dangers of French competition—very
real danger in the light of that brandy incident. The factors on the
bay—Norton and Isham—were not brave enough men to undertake such
a campaign. It was easier sitting snugly inside the forts with a
multitude of slave Indians to wait on their least want. So the trade of
the interior was left to take care of itself.

_Notes on Chapter XVIII._—Hendry’s Journal is in Hudson’s Bay Company’s
House, London. A copy is also in the Canadian Archives. Andrew Graham
of Severn has written various notes along the margin. If it had not
been for Graham, it looks much as if Hendry’s Journal would have
been lost to the Company. Hendry gives the distances of each day’s
travel so minutely, that his course can easily be followed first to
Basquia, then from Basquia to the North Saskatchewan region. Graham’s
comment that Hendry was at 59° north is simply a slip. It is out of
the question to accept it for the simple reason Hendry could not
have gone eight hundred and ten miles _southwest_ from York, as his
journal daily records, and have been within 6° of 59°. Besides his own
discovery that he had been crossing branches of the Saskatchewan all
the time and his account of his voyage down the Saskatchewan to the
Pas, are unmistakable proofs of his whereabouts. Also he mentions the
Eagle Indians repeatedly. These Indians dwelt between the north and
south branches of the Saskatchewan. Whether the other rivers that he
crossed were the Assiniboine or the Qu’ Appelle or the Red Deer of Lake
Winnipegosis—I do not know.

I had great trouble in identifying the Archithinue Indians of Hendry’s
Journal till I came on Matthew Cocking’s Journal over the same ground.
Dec. 1, 1772, Cocking says: “This tribe is named Powestic Athinuewuck,
Waterfall Indians. There are four tribes or nations which are all
Equestrian Indians, viz:

(1) Mithco Athinuewuck, or Bloody Indians.

(2) Koskiton Wathesitock, or Black Footed Indians.

(3) Pegonow, or Muddy Water Indians.

(4) Sassewuck, or Woody Country Indians.”

CHAPTER XIX

1770-1800

EXTENSION OF TRADE TOWARD LABRADOR, QUEBEC AND ROCKIES—HEARNE
FINDS THE ATHABASCA COUNTRY AND FOUNDS CUMBERLAND HOUSE ON THE
SASKATCHEWAN—COCKING PROCEEDS TO THE BLACKFEET—HOWSE FINDS THE PASS IN
ROCKIES

While Anthony Hendry, the English smuggler, was making his way up the
Saskatchewan to the land of the Blackfeet—the present province of
Alberta—the English Adventurers were busy making good their claim to
Labrador. Except as a summer rendezvous, Rupert, the oldest of the
Company’s forts, at the southeast corner of the bay—had been abandoned,
but far up the coast of Labrador on the wildest part of this desolate
shore, was that fort which the Company was shortly forced to dismantle
at great loss—Richmond. When Captain Coates was sent to cruise the east
coast of Hudson Bay, thirty men under John Potts and Mr. Pollexfen, had
been left on Richmond Gulf to build a fort. There was no more dangerous
region on the bay. It was here Hudson’s crew had been attacked by
the Eskimos, and here the Eskimos yearly came to winter and hunt the
white whale. Between the rugged main shore and the outer line of barren
islands was usually open water. Camped on the rocky islets, the timid
Eskimos were secure from Indian foe, and if the white whale fisheries
failed, they had only to scud across the open water or portage over
the ice to the mainland and hunt partridge on Richmond Gulf. From one
hundred and fifty to three hundred Eskimos yearly wintered within
trading distance of Richmond.

Quickly, storehouses, barracks, wareroom and guardroom were erected
just inside the narrow entrance from Hudson Bay to Richmond Gulf, and
round all thrown a ten-foot palisade. This was in 1749. Coates had
been attracted to Richmond Gulf—which he calls Artiwinipack—by its
land-locked, sheltered position and the magnificent supply of lumber
for building. The Eskimo whale fisheries were farther south at Whale
River and East Main, with winter lodges subordinate to Richmond. The
partridges of the wooded slopes promised abundance of food, and there
was excellent fox and beaver trapping. Compared to the other rocky
barrens of northern Labrador, Richmond Harbor seemed Paradise, “_but
oh, my conscience_,” wrote Captain Coates, “_there is so profound
silence, such awful precipices, no life, that the world seems asleep.
The land is so tremendous high that wind and water reverberate between
the cliffs entering two miles to our gulf. Inside are mountains,
groves, cascades and vales adorned with trees. On the Hudson Bay side
nothing is seen but barren rocks. Inside, all is green with stately
woods.... On the high mountains is only snow moss; lower, a sort of
rye grass, some snow drops and violets without odor, then rows of
evergreens down to the very sea. On the right of the gulf is Lady
Lake’s Grove under a stupendous mountain, whence falls a cascade
through the grove to the sea. In short, such is the elegant situation
of Richmond Fort that it is not to be paralleled in the world._”

Such were the high hopes with which Richmond Fort was founded. To-day
it is a howling wilderness silent as death but for the rush of waters
heard when white men first entered the bay. Partridge there were in
plenty among the lonely evergreens, and game for trapping; but not
the warmest overtures of Chief Factor Potts and Mr. Pollexfen and Mr.
Isbister, who yearly came up from Albany, could win the friendship of
the treacherous Eskimos. They would not hunt, and the white men dare
not penetrate far enough inland to make their trapping pay. Potts kept
his men whale fishing off Whale River, but in five years the loss to
the Company had totaled more than £24,000. The crisis came in 1754.
Day and night, the stealthy shadow of Eskimo spies moved through the
evergreens of the gulf. In vain Potts gave the chiefs presents of
gold-laced suits, beaver hats with plumes, and swords. “They _shaked_
my hands,” he records, “and hugged and embraced and smiled”; but the
very next trapper, who went alone to the woods, or attempted to drive
his dog train south to Whale River, would see Eskimos ambushed behind
rocks and have his _cache_ rifled or find himself overpowered and
plundered. One day in February, Mr. Pollexfen had gone out with his men
from Whale River trapping. When they returned in the afternoon they
found the cook boy had been kidnapped and the house robbed of every
object that could be carried away—stores of ammunition, arms, traps,
food, clothes, even the door hinges and iron nails of the structure.

Waiting only till it was dark, the terrified hunters hitched their dog
sleighs up, tore off all bells that would betray flight, and drove
like mad for the stronger fort of Richmond. Potts hurriedly sent out
orders to recall his trappers from the hills and manned Richmond for
siege. It was four days before all the men came under shelter, and
nightly the Eskimos could be heard trying to scale the palisades. The
fort was so short of provisions, all hands were reduced to one meal a
day. Potts called for volunteers, to go to the rescue of the kidnapped
cook—a boy, named Matthew Warden; and thirteen men offered to go. The
Eskimos had taken refuge on the islands of the outer shore. Frost-fog
thick as wool lay on the bay. Eskimos were seen lurking on the hills
above the fort. A council was held. It was determined to catch three
Eskimos as hostages for the cook’s safety rather than risk the lives
of thirteen men outside the fort. Some ten days later, when a few men
ventured out for partridges, the forest again came to life with Eskimo
spies. Potts recalled his hunters, sent two scouts to welcome the
Eskimos to the fort and placed all hands on guard. Three Indians were
conducted into the house. In a twinkling, fetters were clapped on two,
and the third bade go and fetch the missing white boy on pain of death
to the hostages. The stolid Eskimo affected not to understand. Potts
laid a sword across the throats of the two prisoners and signaled the
third to be gone. The fellow needed no urging but scampered. “I had our
men,” relates Potts, “one by one pass through the guardroom changing
their dresses every time to give the two prisoners the idea that I had
a large garrison. They seemed surprised that I had one hundred men,
but they spoke no word.” The next day, the fettered prisoners drew
knives on their guard, seized his gun and clubbed the Company men from
the room. In the scuffle that followed, both Eskimos were shot. The
danger was now increased a hundredfold. Friendly Montagnais Indians,
especially one named Robinson Crusoe, warned Potts that if the shooting
were known, nothing could save the fort. The bodies were hidden in the
cellar till some Montagnais went out one dark night and weighting the
feet with stones, pushed them through a hole in the ice. How quickly
white men can degenerate to savagery is well illustrated by the conduct
of the cooped-up, starving garrison. Before sending away the dead
bodies, they cut the ears from each and preserved them in spirits of
alcohol to send down by Indian scouts to Isbister at Moose with a
letter imploring that the sloop come to the rescue as soon as the ice
cleared. For two months the siege lasted. Nothing more was ever heard
of the captured boy, but by the end of May, Isbister had sent a sloop
to Richmond. As told elsewhere, Richmond was dismantled in 1778 and the
stores carried down to Whale River and East Main.

Important changes had gradually grown up in the Adventurer’s methods.
White servants were no longer forbidden to circulate with the Indians
but encouraged to go out to the hunting field and paid bounties on
their trapping. Three men had been sent out from York in January, 1772,
to shoot partridges for the fort. It was a mild, open winter. The men
carried provisions to last three weeks. Striking back through the marsh
land, that lies between Hayes and Nelson Rivers, they camped for the
first night on the banks of the Nelson. The next morning, Tuesday,
the 7th of January, they were crossing the ice of the Nelson’s broad
current when they suddenly felt the rocking of the tide beneath their
feet, looked ahead, saw the frost-smoke of open water and to their
horror realized that the tidal bore had loosened the ice and they were
adrift, bearing out to sea. In vain, dogs and men dashed back for the
shore. The ice floe had separated from the land and was rushing seaward
like a race horse. That night it snowed. The terrified men kept watch,
hoping that the high tide would carry the ice back to some of the long,
low sand-bars at Port Nelson. The tide did sway back the third day but
not near enough for a landing. This night, they put up their leather
tents and slept drifting. When they awakened on Friday the 10th, they
were driving so direct for the shore that the three men simultaneously
dashed to gain the land, leaving packs, provisions, tent and sleighs;
but in vain. A tidal wave swept the floe off shore, and when they
set back for their camp, they were appalled to see camp kit, sleds,
provisions, all—drive past afloat. The ice floe had broken. They were
now adrift without food or shelter, James Ross carrying gun, powder
bag and blanket over his shoulders as he had risen from sleep, Farrant
wearing only the beaver coat in which he had slept, Tomson bereft of
either gun or blanket.

[Illustration: Fort Rae, on Great Slave Lake, One of the Northernmost
Posts of the Fur Trade.]

This time, the ebb carried them far into the bay where they passed the
fourth night adrift. The next day, wind and the crumbling of the ice
added to their terrors. As the floe went to pieces, they leaped from
float to float trying to keep together on the largest icepan. Farrant
fell through the slush to his armpits and after being belted tightly
in his beaver coat lay down behind a wind-break of ice blocks to die.
Their only food since losing the tent kit had been some lumps of sugar
one of them had chanced to have in his pockets. During Saturday night
the 11th of January, the ice grounded and great seas began sweeping
over the floe. When Ross and Tomson would have dragged Farrant to
a higher hummock of the ice field, they found that he was dead. On
Monday, the weather grew cold and stormy. Tomson’s hands had swollen so
that he could not move a muscle and the man became delirious, raving
of his Orkney home as they roamed aimlessly over the illimitable ice
fields. That night, the seventh they had been adrift, just as the
moon sank below the sea, the Orkneyman, Tomson, breathed his last.

Ross was now alone. A great ice floe borne down by a wash of the tide,
swept away Tomson’s body. Ross scrambled upon the fresh drift and
hoping against hope, scarcely able to believe his senses, saw that the
new icepan extended to the land. Half blinded by sun glare, hands and
feet frozen stiff, now laughing hysterically, now crying deliriously,
the fellow managed to reach shore, but when the sun set he lost all
sense of direction and could not find his way farther. That night, his
hands were so stiff that he could not strike a light on his flint, but
by tramping down brushwood, made himself a bed in the snow. Sunrise
gave him his bearings again and through his half-delirium he realized
he was only four miles from the fort. Partly walking, partly creeping,
he reached York gates at seven that night. One of the dogs had followed
him all the way, which probably explains how he was not frozen sleeping
out uncovered for nine nights. Hands and feet had to be amputated, but
his countrymen of Orkney took up a subscription for him and the Company
gave him a pension of £20 a year for life. The same amount was bestowed
on the widows of the two dead men. It is not surprising that Hudson
Bay became ill-omened to Orkneymen who heard such tales of fur hunting
as have been related of Richmond and York.

But the Company was now on the eve of the most momentous change in its
history. Anthony Hendry had reported how the French traders had gone up
the Saskatchewan to the tribes of equestrian Indians; and Hendry had
been cashiered for his pains. Now a new fact influenced the Company.
French power had fallen at Quebec, in 1759. Instead of a few French
traders scattered through the West, were thousands of wildwood rovers,
half-Indian, half-French, voyageurs and bush-lopers, fled from the new
laws of the new English régime to the freedom of the wilderness. Beyond
Sault Ste. Marie, the long hand of the law could not reach. Beyond the
Sault, was law of neither God nor man. To make matters worse, English
merchants, who had flocked to Montreal and Quebec, now outfitted these
French rovers and personally led them to the far hunting field of the
_Pays d’en Haut_—a term that meant anything from Lake Superior to the
Pole. The English Adventurers sent more men up stream—up the Moose
toward Quebec as far as Abbittibbi, up the Albany toward what is now
Manitoba past Henley House as far as Osnaburg, across what is now
Keewatin toward Lake Superior as far as New Brunswick House. The catch
of furs showed a decrease every year. Fewer Indians came to the bay,
fewer hunters to the outlying fur posts. Dividends dropped from 10 to 8
and from 8 to 6 and from 6 to 5 per cent. Instead of 100,000 beaver a
year there came to the London market only 40,000 and 50,000 a year.

To stand on the rights of monopoly conferred by an ancient charter
while “interlopers and pedlars,” as the Company called them—ran
away with the profits of that monopoly, was like standing on your
dignity with a thief while he picked your pockets. The “smug ancient
gentlemen,” as enemies designated the Company, bestirred themselves
mightily. Moses Norton, governor of Churchill, was no more anxious
to fight the French Canadians on the hunting field now than he had
been in the days of Anthony Hendry, but being half-Indian he knew
all the legends of the Indians—knew that even if the French already
had possession of the Saskatchewan, north of the Saskatchewan was an
unclaimed kingdom, whence no white man had yet set foot, as large again
as the bounds of Hudson Bay.

Besides, the Company had not forgotten those legends of minerals in the
North which had lured Captain Knight to his death. Chippewyan Indians
still came to Churchill with huge masses of amorphous copper strung on
necklaces or battered into rough pots and pans and cooking utensils.
Whence came that copper? Oddly enough, the world cannot answer that
question yet. The Indians said from “a Far-Away-Metal River” that
ran to a vast sea where the tide ebbed and flowed. Once more hopes
of finding a Northwest Passage rose; once more hopes of those metals
that had led Knight to ship-wreck. Norton suggested that this time
the search should be made by land. Serving as a clerk on a brig at
Churchill was a well-educated young Englishman already mentioned—Samuel
Hearne.

The yearly boats that came to Churchill in 1769, commissioned Hearne
for this expedition, whose ostensible object was the finding of the
Metal River now known as the Coppermine but whose real object was the
occupation of a vast region not yet preempted by the Canadians. The
story of Hearne’s travels would fill a volume. Norton, the governor,
was a curious compound of ability and sham, strength and vice. Born
of an Indian mother and English father, he seemed to have inherited
all the superstitions of one and vices of the other. He was educated
in England and married an English woman. Yet when he came to the
wilderness, he had a seraglio of native wives that would have put a
Mormon to the blush. These he kept apart in rudely but gorgeously
furnished apartments to which he alone possessed the keys. At the
mess-room table, he wearied the souls of his officers by long-winded
and saintly sermons on virtue which were expounded as regularly as the
night supper came round. Did some blackleg expiating dissipations by
life in the wilds judge Norton’s sermons by his conduct and emulate
his example rather than his precepts, Norton had the culprit tied to
the triangle and flogged till his back was raw. An Indian is never a
hypocrite. Why would he be? His code is to do as he wishes, to follow
his desires, to be stronger than his enemies, to impose on the weak.
He has no religion to hold a higher example up like a mirror that
reflects his own face as loathsome, and he has no science to teach him
that what religion calls “evil” means in the long run, wretchedness
and rottenness and ruin. But the hypocrisy in Norton was the white man
strain—the fig leaf peculiar to civilized man—living a lie so long
that he finally believes the lie himself. Knowledge of white man’s
science, Norton had; but to the Indian in him, it was still mystery;
“medicine,” a secret means to kill an enemy, arsenic in medicine,
laudanum in whiskey, or poison that caused convulsions to an Indian who
refused either a daughter for the seraglio or beaver at Norton’s terms.
A white man who could wield such power was to the Indians a god, and
Norton held them in the hollow of his hand. Equally successful was the
half-breed governor managing the governing committee of the Hudson’s
Bay Company in London; for he sent them enormous returns in beaver at
small outlay.

Seven great guns roared their God-speed as the fort gates opened and
Hearne sped out by dog train for his inland trip north on November 6,
1769. Norton waved a farewell and Hearne disappeared over the rolling
drifts with two Indians as guides, two white men as packers to look
after provisions. Striking northwest, Hearne was joined by other
traveling Indians. Bitterly cold weather set in. One Indian guide
deserted the first night out and the other proved himself an impudent
beggar, who camped when it was cold and camped when it was wet and
paused to hunt when it was fair, but laid up no stock of provisions,
giving Hearne plainly to understand that the whole Indian cavalcade
looked to the white men’s sleighs for food. The travelers did not make
ten miles a day. At the end of the month Hearne wakened one morning to
find his stores plundered and gales of laughter ringing back as the
Indians marched off with their booty. Not even guns were left. Rabbit
and partridge-snaring saved the three white men from starving as they
retreated. They were safe inside the fort once more by December 11.
Hearne’s object setting out in midwinter had been to reach the North
before summer, and nothing daunted, he again set forth with five fresh
guides on February 23, 1770, again depending on snares for food. April
saw the marchers halted on the borders of the Barren Lands, scouring
the wide wastes of treeless swamps and rock for game. Caribou had
retreated inland and not yet begun their traverse to the bay. Until
wild fowls came winging north, the camp lived on snow water, tobacco
and such scraps of leather and dried meat as had not already been
devoured. A chance herd of wandering deer relieved the famine till
June, when rations were again reduced; this time, to wild cranberries.
Then the traverse of the caribou herds came—a rush of countless myriads
with the tramp of an army and the clicking of a multitude of horns
from west to east for weeks. Indians had gathered to the traverse in
hundreds. Moss served as fuel. Provisions were abundant. Hearne had
almost decided to winter with the wandering Chippewyans when they again
began to plunder his store of ammunition. Wind had smashed some of the
survey instruments, so he joined a band of hunters on their way to the
fort, which he reached on November 25.

Hearne had not found “Far-Away-Metal-River,” nor the copper mines,
nor the Northwest Passage, but he had found fresh tribes of Indians,
and these were what Norton wanted. December 7, 1770, less than a
month from his home-coming, Hearne was again dispatched by Norton.
Matonabbee, a famous guide of the Chippewyans, accompanied the explorer
with a retinue of the Indian’s wives to draw sleds and handle baggage.
Almost as notable as Norton was Matonabbee, the Chippewyan chief—an
Indian of iron constitution and iron will, pitiless to his wives,
whom he used as beasts of burden; relentless in his aims, fearless
of all Indians, a giant measuring more than six feet, straight as an
arrow, supple as willow, hard as nails. Imperturbable and good-natured
Matonabbee set the pace at winged speed, pausing for neither hunger nor
cold. Christmas week was celebrated by fasting. Matonabbee uttered no
complaint; and the white man could not well turn back when the Indian
was as eager for the next day’s march as if he had supped sumptuously
instead of going to bed on a meal of moss water. Self-pity, fear,
hesitation, were emotions of which the guide knew nothing. He had
undertaken to lead Hearne to “Far-Away-Metal-River,” and only death
could stop him.

In the Barren Lands, caribou enough were killed to afford the whole
company provisions for six months; and the marchers were joined by
two hundred more Indians. Wood became scarcer and smaller as they
marched north. Matonabbee halted in April and ordered his wives to
camp while the men made dugouts for the voyage down stream. The boats
were heavy in front to resist the ice jams. If Hearne had marveled
at the large company now following Matonabbee to a hard, dangerous
hunting field he quickly guessed good reasons when wives and children
were ordered to head westward and await the warrior’s return at Lake
Athabasca. Women are ordered away only when there is prospect of
war, and Hearne could easily surmise whence the Chippewyans annually
obtained eleven thousand of their best beaver pelts. The sun no longer
set. It was continual day, and on June 12, 1771, the swamps of the
Barrens converged to a narrow, rocky river bed whence roared a misty
cataract—“Far-Off-Metal-River”—the Coppermine River, without any sign
of the ebbing tide that was to lead to the South Sea. When Hearne
came back to his Indian companions from the river bed, he found them
stripped and daubed in war paint, gliding as if in ambush from stone
to stone down the steep declivity of the waterfall. Then far below the
rapids, like the tops of big bowlders, appeared the rounded leather
tent-peaks of an Eskimo camp. The Eskimos were apparently sound asleep,
for it was midnight though as light as day.

Before Hearne could collect his senses or alarm the sleeping victims,
he had been left far to the rear by his villainous comrades. Then
occurred one of the most deplorable tragedies in the history of the
Hudson’s Bay Company. Such of the horrors as are tellable, I have told
elsewhere in the account of Hearne’s travels. The raiders fell on the
Eskimos like wolves on the sheepfold. Not content with plundering the
camp of beaver pelts, they speared, stabbed, bludgeoned, men, women,
children, old and young, till the river ran red with innocent blood.
Rushing forward, Hearne implored Matonabbee to stop the slaughter.
Matonabbee’s response was a shout of laughter. What were the weak for
but to be the victims of the strong? What did these fool-Eskimos toil
for but to render tribute of their toil to him, who had the force to
take? The doctrine was not a new one. Neither is it yet old; only
we moderns do our bludgeoning with financial coercion, competition,
monopoly or what not, instead of the butt end of a gun, or stone spear;
and it would be instructive to know if philosophers in a thousand years
will consider our methods as barbarous as we consider the savages of
two hundred years ago.

The tortures of that raid have no place in a history of the Hudson’s
Bay Company. They are told in Hearne’s life, and they haunted the
explorer like a bloody nightmare. One day later, on July 17, Hearne
stood on the shores of the Arctic ocean—the first white man to witness
the tossing ice floes of that green, lone, paleocrystic sea; but his
vision was not the exaltation of an explorer. It was a hideous memory
of young girls speared bodily through and through and left writhing
pinioned to the ground; of young boys whose hearts were torn out and
devoured while warm; of old men and women gouged, buffeted, beaten
to death. It does not make a pretty picture, that doctrine of the
supremacy of strength, the survival of the fit, the extermination of
the weak—it does not make a pretty picture when you reduce it to terms
of the physical. How quickly wild-beast savagery may reduce men to the
level of beasts was witnessed as Hearne rested on the shores of the
Arctic—a musk ox was shot. The warriors tore it to pieces and devoured
it raw.

Retreating up the shelving rocks of the Coppermine twenty miles, Hearne
found what he thought were the copper mines from which the Indians made
their metal weapons. The company then struck westward for the famous
Athabasca region where the wives were to camp for the winter. Athabasca
proved a hunter’s paradise as it has been ever since Hearne discovered
it. Beaver abounded in the swampy muskegs. Buffalo roamed to the south.
Moose yards were found in the wooded bluffs; mink, marten, fox, every
fur bearer which the English Adventurers sought. In spring, a flotilla
carried the Indians down to Churchill, where Hearne arrived on June 30,
1772.

The geographical importance of Hearne’s discovery—the fact that he had
found a region half the size of European Russia and proved that not a
narrow strip of land lay between the Atlantic and Pacific but a vast
continent—was eclipsed by the importance of his discoveries for the fur
traders. The region must be occupied by the English Company before the
French Canadians found it. Old Moses Norton sick unto death hastened
to send word to the governing committee in London, and the governing
committee voted Hearne a present of £200, £10 a year for a valet, £130
a year as a salary, and promotion as governor on Norton’s death, which
occurred on December 29, 1773.

The death of Norton was of a piece with his life. The bully fell ill of
some deadly intestinal trouble that caused him as excruciating tortures
as ever his poisons had caused his victims. Calling the officers of the
fort, he publicly made his will, leaving all his savings to his wife
in England but directing that she should yearly set aside £10 for the
clothing of his Indian wives at Churchill. As the Indian women stood
round the dying tyrant’s bed his eye detected an officer whispering to
one of the young Indian wives. With a roar, Norton leaped to his feet
in the bed.

“You —— —— ——,” he roared, “I’ll burn you alive! I’ll burn you alive——”

The effort cost the bully his life. He fell back dead—he whose hand
had tyrannized over the fort for fifty years, a mass of corrupting
flesh which men hurriedly put out of sight. Hearne was called from the
Saskatchewan to become governor and undertake the opening of the inland
trade. Hearne’s report on his trip to the Coppermine and Athabasca
was received at London in November, 1772. In May of 1773, the minutes
recorded “that the company having under consideration the interruptions
to the trade from the Canadian Pedlars as reported by Isaac Batts at
Basquia, do decide on mature deliberation to send Samuel Hearne to
establish a fort at Basquia with Mr. Cocking.” They were accompanied
by Louis Primo, John Cole and half a dozen French renegades, who had
been bribed to desert from the Canadians—in all seventeen men. Hearne
did better than he was instructed. Leaving Batts, Louis Primo and the
Frenchmen at Basquia to compete against the Canadians, he established
Cumberland House far above, on the Saskatchewan, at Sturgeon Lake,
where the Indians could be intercepted before they came down to the
French posts. Traders inland were paid £40 a year with a bounty of £2
when they signed their contract and a bonus of a shilling for every
twenty beaver.

When Hearne was recalled to Churchill to become governor, Matthew
Cocking was left superintendent of inland trade. Cocking had earned
laurels for himself by a voyage almost as important as Hearne’s. The
very week that Hearne came back to Churchill at the end of June,
1772, from the Athabasca, Cocking had set out from York for the South
Saskatchewan. He accompanied the Assiniboines returning from their
yearly trip to the bay. By the end of July he had crossed the north end
of Lake Winnipeg and gone up the Saskatchewan to Basquia. Louis Primo,
the renegade Frenchman, was met leading a flotilla of canoes down to
Hudson Bay, and it must have afforded Cocking great satisfaction to see
that the activity of the Hudson’s Bay Company had forced the French
Canadians to desert both their posts on the lower Saskatchewan. He
passed the empty houses on the banks of the river where the leaders of
the French-Canadians had had their forts, Findlay’s and Frobisher’s and
Curry’s. Leaving canoes somewhere eastward of the Forks, Cocking struck
south for the country of the Blackfeet at the foothills of the Rockies,
near what is now the International Boundary. The South Saskatchewan
was crossed at the end of August in bull-boats—tub-like craft made of
parchment stretched on willows. In the Eagle Hills, Cocking met French
traders, who had abandoned civilized life and joined the Indian tribes.
The Eagle Hills were famous as the place where the Indians got tent
poles and birch bark before crossing the plains to the east and south.
Cocking spent the winter with the Blackfeet and the Bloods and the
Piegans and the Sarcees, whom he names as the Confederacy of Waterfall
Indians, owing to the numerous cataracts on the upper reaches of Bow
River. He was amazed to find fields of cultivated tobacco among the
Blackfeet and considered the tribe more like Europeans than any Indians
he had ever met. The winter was spent hunting buffalo by means of the
famous “pounds.” Buffalo were pursued by riders into a triangular
enclosure of sticks round a large field. Behind the fences converging
to a point hid the hunters, whose cries and clappings frightened the
herds into rushing precipitately to the converging angle. Here was
either a huge hole, or the natural drop over the bank of a ravine,
where the buffalo tumbled, mass after mass of infuriated animals,
literally bridging a path for the living across the bodies of the dead.
The Blackfeet hunters thought nothing of riding for a hundred miles
to round up the scattered herds to one of these “pounds” or “corrals.”
All that Hendry had said of the Blackfeet twenty years before, Cocking
found to be true. All were riders—men, women, children—the first
tribes Cocking had yet met where women were not beasts of burden. The
tribe had earthen pots for cooking utensils, used moss for tinder, and
recorded the history of the people in rude drawings on painted buffalo
robes. In fact, Cocking’s description of the tribal customs might be an
account of the Iroquois. The Blackfeet’s entire lives were spent doing
two things—hunting and raiding the Snakes of the South for horses. Men
and women captives were tortured with shocking cruelty that made the
Blackfeet a terror to all enemies; but young captives were adopted into
the tribe after the custom followed by the Iroquois of the East. Of
food, there was always plenty from the buffalo hunts; and game abounded
from the Saskatchewan Forks to the mountains.

[Illustration: Traders Leaving Athabasca Landing for the North.]

When Cocking tried to persuade the Blackfeet to come down to the fort
with furs, they were reluctant. They did not understand canoe travel
and could not take their horses, and why should they go down? The
Assiniboines would trade the furs for firearms to be brought to the
Blackfeet. Cocking pointed out that with more firearms, they could
be masters of the entire country and by dint of presenting cocked
hats and swords and gold-laced red coats to the chiefs, induced them to
promise not to trade with “the Canadian Pedlars.” “We have done all in
our power to keep them from trading with François or Curry, who lie at
the Portage (the Rapids) of the Saskatchewan to intercept the natives
coming to us.”

On May 16, 1773, Cocking set out to return to the fort. For the first
time, a few young Blackfeet joined the canoes going to York. At the
Forks, two rival camps were found, that of Louis Primo who had come
over to the Hudson’s Bay from the French, and old François working for
the French Canadians. The English traders had no liquor. Four gallons
of rum diluted with water won the Indians over to old François, the
Canadian, who picked out one hundred of the rarest skins and was only
hindered taking the entire hunt because he had no more goods to trade.
François’ house was a long log structure divided into two sections,
half for a kitchen and mess room, half for a trading room, and the
furs were kept in the loft. Outside, were two or three log cabins for
François’ white men, of whom he had twenty. Round all ran ten-foot
stockades against which lay the great canoes twenty-four feet long,
twenty-two inches deep, which carried the furs to Lake Superior.
Cocking, who was used to factors ruling like little kings, was shocked
to find old François “an ignorant Frenchman, who did not keep his men
at proper distance and had no watch at night. It surprises me,” he
writes, “to observe what a warm side the natives hath to the French
Canadians.”

Down at Grand Rapids near the mouth of the Saskatchewan, Cocking
received another shock. Louis Primo and those Frenchmen bribed to join
the Hudson’s Bay, who had gone on from the Forks ahead of Cocking, were
to join him at the last portage of the Saskatchewan to go down to York.
He found that they had gone back to the French bag and baggage with
all their furs and goods supplied by the Hudson’s Bay and were already
halfway down to Lake Superior. Spite of being only “an ignorant old
Frenchman,” François had played a crafty game. By June 18, Cocking was
back at York.

But the Company did not content itself with occasional expeditions
inland. Henceforth “patroons of the woods,” as they were called, were
engaged to live inland with the Indians and collect furs. Fifty-one
men were regularly kept at Cumberland House, and a bonus of £20 a year
regularly paid to the patroons. Whenever a Frenchman could be bribed
to come over to the Hudson’s Bay traders, he was engaged at £100 a
year. Bonuses above salaries amounted to £200 a year for the factors,
to £40 for the traders, to £80 for traveling servants. The Company now
had a staff of five hundred white men on the field and ten times as
many Indians. In 1785, Robert Longmore is engaged to explore inland up
Churchill River as far as Athabasca, where, in 1799, Malcolm Ross is
permanently placed as chief trader at £80 a year. In 1795, Joseph Howse
is sent inland from York to explore the Rockies, where he gives his
name to a pass, and “it is resolved that forts shall be erected in this
country too.” John Davidson explores the entire coast of Labrador on
the east; and on the west of Hudson Bay Charles Duncan reports finally
and, as far as the Company is concerned, forever—_there is no navigable
Northwest Passage_. In all, the Company has spent £100,000 seeking that
mythical passage, which is now written off as total loss. Up at Marble
Island, the sea still takes toll of the brave, and James Mouat, the
whaler, is buried in 1773, beside Captain Knight. At this stage too,
I am sorry to say, 12,000 gallons of brandy are yearly sent into the
country.

It was in 1779 that _The King George_ ship beat about the whole summer
in the ice without entering York and was compelled to unload its cargo
at Churchill, for which Captain Fowler was suspended and lost his
gratuity of £100.

Such strenuous efforts brought big rewards in beaver, seventy, and
eighty, and ninety thousand a year to London, but the expenses of
competition had increased so enormously that dividends had fallen from
10 to 5 per cent. I suppose it was to impress the native mind with the
idea of pomp, but about this time I find the Company furnished all its
officers with “brass-barreled pistols, swords with inlaid handles,
laced suits and cocked hats.” A more perfect example of the English
mind’s inability to grasp American conditions could not be found than
an entry in the expense book of 1784 when the Company buys “150 tracts
on _the Country Clergyman’s Advice to Parishioners_” for distribution
among North American Indians, who could not read any language let alone
English.

It was no longer a policy of drift but drive, and in the midst of this
came the shock of the French war. All hands were afield from Churchill
but thirty-nine white servants one sleepy afternoon on August 8, 1782,
and Governor Hearne was busy trading with some Indians whom Matonabbee
had brought down, when the astounding apparition appeared of a fleet
at sea. No appointed signals were displayed by the incoming ships—they
were _not_ Company ships, and they anchored five miles from the fort
to sound. Churchill had not heard of war between France and England. No
alarm was felt. The fort had been forty years in building and was one
of the strongest in America, constructed of stone with forty great guns
and an outer battery to prevent approach. Probably intending to send
out a boat the next morning, Hearne went comfortably to bed. At three
in the morning, which was as light as day, somebody noticed that four
hundred armed men had landed not far from the fort and were marching in
regular military order for the gates. Too late, a reveille sounded and
bells rang to arms. Hearne dashed out with two men and met the invaders
halfway. Then he learned that the fleet was part of the French navy and
the four hundred invaders regular marines under the great officer—La
Perouse. Resistance was impossible now. The guns of the fort were not
even manned. The garrison was too small to permit one man to a gun. At
six in the morning, the British flag was lowered and a white tablecloth
of surrender run up on the pole. Hearne and the officers were taken
on board prisoners of war. Then the rough soldiery ran riot. Furs,
stores, documents—all were plundered, and a second day spent blowing up
the fortifications. Buildings were burned but the French were unable
to do serious damage to the walls. Matonabbee the great chief looked
on in horror. He had thought his English friends invincible, and now
he saw his creed of brute strength turned upon them and upon himself.
No longer he smiled contemptuously at the horror. It was one thing
to glory in the survival of the strong—another to be the under dog.
Matonabbee drew away outside the walls and killed himself. Old Norton’s
widows and children were scattered. On one the hardships fell with
peculiar harshness. His daughter Marie he had always nurtured as a
white girl. She fled in terror of her life from the brutal soldiery and
perished of starvation outside the walls.

Hearne has been blamed for two things in this surrender, for not making
some show of resistance and for not sending scouts overland south to
warn York. For thirty-nine men to have fought four hundred would have
invited extermination, and Hearne did not know that the invaders were