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.