The Company now regularly sent ships to Russia; and from Russia the adventurers must have heard of Peter the Great's plan to find the North Passage. The finding of the Passage had been one of the reasons for the granting of the charter, and the fur buyers' petition against the charter had set forth that small effort had been made in that direction. Now, at Churchill, Richard Norton and his son Moses, servants of the Company, had heard strange rumours from the Indians of a region of rare metals north-west inland. All these things the governor on the Bay, James Knight, pondered, as he cruised up and down from Albany to Churchill. Then the gold fever beset the Company. They sent for Knight. He was commissioned on June 3, 1719, to seek the North-West Passage, and, incidentally, to look for rare minerals.
Four ships were in the fleet that sailed for Hudson Bay this year. Knight went on the Albany with Captain Barlow and fifty men. He waited only long enough at Churchill to leave provisions. Then, with the Discovery, Captain Vaughan, as convoy, he sailed north on the Albany. On his ship were iron-bound caskets to carry back the precious metals of which he dreamed, and the framework for houses to be erected for wintering on the South Sea. With him went iron-forgers to work in the metals, and whalers from Dundee to chase the silver-bottoms of the Pacific, and a surgeon, to whom was paid the extraordinary salary of £50 on account of the unusual peril of the voyage.
What became of Knight? From the time he left Churchill, his journal ceases. Another threescore lives paid in toll to the insatiable sea! No word came back in the summer of 1720, and the adventurers had begun to look for him to return by way of Asia. Then three years passed, and no word of Knight or his precious metals. Kelsey cruised north on the Prosperous in 1719, and Hancock on the Success in 1720; Napper and Scroggs and Crow on other ships on to 1736, but never a trace did they find of the argonauts. Norton, whaling in the north in 1726, heard disquieting rumours from the Indians, but it was not till Hearne went among the Eskimos almost fifty years later that Knight's fate became known. His ships had been totally wrecked on the east point of Marble Island, that white block of granite bare as a gravestone. Out of the wave-beaten wreckage the Eskimos saw a house arise as if by magic. The savages fled in terror from such a mystery, and winter—the terrible, hard, cutting cold of hyperborean storm—raged on the bare, unsheltered island. When the Eskimos came back in the summer of 1720, a great many graves had been scooped among the drift sand and boulders. The survivors were plainly starving, for they fell ravenously on the Eskimos' putrid whale meat. The next summer only two demented men were alive. They were clad in rabbit and fox skins. Their hair and beards had grown unkempt, and they acted like maniacs. Again the superstitious Eskimos fled in terror. Next summer when the savages came down to the coast no white men were alive. The wolves had scraped open a score of graves.
It may be stated here that before 1759 the books of the Hudson's Bay Company show £100,000 spent in bootless searching and voyaging for the mythical North-West Passage. Nevertheless study-chair explorers who journeyed round the world on a map, continued to accuse the Company of purposely refusing to search for the Passage, for fear of disturbing its monopoly. So violent did the pamphleteers grow that they forced a parliamentary inquiry in 1749 into the Company's charter and the Company's record, and what saved the Company then, as in 1713, was the fact that the adventurers were the great bulwark against French aggression from Quebec.
Arthur Dobbs, a gentleman and a scholar, had roused the Admiralty to send two expeditions to search for the North-West Passage. It is unnecessary for history to concern itself with the 'tempest in a teapot' that raged round these expeditions. Perhaps the Company did not behave at all too well when their own captain, Middleton, resigned to conduct the first one on the Furnace Bomb and the Discovery to the Bay. Perhaps wrong signals in the harbours did lead the searchers' ships to bad anchorage. At any rate Arthur Dobbs announced in hysterical fury that the Company had bribed Middleton with £5000 not to find the Passage. Middleton had come back in 1742 saying bluntly, in sailor fashion, that 'there was no passage and never would be.' At once the Dobbs faction went into a frenzy. Baseless charges were hurled about with the freedom of bombs in a battle. Parliament was roused to offer a reward of £20,000 for the discovery of the Passage, and the indefatigable Dobbs organized an opposition trading company—with a capital of £10,000—and petitioned parliament for the exclusive trade. The Dobbs Galley, Captain Moon, and the California, Captain Smith, with the Shark, under Middleton, as convoy for part of the way, went out in 1746 with Henry Ellis, agent for Dobbs, aboard. The result of the voyage need not be told. There was the usual struggle with the ice jam in the north off Chesterfield Inlet, the usual suffering from scurvy. Something was accomplished on the exploration of Fox Channel, but no North-West Passage was found, a fact that told in favour of the Company when the parliamentary inquiry of 1749 came on.
In the end, an influence stronger than the puerile frenzy of Arthur Dobbs forced the Company to unwonted activity in inland exploration. La Vérendrye, the French Canadian, and his sons had come from the St Lawrence inland and before 1750 had established trading-posts on the Red river, on the Assiniboine, and on the Saskatchewan. After this fewer furs came down to the Bay. It was now clear that if the Indians would not come to the adventurers, the adventurers must go to the Indians. As a beginning one Anthony Hendry, a boy outlawed from the Isle of Wight for smuggling, was permitted to go back with the Assiniboines from Nelson in June 1754.
Hendry's itinerary is not difficult to follow. The Indian place-names used by him are the Indian place-names used to-day by the Assiniboines. Four hundred paddlers manned the big brigade of canoes which he accompanied inland to the modern Oxford Lake and from Oxford to Cross Lake. The latter name explains itself. Voyageurs could reach the Saskatchewan by coming on down westward through Playgreen Lake to Lake Winnipeg, or they could save the long detour round the north end of Lake Winnipeg—a hundred miles at least, and a dangerous stretch because of the rocky nature of the coast and the big waves of the shallow lake—by portaging across to that chain of swamps and nameless lakes, leading down to the expansion of the Saskatchewan, known under the modern name of the Pas. It is quite plain from Hendry's narrative that the second course was followed, for he came to 'the river on which the French have two forts' without touching Lake Winnipeg; and he gave his distance as five hundred miles from York,[4] which would bring him by way of Oxford and Cross Lakes precisely at the Pas.
[4] Nelson. Throughout this narrative Nelson, the name of the port and river, is generally used instead of York, the name of the fort or factory.
The Saskatchewan is here best described as an elongated swamp three hundred miles by seventy, for the current of the river proper loses itself in countless channels through reed-grown swamps and turquoise lakes, where the white pelicans stand motionless as rocks and the wild birds gather together in flocks that darken the sky and have no fear of man. Between Lake Winnipeg and Cumberland Lake one can literally paddle for a week and barely find a dry spot big enough for a tent among the myriad lakes and swamps and river channels overwashing the dank goose grass. Through these swamps runs the limestone cliff known as the Pasquia Hills—a blue lift of the swampy sky-line in a wooded ridge. On this ridge is the Pas fort. All the romance of the most romantic era in the West clings to the banks of the Saskatchewan—'Kis-sis-kat-chewan Sepie'—swift angrily-flowing waters, as the Indians call it, with its countless unmapped lakes and its countless unmapped islands. Up and down its broad current from time immemorial flitted the war canoes of the Cree, like birds of prey, to plunder the Blackfeet, or 'Horse Indians.' Between these high, steep banks came the voyageurs of the old fur companies—'ti-aing-ti-aing' in monotonous sing-song day and night, tracking the clumsy York boats up-stream all the way from tide water to within sight of the Rocky Mountains. Up these waters, with rapids so numerous that one loses count of them, came doughty traders of the Company with the swiftest paddlers the West has ever known. The gentleman in cocked hat and silk-lined overcape, with knee-buckled breeches and ruffles at wrist and throat, had a habit of tucking his sleeves up and dipping his hand in the water over the gunnels. If the ripple did not rise from knuckles to elbows, he forced speed with a shout of 'Up-up, my men! Up-up!' and gave orders for the regale to go round, or for the crews to shift, or for the Highland piper to set the bagpipes skirling.
Hither, then, came Hendry from the Bay, the first Englishman to ascend the Saskatchewan. 'The mosquitoes are intolerable,' he writes. 'We came to the French house. Two Frenchmen came to the water side and invited me into their house. One told me his master and men had gone down to Montreal with furs and that he must detain me till his return; but Little Bear, my Indian leader, only smiled and said, "They dare not."'