Whale fisheries were now flourishing on the bay, for which each captain received a bounty of 25 per cent. on net proceeds.
In 1769, the Company issued as standard of trade 3 marten, 1 beaver; 2 fox, 3 beaver; gray fox, 4 beaver; white fox, ½ beaver; 1 otter, 1 beaver.
CHAPTER XVIII
1754-1755
THE MARCH ACROSS THE CONTINENT BEGINS—THE COMPANY SENDS A MAN TO THE BLACKFEET OF THE SOUTH SASKATCHEWAN—ANTHONY HENDRY IS THE FIRST ENGLISHMAN TO PENETRATE TO THE SASKATCHEWAN—THE FIRST ENGLISHMAN TO WINTER WEST OF LAKE WINNIPEG—HE MEETS THE SIOUX AND THE BLACKFEET AND INVITES THEM TO THE BAY
Nothing lends more romantic coloring to the operations of the fur traders on Hudson Bay than the character of the men in the service. They were adventurers, pure and simple, in the best and the worst sense of that term. Peter Romulus, the foreign surgeon, rubbed elbows with Radisson, the Frenchman. A nephew of Sir Stephen Evance—come out under the plain name, Evans—is under the same roof as a niece of the same governor of the Company, who has come to the bay as the doweried wife of an apprentice. Younger sons of the English gentry entered the service on the same level as the Cockney apprentice. Rough Orkney fishermen—with the thick burr of the North in their accent, the iron strength of the North in their blood, and a periphery of Calvinistic self-righteousness, which a modern gatling gun could not shoot through—had as bedfellows in the fort barracks soft-voiced English youths from the south counties, who had been outlawed for smuggling, or sent to the bay to expiate early dissipations. And sometimes this curious conglomeration of human beings was ruled in the fort—ruled with the absolute despotism of the little king, of course—by a drunken half-breed brute like Governor Moses Norton, whose one qualification was that he could pile up the beaver returns and hold the Indians’ friendship by being baser and more uncivilized than they. The theme is one for song and story as well as for history.
Among the flotsam and jetsam cast on Hudson Bay in the seventeen hundred and fifties was one Anthony Hendry, a boy from the Isle of Wight. He had been outlawed for smuggling and sought escape from punishment by service on the bay. He came as bookkeeper. Other servants could scarcely be driven or bribed to go inland with the Indians. Hendry asked permission to go back to their country with the Assiniboines, in 1754. James Isham was governor of York Fort at the time. He was only too glad to give Hendry permission.