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

by Agnes C. Laut

To which the Company made answer that not £1,000 of stock had changed hands in the last year, which was doubtless true; for ’97 was the year of the great defeat. The climate would always prevent settlement in Hudson Bay, and most important of all—England would have lost all that region but for the Hudson’s Bay Company. In its mood at the time, that was a telling argument with the English Parliament. Negotiations were in progress with France for a permanent treaty of peace. If the Hudson’s Bay Company were dissolved, to whom would all the region revert but to those already in possession—the French? And if the impending war broke out, who would defend the bay from the French but the Company?

By act of Parliament, the charter of the English Adventurers was confirmed for a period of seven years. And more—when an act was passed in 1708 to encourage trade to America, a proviso was inserted that the territory of the Company should not be included in the freedom of trade.

From the time France was beaten in the continental wars, the English Adventurers never ceased to press their claims against France for the restoration of all posts on Hudson Bay and the payment of damages varying in amount from £200,000 to £100,504. Memorials were presented to King William, memorials to Queen Anne. Sir Stephen Evance, the goldsmith, who had become a heavy shareholder through taking stock in payment for his ships chartered to the bay—had succeeded Marlborough as governor in 1692, but the great general was still a friend at Court, and when Evance retired in 1696, Sir William Trumbull, Secretary of State, became governor. Old Governor Knight came from Albany on the bay, in 1700, to go to France with Sir Bibye Lake and Marlborough to press the claims of the English fur traders against France. For the double claims of restoration and damages, France offered to trade all the posts on the south shore for all the posts on the west shore. The offer was but a parley for better terms. Both English and French fur traders knew that the best furs came from the west posts. Negotiations dragged on to 1710. It was subterraneously conveyed to the English fur traders that France would yield on one point, but not on both: they could have back the bay but not the indemnity; or the indemnity but not the bay. The English fur traders subterraneously conveyed to the commissioners in Holland, that they would accept the restoration of the bay and write off the indemnity bill of £100,000 as bad debts. Such was the Peace of Utrecht, 1713, as it affected the fate of the Hudson’s Bay Company.

One point was left unsettled by the treaty. Where was the boundary between bushrangers of New France working north from the St. Lawrence, and the voyageurs of the Hudson’s Bay Company, working south from James Bay? A dozen different propositions were made, but none accepted. The dispute came as a heritage to modern days when Quebec and Ontario wrangled out their boundaries, and Ontario and Manitoba competed for Keewatin, and finally the new province of Saskatchewan disputed Manitoba for a slice giving access to a seaport on Hudson Bay.

The settlement came just in time to save the Company from bankruptcy. The Adventurers had no money to pay their captains. Grimmington and Smithsend accepted pay of £200 apiece in bonds. Yet this same Company so often accused of avarice and tyranny to servants borrowed money to pay £20 each to the seamen surviving the terrible disasters of ’97, and donated a special gratuity to Captain Bailey for bringing the books of Nelson safely home. Sir Stephen Evance became governor again in 1700 and transferred £600 of his own stock to Captain Knight as wages for holding Albany. Captains would now accept engagements only on condition of being ransomed if captured, at the Company’s expense; and no ship would leave port without a convoy of frigates.

June 2, 1702, the secretary is ordered to pay the cost of making a scarlet coat with lace, for Nepanah-tay, the Indian chief, come home with Captain Grimmington.

November 5, 1703, Captain Knight is ordered to take care of the little Indian girl brought home by Captain Grimmington. It is ordered at the same time that tradesmen’s bills shall be paid “as long as the money lasts,” but that seamen’s wages be paid up to date. Orders are also issued for the gunsmith “to stamp no barrell nor locks with ye compy’s marker that are not in every way good and perfect.”

Henry Kelsey is now employed at £100 per annum either “to go up country”—meaning inland—or across to East Main (Labrador). When Mike Grimmington is not on the bay in his frigate, he is sent to Russia with beaver, bringing back cargoes of leather. Fullerton takes Knight’s place at Albany, with a scale of wages running from £10 to £16 a year for apprentices with a gratuity of 20s a month if they prove worthy; and to Fullerton and the captains of the vessels are sent twenty-three hogsheads of liquor to keep up their courage against the French in 1710. Outward bound the same year, Mike Grimmington, the veteran of a hundred raids, falls desperately ill. Like the Vikings of the North, he will not turn back. If vanquished, he will be vanquished with face to foe. So he meets his Last Foe at sea, and is vanquished of Death on June 15—within a few weeks of Radisson’s death—and is buried at Harwich. Learning the news by coureur, the Governing Committee promptly vote his widow, Anne, a gift of £100 and appoints the son, Mike Grimmington, Jr., an apprentice. Sir Bibye Lake, who had helped to secure the favorable terms of the peace treaty, is voted governor in 1713.

In no year at this period did the sales of furs exceed £100,000 but big cargoes are beginning to come in again, and the Company is able to declare a dividend of 10 per cent. in 1718. Before the French war, the forts had been nothing but a cluster of cabins palisaded. Now the Adventurers determine to strengthen their posts. For the time, Rupert and Severn are abandoned, but stone bastions are built in 1718 at Moose and Albany and Nelson (now known as York) and Churchill. Inland from Albany, Henley House is garrisoned against the French overlanders. At East Main on Slude River a fort is knocked together of driftwood and bowlder and lime.

In spite of increased wages and peace, the Adventurers have great difficulty procuring servants. The war has made known the real perils of the service. Mr. Ramsay is employed in 1707 and Captain John Merry in 1712 to go to the Orkneys for servants—fourteen able-bodied seamen in the former year, forty in the latter, and for the first time there come into the history of the Northwest the names of those Orkney families, whose lives are really the record of the great domain to which they gave their strength—the Belchers and Gunns, and the Carruthers, and the Bannisters, and the Isbisters and the Baileys, generation after generation, and the Mackenzies, and the Clarkes and the Gwynnes’s. Some came as clerks, some as gunners, some as bush-lopers. The lowest wage was 12s a month with a gratuity of £2 on signing the contract. But this did not suffice to bring recruits fast enough for the expanding work of the Company, and there comes jauntily on the scene, in 1711, Mr. Andrew Vallentine of matrimonial fame with secret contracts to supply the Company with apprentices if the Company will supply the dowries for the brides of the said apprentices. As told in a former chapter, “all proposals to be locked up in ye Iron Chest in a Booke Aparte.” Dr. Sacheverell, the famous divine, performed the marriage ceremonies; and from an item surreptitiously smuggled into the general minutes of the Company’s records instead of “the Booke Aparte,” I judge that the marriage portions were on a scale averaging some £70 and £100 each. A Miss Evance is named as one of the brides, so that the affair was no common listing of women for the marriage shambles such as Virginia and Quebec witnessed, but a contract in which even a relative of the Company’s governor was not ashamed to enter. Business flourished—as told elsewhere. The marriage office had to have additional apartments in “the Buttery” until about 1735, when lawsuits and the death of Mr. Vallentine caused a summary shutting down of the enterprise. It had accomplished its aim—brought recruits to the Company.