Delphi complete works of.., p.719
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 719
But the fur trade brought its own difficulties. It was from the first under royal licence and monopoly. But the illicit trade was as easy as it was tempting and the records show that at least one governor sought thereby to retrieve a broken fortune.
The fur trade found its way into regions beyond geographical knowledge. Two Huguenot traders, Pierre Esprit Radisson and Chouart des Groseilliers penetrated the unknown territory north of Lake Superior till they reached salt water. They brought sixty canoes of furs to Montreal. Punished as illicit traders, they offered their services to the English. From this was to follow the formation in 1670 of the Hudson’s Bay Company.
CHARLES W. JEFFERYS, R.C.A., TORONTO, ONT., 1941
“. . . trade . . . conjoined with the magnificent reach of exploration and empire . . .” — page 65
The trade grew of itself, increasing the use and demand for such valuable skins as those of the otter and beaver, an animal dying out in Europe. The beaver hat came in early in the sixteen hundreds and had a run of three hundred years. It is recorded L. and C. Knowles, “Economic Development of the British Overseas Empire,” Vol. II, 1930 that in one single season (1650) a hundred canoes loaded with beaver skins came down to Tadoussac. But the effect of the fur trade was to accelerate that wide extension of New France which was tending to make it little more than a vast web of claim and conquest spread over half a continent, based on a single central point of strength. Quebec gone, there would be nothing else.
Through this mist of the past we can see what was and what might have been in New France. But the atmosphere is clouded with the smoke of perpetual war, the night sky lurid with the flames of raid and massacre. The story reads as one long record of conflict. To the struggle of civilization against savagery, is added that of British against French.
Kirke had taken Quebec (with one hundred people in it) in 1629. It was given back in 1632. But peace with England was followed by raids of the Iroquois and the massacre of the Huron missions. With royal government De Courcelles, and then Tracy, made vigorous war and ravaged the Mohawk country (1666). Then came the great Frontenac (first, 1672-1682) and built Fort Frontenac, burned out the Senecas and put fear into the savages. His successors La Barre and Denonville were weaker men. They fought, burned and ravaged (1683) but failed to conquer. The angered Iroquois descended the river in the summer of 1689. In the dead of night, in a heavy thunderstorm, they fell in hundreds on the outpost of La Chine. There followed the massacre which ranks high in the history of horror. Two hundred of the French settlers were butchered on the spot, with eighty soldiers who sought to defend them. One hundred and twenty were carried away for death by torture. Then came Frontenac again (1689-98), a saviour in distress, for the whole of French Canada was now in peril. The heroic episode of Madeleine de Verchères F. Parkman, “Half Century of Conflict,” 1892 defending the fort (1692) marks the danger of the hour. Frontenac raided the Indian country, drove the Iroquois from the fur trade routes, re-established Fort Frontenac and laid waste the land of the Onondagas and the Oneidas.
But a new war with England, occasioned by the expulsion of the Stuarts, had already begun. It had only ended in the Peace of Ryswick in 1697, a year before Frontenac died at Quebec. The peace was just a breathing space. There followed Queen Anne’s War, as American colonists called it, otherwise the war of the Spanish Succession (1701-1713), fought to decide whether the French king’s grandson should be King of Spain. These two wars spread danger and dismay over New France and New England, with foray and massacre along their frontiers, the savages as attendant devils on both sides. They were signalized by the massacre of the Dutch at Schenectady (1690), by two unsuccessful attempts against Quebec (Phipps 1690, and Admiral Walker 1711), the capture of Port Royal by Phipps in 1690, its retrocession and its final capture in 1711, with innumerable raids and forays that brought little but misery and devastation, until Marlborough’s victories in Europe brought to a world, weary with war, the compromise Treaty of Utrecht.
In America the French kept Canada and Cape Breton Island, but gave up Newfoundland, except for certain fishery rights, and abandoned all claim to the territory of Hudson Bay. With this treaty appears a permanent British North America, a substantial part of the area now called Canada.
ORIGINAL PAINTING BY STANLEY ROYLE, R.B.A., R.C.A., SACKVILLE, N.B., 1941
“. . . an English ship (The Nonsuch) . . . reached the mouth of a great river flowing into James Bay” — page 76
CHAPTER III. BRITISH AMERICA AND FRENCH CANADA. 1713-1763
THE HUDSON’S BAY Company — The French Exploration of the West — Growth of French Canada — And of British America — King George’s War, 1744-48 — Nova Scotia, Halifax and the Acadians — The Seven Years’ War and the Cession of Canada.
From the arctic seas of Labrador the Hudson Strait, a channel 100 miles wide and 450 miles long, leads to the great inland sea of the Hudson Bay. The bay is roughly a vast circle, of a diameter of some six hundred miles, extended on the south-east 350 miles by the shallow and rocky James Bay. The bay never freezes, but its river mouths and harbours are beset with ice. Canada Year Book, 1940 The strait, leading to it, has stern, precipitous coasts of rock, between which drive violent tides reaching to thirty-five feet. The strait does not absolutely freeze over, but the moving ice of bergs and floes, both inside the strait and drifting in a flood a hundred miles across its mouth, preclude navigation, even under present-day conditions, from the end of October to the middle of June. In the historic days of sailing ships, safe entry and departure was from July 15 to October 1, a period of ten weeks.
The shores of the Hudson Bay, as apart from the strait and a few high bluffs towards Ungava, are everywhere low, mournful and desolate, with but small suggestion of wealth or life. On the north-west are the barren lands of slate and stone; west and south the low forests that struggle towards the shore and fail to reach it, and at the bottom end the marshes and shallows of James Bay. Only at the mouth of the Churchill River is there a good natural harbour (Fort Churchill); the other river mouths are open roadsteads with tortuous channels through the sand. Such was the land of desolation that till yesterday God seemed to have forgotten. Beside its hidden wealth of to-day all the vineyards of France are as nothing.
But the bay has also its unseen natural grandeur. An area of 1,379,160 square miles of land, almost one-quarter of our mainland continent north of Mexico, is drained by the great rivers that on every side pour into the bay. This watershed, that was to become the grant to the Company, reaches out westward to where the headwater streams of the Churchill and the Saskatchewan give place to those that run to the Mackenzie and the Arctic Ocean; south-west and south to where it divides the Saskatchewan from the Missouri and the Red River gathers the waters of Minnesota. From the south come the Severn, the Albany and the Moose and the rivers from the fabled Kingdom of Saguenay. This vast river system became the waterway of the fur trade for two centuries (1670-1869) of Company rule.
A. H. De Trémaudan, “The Hudson Bay Road,” 1915
In discovery and exploration the bay is all British. The strait was discovered in the Cabot voyages but the bay, within, never really penetrated till Henry Hudson’s voyage of 1610. Hudson’s crew mutinied and set him adrift at the south end of the bay. Admiral Button, looking for Hudson, founded and named Port Nelson. Captains Fox and James, both carrying letters addressed to the Emperor of Japan, pretty well explored the coast and realized that Churchill harbour was not the passage to the South Sea. After that, the bay was let alone for half a century.
Now there was in New France a man of exception, Pierre Douglas MacKay, “The Honourable Company,” 1936 Esprit Radisson. He spent many years living among the Indians, actually living with them, and he bettered their instruction in craft and ferocity. Fighting against the Mohawks, he had been captured and his torture at the stake begun, when he was seized and rescued by a squaw, who knew a man when she saw one. From then on, Radisson did not hesitate to join in burning his enemies at the stake, and to join, if his own language means what it seems to, in the cannibal feasts that were another variant of Indian pleasure. Radisson left a journal, written in what he understood to be English. No history book, diluted by a hundred repetitions, can match the crude reality of it.
Radisson and a lesser associate, his brother-in-law Chouart des Groseilliers, had wandered for years in the Lake Superior country. As already said, they had found their way to the James Bay. Radisson writes that they “came to the sea shore” where they found “an old house all demolished, battered with bullets.” The Indians told them of white men being there and of “peculiarities of European.” As to this Radisson remarks, “We know ourselves and what Europe is, therefore in vaine they tell us as for that.” It has been thought possible that this old house had sheltered Henry Hudson.
When the officials of New France cheated Radisson and Groseilliers out of their furs, they went to France and appealed to the Crown. This proving vain, they decided to offer their services 1666 to England. By a stroke of good fortune they were put into touch with Prince Rupert, the cousin of King Charles II, who became thereby the patron saint of our North-West Territory. Many will agree that this remarkable man has not been assessed in our history at his true value. Born to arms and to adversity as one of the thirteen children of the exiled King of Bohemia, he served as a youth in the Thirty Years’ War, was the chief military leader of the king’s party of the English Civil War, and admiral at sea against the Commonwealth; and, in his riper age, a commanding figure at his cousin’s court. Prince Rupert was not only a soldier but an art connoisseur, a scholar, an inventor and a scientist, one of the founders of the Royal Society of London. It is characteristic of the scholarship of the age that Prince Rupert could do everything but spell, a thing no doubt to which E. Warburton, “Life of Prince Rupert,” 1849 he was quite indifferent. In one and the same letter we find him spelling ‘dog’ in two different ways.
The prince’s capable intellect perceived at once the value of Radisson’s discovery that the fur country could be reached by sea. The sea route was ice-bound and arduous but shorter than even the voyage to Montreal, the mere starting point of the trade. It substituted a summer voyage for a year in the wilderness. Rupert 1668 and an associated group of friends sent out Groseilliers, in an English ship (The Nonsuch), to try out the plan. He reached the mouth of a great river flowing into James Bay (‘The Rupert,’ he called it) and from it returned with a rich cargo of furs.
On the strength of this success, Rupert and seventeen associates 1670 obtained from the king their incorporation as The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson’s Bay. The charter thus granted to these ‘undertakers,’ as it calls them, is a lengthy document, containing some six thousand five hundred words. It has all the relentless repetition of the Beckles Willson, “The Great Company,” 1899, Text of Charter in Appendix language of the law. Where literary English would speak of “waters,” it says, “havens, bays, creeks, rivers, lakes and seas.” Where we should write, “points,” it prefers, “places, seas, straits, bays, ports, havens and territories.” But it is worth all its words. It is most far-reaching commercial document in British history. The charter of the East India Company (1600) meant more as wealth. But in their bearing on the reality of British empire, the expansion of our race, there is no comparison between the two.
In sheer spaciousness the grant has never been equalled, except by such fairyland dreams as the grant of Pope Alexander VI dividing the New World half and half between Spain and 1662 Portugal; or the charter of Connecticut which was supposed to dive under New York and Pennsylvania, come up to breathe in Ohio, and go on somehow to the ‘South Sea.’ Inside the bounds of fact and geography the Hudson’s Bay grant has never been equalled.
The charter creates a Company, with Governor, Deputy Governor, Committee and General Court, who are to be true and absolute lords and proprietors of the territory granted, holding it from the Crown as a part of the Manor of East Greenwich, in the county of Kent, in free and common socage. The territory covers what we would define in present-day English as the basin of the Hudson Bay. Exception is made of land already possessed or granted in the area (but there was none), and exception made also of land already held by any Christian prince, a limitation that vanished with the Treaty of Utrecht. The company are to own the land, the fisheries, both inland and on the coast, all mines (“gold, silver, gems, and precious stones”) and to have the exclusive monopoly of trade.
They were given full jurisdiction, under the Crown, over the maintenance of law and order. They had the right to maintain ships of war, men and ammunition, to build forts and works of defence. They had the right to make peace or war, within the sphere of their operations, against any prince or people that were not Christians.
The whole of this magnificent territory is christened by the charter “Rupert’s Land” — spelled thus in two words. The name has been ungratefully edged off our map, bit by bit, by the provinces and the territories. It has now been reduced — or elevated — to a purely spiritual meaning as a diocese of the Episcopal Church. A similar lack of historic sympathy has clipped the Company’s Bay itself to the official ‘Hudson Bay.’
But the charter went even beyond Rupert’s Land. Where their own government ended the Company were to have the sole right of trade in all the “havens, bays, creeks, rivers, lakes and seas” into which they could find passage from their own area. This was later to mean that the Company could trade over the still unknown Rocky Mountains and into the still unsuspected British Columbia. This access to such “havens, bays and creeks” was to stand us in good stead; it was our first grasp on the of. Tribute to Prince of Wales, 1927: King George VI, 1939 Pacific. In recognition of the Crown the Charter calls on the Company to yield and pay yearly two elks and two black beavers “Whensoever we or our heirs shall happen to enter into the said countries, territories and regions.”
The Associates subscribed £10,500 and commenced at once the George Bryce, “The Remarkable History of the Hudson’s Bay Company,” 1900 series of voyages to the great bay from which their trade spread and multiplied. Within fifteen years the Company had established forts at Albany River, Hayes Island, Rupert’s River, Port Nelson and New Severn. Their ships, at this time usually three, sailed from the Thames at the opening of June and went north-about round Scotland on their course to the strait. Caution and experience proved their best insurance. Only two were lost in 175 years. The cargoes consisted chiefly of guns, powder and shot, knives, hatchets, kettles, fishing nets, with glass beads to represent native luxury. The vessels were due to arrive home in October.
From the first the French disputed the Company’s rights. J. A. J. McKenna, “The Hudson Bay Route,” Canadian Government, 1908 Overland expeditions set up French forts. Even in nominal peace English forts were attacked and captured. King William’s War (1689-97) witnessed the advent of a French fleet into the bay, commanded by Le Moyne d’Iberville, and his complete triumph over the English. The Treaty of Ryswick declared the west coast British and that of Utrecht surrendered this entire territory to Great Britain.
While the English were thus pursuing solid commercial advantage in the Hudson Bay territory, with assets that multiplied ten to one in fifty years and paid by 1749 a 40 per cent dividend, L. and C. Knowles, “Economic Development of the British Overseas Empire,” Vol. II, 1930 the French were still pursuing dreams. Their lofty ambition still staked its claim across the unknown continent, still searched for the Spanish mines and the waterway to the Western Sea (la Mer de l’Ouest). From their new Louisiana, explorers reached the plains beside the Red River of Texas, the Arkansas and the Missouri. Le Sueur reached the prairie of upper Minnesota, black with buffalo. La Harpe and Bourgmont reached the plains that are now Kansas. Finally, in 1740, the two brothers Mallet ascended the River Platte, crossed the Colorado plains and reached Santa Fé on the headwaters of the Rio Grande.
These are forgotten names and exploits that proved futile. But very different is the fame that has enshrined in our history the expeditions of Varennes de La Vérendrye and his sons, whose explorations carried the first claim of the discovery of the Rocky Mountains in the United States, and in Canada the opening of the valley of the Saskatchewan.
La Vérendrye or, to give him his full name, Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, Sieur de La Vérendrye, born at Three Rivers (1685), was the son of a lieutenant of the disbanded Carignan-Salières regiment, who held a small seigneurie and with it the position of Governor of Three Rivers at a salary of 1200 francs ($240) a year. To this he added the usual profits, lawful and otherwise, of the fur trade.
CHARLES W. JEFFERYS, R.C.A., TORONTO, ONT., 1941
