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