A new era was now to open on the bay—an era of wildwood runners tracking the snow-padded silences; of dare-devil gamesters of the wilderness sweeping down the forested waterways to midnight raid and ambuscade and massacre on the bay; of two great powers—first France and England, then the Hudson’s Bay Fur Company and the Nor’Westers—locked in death-grapple during a century for the prize of dominion over the immense unknown territory inland from the bay. Hudson and Jens Munck, Vikings of the sea, were to be succeeded by those intrepid knights of the wilderness, Radisson the pathfinder, and d’Iberville, the wildwood rover. The third era on Hudson Bay comes down to our own day. It marks the transition from savagery with semi-barbaric splendor, with all its virtues of outdoor life and dashing bravery, and all its vices of unbridled freedom in a no-man’s land with law of neither God nor man—to modern commerce; the transition from the Eskimo’s kyack and voyageur’s canoe over trackless waters to latter-day Atlantic liners plowing furrows over the main to the marts of commerce, and this period, too, is best typified in two commanding figures that stand out colossally from other actors on the bay—Lord Selkirk, the young philanthropist, and Lord Strathcona, whose activities only began at an age when other men have either made or marred their careers. For three hundred years, the history of Hudson Bay and of all that region for which the name stands is really the history of these four men—Radisson, d’Iberville, Selkirk and Strathcona.
While Hudson Bay lay in its winter sleep, the world had gone on. The fur traders of New France had pushed westward from the St. Lawrence to the Great Lakes and Mississippi. In fact, France was making a bold bid for the possession of all America except New Spain, and if her kings had paid more attention to her colonies and less to the fripperies of the fool-men and fool-women in her courts, the French flag might be waving over the most of America to-day. In New England, things had also gone apace. New York had gone over from Dutch to English rule, and the commissioners of His Majesty, King Charles II, were just returning from revising the affairs of the American plantations consequent upon the change from Cromwell’s Commonwealth to the Stuart’s Restoration. In England, at Oxford, was Charles himself, fled from the plague of London. Majesty was very jaded. Success had lost its relish and pleasure had begun to pall from too much surfeit. It was a welcome spur to the monarch’s idle languor when word came posthaste that the royal commissioner, Sir George Carterett, had just arrived from America accompanied by two famous Frenchmen with a most astonishing story.
They had set sail from America on August 1, 1665, Carterett bearing a full report of conditions in the American plantations. When off Spain, their boat had been sighted, pursued, captured and boarded by a Dutch privateer—The Caper. For two hours, hull to hull, rail to rail, hand to hand, they had fought, the men behind the guns at the portholes of one ship looking into the smoke-grimed faces of the men behind the guns on the other ship till a roaring broadside from The Caper tore the entrails out of Carterett’s ship. Carterett just had time to fling his secret dispatches overboard when a bayonet was leveled at his breast and he surrendered his sword a captive. Likewise did two French companions. Taken on board The Caper, all three were severely questioned—especially the Frenchmen. Why were they with Carterett? Where were they going? Where had they come from? Could they not be persuaded to go to Holland with their extraordinary story. One—Medard Chouart de Groseillers—was a middle-aged man, heavily bearded, swarthy, weather-worn from a life in the wilderness. The other—his brother-in-law—Pierre Esprit Radisson, was not yet thirty years of age. He was clean-shaved, thin, lithe, nervous with the restlessness of bottled-up energies, with a dash in his manners that was a cut between the courtier and the wilderness runner. These were the two men of whom such famous stories had been told these ten years back—the most renowned and far traveled wood-runners that New France had yet produced. It was they, who had brought 600,000 beaver skins to Quebec on a single trip from the North. How they had been robbed by the governor of New France and driven from Quebec to Cape Breton, where, out of jealousy, they were set upon and mobbed, escaping only with the clothes on their backs to Port Royal, Nova Scotia—was known to all men. In vain, they had appealed to France for justice. The robber governor was all powerful at the French court and the two explorers—penniless nobodies pitting their power against the influence of wealth and nobility—were dismissed from the court as a joke. They had been promised a vessel to make farther explorations in the North, but when they came to Isle Percé, south of Anticosti, to await the vessel, a Jesuit was sent to them with word that the promise had been a put-off to rid the court of troublesome suitors—in a word, a perfidious joke. There had followed the flight to Cape Breton, the setting to work of secret influence against them, the mob, the attempted murder, the flight to Port Royal, Nova Scotia. Port Royal was at this time under English rule, and an English captain, Zachariah Gillam, offered his ship for their trip North, but when up opposite Hudson Straits, the captain had been terrified by the ice and lost heart. He turned back. The season was wasted. The two Frenchmen had then clubbed their dwindling fortunes together and had engaged two vessels on their own account, but fishing to lay up supplies at Sable Island, one of the vessels had been wrecked. For four years they had been hounded by a persistent ill-luck: First, when robbed by the French governor on pretense of a fine for going to the North without his permission; second, when befooled by the false promises of the French court; third, when Captain Gillam refused to proceed farther amid the Northern ice; and now, when the wreck of the vessel involved them in a lawsuit. In Boston, they had won their lawsuit, but the ill-luck left them destitute. Carterett, the Royal Commissioner, had met them in Boston and had persuaded them to come to England with him.
The commander of the Dutch ship listened to their story and took down a report of it in writing. Could they not be persuaded to come on with him to Holland? The two Frenchmen refused to leave Carterett. Groseillers, Radisson and Carterett were then landed in Spain. From Spain, they begged and borrowed and pawned their way to France, and from France got passage to Dover. Here, then, they had come to the king at Oxford with their amazing story.
The stirring adventures of these two explorers, I have told in another volume, and an exact transcript of their journals I am giving elsewhere, but their story was one to make King Charles marvel. How Radisson as a boy had been captured by the Mohawks and escaped through the Dutch settlement of New York; how, as a youth, he had helped the Jesuits to flee from a beleaguered fort at Onondaga; how before he was twenty-five years old, he had gone overland to the Mississippi where he heard from Cree and Sioux of the Sea of the North; and how before he was thirty, he had found that sea where Hudson had perished—all those adventures King Charles heard. The King listened and pondered, and pondered and listened, and especially did he listen to that story of the Sea of the North, which Henry Hudson had found in 1610 and from which Radisson sixty years later had brought 600,000 beaver. Beaver at that time was worth much more than it is to-day. That cargo of beaver, which Radisson had brought down from Hudson Bay to Quebec would be worth more than a million dollars in modern money.
“We were in danger to perish a thousand times from the ice runs,” related Radisson, telling how they had passed up the Ottawa to Lake Superior and from Lake Superior by canoe seven hundred miles north to Hudson Bay. “We had thwarted (portaged) a place forty-five miles. We came to the far end at night. It was thick forest, and dark, and we knew not where to go. We launched our canoes on the current and came full sail on a deep bay, where we perceived smoke and tents. Many boats rush to meet us. We are received with joy by the Crees. They suffer us not to tread the ground but carry us like cocks in a basket to their tents. We left them with all possible haste to follow the great river and came to the seaside, where we found an old house all demolished and battered with bullets. The Indians tell us peculiarities of the Europeans, whom they have seen there. We went from isle to isle all summer. We went along the bay to see the place the Indians pass the summer. This river comes from the lake that empties in the Saguenay at Tadoussac, a hundred leagues from where we were in the Bay of the North. We left in the place our mark and rendezvous. We passed the summer coasting the sea. This is a vast country. The people are friendly to the Sioux and the Cree. We followed another river back to the Upper Lake (Lake Superior) and it was midwinter before we joined the company at our fort” (north of Lake Superior).
When King Charles moved from Oxford to Windsor, Radisson and Groseillers were ordered to accompany him, and when the monarch returned to London, the two Frenchmen were commanded to take chambers in town within reach of the court, and what was more to the point, the King assigned them £2 a week maintenance, for they were both destitute, as penniless soldiers of fortune as ever graced the throne room of a Stuart. At Oxford, too, they had met Prince Rupert, and Prince Rupert espoused their cause with the enthusiasm of an adventurer, whose fortunes needed mending. The plague, the great fire in London, and the Dutch war—all prevented King Charles according the adventurers immediate help, but within a year from their landing, he writes to James, Duke of York, as chief of the navy, ordering the Admiralty department to loan the two Frenchmen the ship Eaglet of the South Sea fleet for a voyage to Hudson Bay, for the purpose of prosecuting trade and extending their explorations toward the South Sea. I have his letter issuing the instructions, and it is interesting as proving that the initiative came from King Charles, as Prince Rupert has hitherto received all the credit for organizing the Adventurers of England trading to Hudson Bay. Prince Rupert and half a dozen friends were to bear the expense of wages to the seamen and victualling the ships. During the long period of waiting, Charles presented Radisson with a gold medal and chain. To Groseillers—if French tradition is to be accepted—he gave some slight title of nobility. During this time, too, Radisson and Groseillers heard from the captain of the Dutch ship, who had questioned them. There came a spy from Amsterdam—Eli Godefroy Touret, who first tried to bribe the Frenchmen to come to Holland, and failing that, openly accused them of counterfeiting money. The accusation could not be proved, and the spy was imprisoned.
