The conquest of the great Northwest, Volume 1 (of 2) /

by Agnes C. Laut

So with Radisson and Groseillers. They had brought back 600,000 beaver pelts overland from Hudson Bay five years before. If they could repeat the feat, it meant bigger booty than Drake had raided from the Spanish of the South Seas, for the price of beaver at that time fluctuated wildly from eight shillings to thirty-five. And who could tell that they might not find a passage to the South Seas from Hudson Bay? That old legend of a tide like the ocean on Lake Winnipeg, Radisson had heard from the Indians, as every explorer was to hear it for a hundred years. The explanation is very simple to anyone who has sailed on Lake Winnipeg. The lake is so shallow that an inshore wind lashes the waters up like a tide. Then sudden calm, or an outshore breeze, leaves the muddy flats almost bare. I remember being stranded on that lake by such a shift of wind for twenty-four hours. To the Indians who had never seen the ocean, the phenomenon seemed like the tide of which the white man told, so Radisson had reported to the Adventurers that the Indians said the South Sea was only a few weeks’ journey from Hudson Bay.

Radisson, whose highest hope from boyhood was to be a great explorer, must have dreamed his dreams as the ships slid along the glassy waters of the Atlantic westward. Six weeks, ordinarily, it took sailing vessels to go from the Thames to the mouth of Hudson Straits, but furious storms—as if the very elements themselves were bent on the defeat of these two indomitable men—drove their ships apart half way across the Atlantic. As is often the case, the little ship—Gillam’s Nonsuch—weathered the hurricane. Now buried under billows mountain-high, with the yardarms drenched by each wash of the pounding breakers, now plowing through the cataract of waters, the little Nonsuch kept her head to the wind, and if a sea swept from stem to stern, battened hatches and masts naked of sails took no harm. The staunch craft kept on her sea feet, and was not knocked keel up.

But The Eaglet, with Radisson, was in bad way. Larger and ponderous in motion, she could not shift quick to the raging gale. Blast after blast caught her broadsides. The masts snapped off like saplings uprooted by storm. A tornado of waters threw the ship on her side “till we had like to have swamped”—relate the old Company records—and when the storm cleared and the ship righted, behold, of The Eaglet there is left only the bare hull, with deck boards and cabin floors sprung in a dozen places. The other ship was out of sight. Carpenters were set at work to rig the lame vessel up. It was almost October before the battered hull came crawling limply to her dock on the Thames. There, Sir James Hayes, Rupert’s secretary, turned her over to the Admiralty.

Photograph of the copy of Radisson’s Voyages, end of the third trip on which he discovered Mississippi River, beginning of the fourth trip on which he discovered the overland route to the Sea of the North, or Hudson’s Bay. The original of Radisson’s first four voyages is in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, part of the famous Pepys Collection. The question has been raised is this Radisson’s handwriting, or that of a copyist, like Rodd and others who did professional work for Shaftesbury and others of Radisson’s associates? Specialists on the handwriting and idioms of the period say this is undoubtedly the work of a foreigner not familiar with the idioms of the English.

Adversity is a great tester of a man’s mettle. When some men fall they tumble down stairs. Other men, when they fall, make a point of falling up stairs. Radisson was of the latter class. His activity redoubled. The design in the first place had been for one of the two ships to winter on the bay; the other ship to come back to England in order to return to the bay with more provisions. Radisson urged his associates not to leave The Nonsuch in the lurch. Application was made to the Admiralty for another ship. The Wavero of the West Indies was granted. Radisson spent the winter of 1668-69 fitting up this ship and writing the account of his first four voyages through the wilds of America, “and I hope”—he concludes the fourth voyage—“to embarke myselfe by ye helpe of God this fourth year” of coming to England. But The Wavero on which Radisson sailed in March, 1669, proved unseaworthy. She had to turn back. What was Radisson’s delight to find anchored in the Thames, The Nonsuch, with his brother-in-law, Groseillers.

After parting from the disabled Eaglet, The Nonsuch had driven ahead for Hudson Straits, which she missed by going too far north to Baffin’s Land, but came to the entrance on the 4th of August. Owing to the lateness of the season, the straits were free of ice and The Nonsuch made a quick passage for those days, reaching Digges’ Island, at the west end of the straits on the 19th of August. Groseillers and Gillam then headed south for that rendezvous at the lower end of the bay, where the two Frenchmen had found “a house all battered with bullets,” five years before, and had set up their own marks. Slow and careful search of the east coast must have been made, for The Nonsuch was seven weeks cruising the seven hundred miles from Digges’ Island to that River Nemisco, which had seemed to flow from the country of the St. Lawrence or New France. Here they cast anchor on September 25, naming the river Rupert in honor of their patron. Beaching the ship on the sand-bars at high tide, the crew threw logs about her to fend off ice jams and erected slab palisades round two or three log huts for the winter—a fort named after King Charles.

Weather favored The Nonsuch’s crew. The south end of Hudson Bay often has snow in October, and nearly always ice is formed by November. This year, the harbor did not freeze till the 9th of December, but when the frost did come it was a thing to paralyze these Englishmen used to a climate where a pocketful of coal heats a house. The silent pine forests, snow-padded and snow-wreathed; the snow-cones and snow-mushrooms and snow-plumes bending the great branches with weight of snow like feathers; the icy particles that floated in the air; ice fog, diamond-sharp in sunshine and starlight but ethereal as mist, morning and evening; the whooping and romping and stamping and cannon-shot reports of the frost at night when the biggest trees snapped brittle and the earth seemed to groan with pain; the mystic mock-suns that shone in the heavens foreboding storm, and the hoot and shout and rush of the storm itself through the forests like the Indians’ Thunder Bird on the wings of the wind; the silences, the awful silences, that seemed to engulf human presence as the frost-fog closed mistily through the aisled forests—all these things were new and wondrous to the English crew. It was—as Gillam’s journal records—as if all life “had been frozen to death.” And then the marvel of the frost world, frost that fringed your eyelashes and hair with breath as you spoke, and drew ferns on the glazed parchment of the port windows, and created two inches of snow on the walls inside the ship! Snow fell—fell—fell, day after day, week after week, muffling, dreamy, hypnotic as the frost sleep.

But these things were no new marvels to Groseillers. The busy Frenchman was off to the woods on snowshoes in search of the Indians—a search in which a twig snapped off short, old tepee poles standing bare, a bit of moose skin blowing from a branch, deadfall traps, rabbit snares of willow twigs—were his sole guides. True wood-loper, he found the Ojibways’ camps and they brought down their furs to trade with him in spring. I don’t know what ground there is for it, but Groseillers had the reputation for being a very hard trader. Perhaps it was that the cargo of 600,000 pelts had been brought back when he had gone North with only two canoe loads of goods. As far as I could ascertain from the old records, the scale of trade at the time was half a pound of beads, one beaver; one kettle, one beaver; one pound shot, one beaver; five pounds sugar, one beaver; one pound tobacco, one beaver; one gallon brandy (diluted?), four beaver; one blanket, six beaver; two awls, one beaver; twelve buttons, one beaver; twenty fishhooks, one beaver; twenty flints, one beaver; one gun, twelve beaver; one pistol, four beaver; eight bells, one beaver. At this stage, trade as barter was not known. The white man dressed in gold lace and red velvets pompously presented his goods to the Indian. The Indian had previously, with great palaver, presented his furs to the trader. Any little difference of opinion as to values might be settled later by a present from the trader of drugged liquor to put the malcontent to sleep, or a scalping raid on the part of the Indian.