pensable for such enterprises as the Bay Company pursued, were trained entirely by the Canadians. It was only after they had become thoroughly skilled in their needful work, throwing into it all their woodcraft, their wild impulses, and their reckless enthusiasm, that they were ready to enter into the employ of the Bay Company. Its youthful servants from the Orkneys, however ardent, athletic, or courageous, would have been no substitute for French half-breeds.

The second series of agitations and conflicts which involved the Hudson's Bay Company in vexatious and intense hostilities were substantially an entail or consequence of the primary wrong, the workings of which have just been discussed. The root of the difficulty was the grant by a charter from the king of England, with rights of monopoly for possession and traffic, over a vast and vaguely defined territory, encumbered, at least, by prior claims of French monarchs and their subjects. We have seen that the French in Canada asserted their rights, assured by a half century's earlier occupancy and improvement of the territory, and never relinquished. The French consequently had always dealt with the agents of the Bay Company as trespassers and intruders, and had plundered and destroyed its posts. On the cession of Canada by France to England, in 1763, its inhabitants became British subjects. These new British subjects very naturally believed that they acceded to certain rights of the soil and of opportunities and means for obtaining a livelihood which had been enjoyed and improved by them while they were French subjects. As a matter of course, therefore, they plied with increased vigor the only lucrative trade which their wilderness surroundings opened to them. Only a slight capital was necessary to conduct it as operated by individual enterprise; but associated means and efforts largely increased its facilities, and enabled partners to operate at extended distances. As will soon appear, a very energetic company was formed in Canada for the fur traffic, which speedily was met by rivalry from a similar company, while both alike, with all individual traders, were brought into direct and bitter antagonism with the chartered monopolists. Before a summary statement is given of these rival operations and of the method by which they were compromised, reference must be made to other hostile movements against the company in resistance of its monopoly and its secret policy, which were set in action also by British subjects, but of another class, residing in England, and having in view other objects than simply that of the fur trade.

We must remind ourselves of that alluring aim and passion of all the earliest as well as of the most recent navigators to this hemisphere, and of their royal patrons, to find a water-way through this island, archipelago, or continent, whichever it might prove to be, to Cathay in India. Columbus died in the belief that he had reached the coast of Asia without passing intervening lands; but it was not long before the presence of such intervening lands was patent, and the great problem of a navigable water-way

through them demanded a solution. In 1540 the king of France made a grant of Canada to Cartier as "un des bouts de l'Asie." Lachine, on the St. Lawrence, near Montreal, perpetuates by its name the fancy of Champlain, that that place was the starting-point by the Ottawa for entering the coveted water-way to China.1 Prince Rupert and his associates had obtained their charter as the "Governor and Company of Adventurers in England," under the plea that their object was "the discovery of a new passage into the South Sea." Many Englishmen, from motives of gain of various kinds, and from higher motives, were eager to have that discovery made, and even to venture their own property and lives in the enterprise. Joint-stock companies were formed to advance it. Parliament had offered a reward of £20,000 for the verification of the belief that such a passage was a reality. But soon the surprising and astounding fact came to the knowledge of the generous adventurers, that the privileged company, holding its royal patent, instead of seeking to advance its avowed and pledged object, neglected all effort and enterprise in that direction, and, worse than that, opposed, obstructed, and thwarted every independent movement to effect an object which in honor and obligation it should have been foremost to advance. The company was likewise pledged "to find some trade for furs, minerals, and other considerable commodities." It stayed by the furs. Hudson's Straits were believed to open to rich mineral regions, and were known to hold treasures of the sea. The whole zeal of the company, not given to its own traffic, was spent upon warning off all adventurers from risking themselves in such barren, desolate, and inhospitable regions. The meanness and rapacity of the company aroused against it an intense hostility among English mariners and merchants. This resulted in a petition to the lords in council in 1749, exposing the mischievous monopoly and policy of the company as having used its privileges to obstruct the noble objects it was intended to advance. The petitioners sought to be incorporated, with similar rights of land and water over the regions adjacent to those of the company for advancing discovery and trade. An explanation is given on a later page of the means by which this, like all the other public impeachments of the company, failed of its object.2

The policy of prohibiting exploration and settlement was in the case of the Hudson Bay Company pursued by a breach in their covenanted obligations and in the interest of their own monopoly. The company may be said to have been goaded and shamed into patronage of its first enterprise of exploration one hundred years after the date of its charter. Reports had been circulated by some wandering Indians from the north, near the Arctic circle, of a vast and navigable river in a region rich with furs and with minerals. The resident governor of the company was moved to address the managers in England with the proposal of an expedition for

1 [The history of the search for the Straits of Anian, as this supposed passage was called, is given in Vol. II. — ED.]

VOL. VIII. 3

2 See the reference in the Critical Essay to the work of Arthur Dobbs.

discovery, and Samuel Hearne, an officer of the company, was sent forth under its auspices. He left Churchill, the most northern post, in November, 1769. Midway on his errand he returned twice, being deserted by some of his Indians, and some of his instruments having become unserviceable. Starting a third time, in December, 1770, he traced the Coppermine River to its mouth, and was the first of Europeans to look into the Arctic

circle. His own scientific skill, as well as his instruments, were insufficient for making trustworthy observations, and his enterprise was hardly satisfactory.

The rival North West Company, not to be outdone in this exacting service, sent Alexander Mackenzie in 1789. He followed the river, which received his name, in an unimpeded course for eight hundred miles. He too saw the Arctic Sea, and was the first Englishman to pass the Rocky

[After Sir Thomas Lawrence's picture as engraved by P. Condé in Sir Alexander Mackenzie's Voyages from Montreal to the Frozen and Pacific oceans, 1789 and 1793 (Philad., 1802). There is another portrait and a map of his route in the Allg. Geog. Ephemeriden (1802), vol. ix. - ED.]

Mountains, being followed by Findlay, Fraser, and Thompson. The third expedition, the first that was undertaken by the British government, was that of Sir John Franklin in 1820. He advanced the exploration, but met with terrible disaster and suffering on his return, making a second expedition in 1825.

The British government commissioned Sir John Ross on an expedition in 1829, and in 1832, aided by a private subscription, it sent Captain Sir George Back to search for him. The Hudson Bay Company now again takes up the work at its own charges. It sent one of its officers, Thomas Simpson, and Peter W. Dease, in 1836; and in 1838-9 it was supposed that the longed-for water-opening had been seen. Government thought itself generous in its rewards. It conferred a baronetcy on the London governor of the company, J. H. Pelly, and knighthood on the local resident governor, George Simpson. A pension of £100 was settled upon Messrs. Dease and T. Simpson. The mysterious death of the latter, by murder or suicide,1

1 The biographer accepted the alternative that his brother was vengefully murdered through the cherished malice of the half-breeds who were attending him, and with a view to purloining his papers. But Mr. Alexander Ross, in his

Red River Settlement, candidly reviewing the facts of the case, leaves it probable that Mr. Simpson fell by his own hand, he having previously given signs of an unsettled mind (pp. 225233).

[Copied from J. Cook's engraving of S. P. Green's portrait of Simpson in Alexander Simpson's Life and Travels of Thomas Simpson (London, 1845). - ED.]

when on his way through the prairies, on his return to England in 1840, closed his account. His brother, in a Life of him, tells us how he sought in vain to secure the pension for needy heirs. No advantage in the special object to which the company restricted its aims accrued to it from any successes gained by itself or others in these explorations.

Returning to the subject of the collisions of the Hudson Bay Company with rivals in its special enterprise, we have to note a different method of business pursued by British fur traders from that which had been followed by the French before the cession of Canada. The French had traded under "licenses" granted by the authorities, accompanied by attempted prohibitions of the brandy traffic with the natives. But the British merchants in Canada demanded the liberty of free trade, and they exercised it. Single individuals, sometimes two or three in partnership, would furnish an outfit for employés, or go themselves on an expedition for furs. As might have been expected, sharp practices, jealousies, feuds, and sad demoralization among the Indians at once ensued. The latter were enlisted in groups or parties on the sides of the rivals, who would set themselves at watch to waylay, entrap, and barter with those who were in the service of their opponents. Many a dark and tragic scene was veiled in the depths of the wilderness, of which there are only legends, as culprits would keep their own secrets, and all legal proceedings were out of the possibility of enforcement. The effect was disastrous on the interests of traffic. The game was wasted, and in some places exhausted. Only in the winter season were the furs in good keeping, but the animals were slaughtered through the whole year, the cubs with their parents, with no respite for the breeding interval. Many merchants were brought to ruin, and if matters had continued in this course, only quarrels would have survived the occasion of them.

Under these circumstances, policy and self-interest dictated to some shrewd and sagacious men a course which, while it yielded a vast reward in profits to themselves, proved as destructive to the interests of the Hudson Bay Company. That monopoly might rest upon its charter, and make the most of it. Receiving its orders from the warehouse in Fenchurch Street, and clinging close to its dismal posts on the two inner bays, it waited for the natives to bring them the spoils of the hunt and trap. The rivals of the company had learned to adopt from it the strong power of combined capital, but for the rest knew of wiser methods of their own. They would have trained agents, partners in fact, who would go out and live in the wilderness on common terms with the natives, and do a turn of work for themselves. Some Boston and Albany traders had found the way to Montreal and Quebec free to them for business, after the cession of Canada. A strong organization was formed in 1805 of leading merchants in Canada who could furnish capital and the talent for enterprise. Under the name i See Critical Essay.