Important changes had gradually grown up in the Adventurer’s methods. White servants were no longer forbidden to circulate with the Indians but encouraged to go out to the hunting field and paid bounties on their trapping. Three men had been sent out from York in January, 1772, to shoot partridges for the fort. It was a mild, open winter. The men carried provisions to last three weeks. Striking back through the marsh land, that lies between Hayes and Nelson Rivers, they camped for the first night on the banks of the Nelson. The next morning, Tuesday, the 7th of January, they were crossing the ice of the Nelson’s broad current when they suddenly felt the rocking of the tide beneath their feet, looked ahead, saw the frost-smoke of open water and to their horror realized that the tidal bore had loosened the ice and they were adrift, bearing out to sea. In vain, dogs and men dashed back for the shore. The ice floe had separated from the land and was rushing seaward like a race horse. That night it snowed. The terrified men kept watch, hoping that the high tide would carry the ice back to some of the long, low sand-bars at Port Nelson. The tide did sway back the third day but not near enough for a landing. This night, they put up their leather tents and slept drifting. When they awakened on Friday the 10th, they were driving so direct for the shore that the three men simultaneously dashed to gain the land, leaving packs, provisions, tent and sleighs; but in vain. A tidal wave swept the floe off shore, and when they set back for their camp, they were appalled to see camp kit, sleds, provisions, all—drive past afloat. The ice floe had broken. They were now adrift without food or shelter, James Ross carrying gun, powder bag and blanket over his shoulders as he had risen from sleep, Farrant wearing only the beaver coat in which he had slept, Tomson bereft of either gun or blanket.
Fort Rae, on Great Slave Lake, One of the Northernmost Posts of the Fur Trade.
This time, the ebb carried them far into the bay where they passed the fourth night adrift. The next day, wind and the crumbling of the ice added to their terrors. As the floe went to pieces, they leaped from float to float trying to keep together on the largest icepan. Farrant fell through the slush to his armpits and after being belted tightly in his beaver coat lay down behind a wind-break of ice blocks to die. Their only food since losing the tent kit had been some lumps of sugar one of them had chanced to have in his pockets. During Saturday night the 11th of January, the ice grounded and great seas began sweeping over the floe. When Ross and Tomson would have dragged Farrant to a higher hummock of the ice field, they found that he was dead. On Monday, the weather grew cold and stormy. Tomson’s hands had swollen so that he could not move a muscle and the man became delirious, raving of his Orkney home as they roamed aimlessly over the illimitable ice fields. That night, the seventh they had been adrift, just as the moon sank below the sea, the Orkneyman, Tomson, breathed his last.
Ross was now alone. A great ice floe borne down by a wash of the tide, swept away Tomson’s body. Ross scrambled upon the fresh drift and hoping against hope, scarcely able to believe his senses, saw that the new icepan extended to the land. Half blinded by sun glare, hands and feet frozen stiff, now laughing hysterically, now crying deliriously, the fellow managed to reach shore, but when the sun set he lost all sense of direction and could not find his way farther. That night, his hands were so stiff that he could not strike a light on his flint, but by tramping down brushwood, made himself a bed in the snow. Sunrise gave him his bearings again and through his half-delirium he realized he was only four miles from the fort. Partly walking, partly creeping, he reached York gates at seven that night. One of the dogs had followed him all the way, which probably explains how he was not frozen sleeping out uncovered for nine nights. Hands and feet had to be amputated, but his countrymen of Orkney took up a subscription for him and the Company gave him a pension of £20 a year for life. The same amount was bestowed on the widows of the two dead men. It is not surprising that Hudson Bay became ill-omened to Orkneymen who heard such tales of fur hunting as have been related of Richmond and York.
But the Company was now on the eve of the most momentous change in its history. Anthony Hendry had reported how the French traders had gone up the Saskatchewan to the tribes of equestrian Indians; and Hendry had been cashiered for his pains. Now a new fact influenced the Company. French power had fallen at Quebec, in 1759. Instead of a few French traders scattered through the West, were thousands of wildwood rovers, half-Indian, half-French, voyageurs and bush-lopers, fled from the new laws of the new English régime to the freedom of the wilderness. Beyond Sault Ste. Marie, the long hand of the law could not reach. Beyond the Sault, was law of neither God nor man. To make matters worse, English merchants, who had flocked to Montreal and Quebec, now outfitted these French rovers and personally led them to the far hunting field of the Pays d’en Haut—a term that meant anything from Lake Superior to the Pole. The English Adventurers sent more men up stream—up the Moose toward Quebec as far as Abbittibbi, up the Albany toward what is now Manitoba past Henley House as far as Osnaburg, across what is now Keewatin toward Lake Superior as far as New Brunswick House. The catch of furs showed a decrease every year. Fewer Indians came to the bay, fewer hunters to the outlying fur posts. Dividends dropped from 10 to 8 and from 8 to 6 and from 6 to 5 per cent. Instead of 100,000 beaver a year there came to the London market only 40,000 and 50,000 a year.
To stand on the rights of monopoly conferred by an ancient charter while “interlopers and pedlars,” as the Company called them—ran away with the profits of that monopoly, was like standing on your dignity with a thief while he picked your pockets. The “smug ancient gentlemen,” as enemies designated the Company, bestirred themselves mightily. Moses Norton, governor of Churchill, was no more anxious to fight the French Canadians on the hunting field now than he had been in the days of Anthony Hendry, but being half-Indian he knew all the legends of the Indians—knew that even if the French already had possession of the Saskatchewan, north of the Saskatchewan was an unclaimed kingdom, whence no white man had yet set foot, as large again as the bounds of Hudson Bay.
Besides, the Company had not forgotten those legends of minerals in the North which had lured Captain Knight to his death. Chippewyan Indians still came to Churchill with huge masses of amorphous copper strung on necklaces or battered into rough pots and pans and cooking utensils. Whence came that copper? Oddly enough, the world cannot answer that question yet. The Indians said from “a Far-Away-Metal River” that ran to a vast sea where the tide ebbed and flowed. Once more hopes of finding a Northwest Passage rose; once more hopes of those metals that had led Knight to ship-wreck. Norton suggested that this time the search should be made by land. Serving as a clerk on a brig at Churchill was a well-educated young Englishman already mentioned—Samuel Hearne.
The yearly boats that came to Churchill in 1769, commissioned Hearne for this expedition, whose ostensible object was the finding of the Metal River now known as the Coppermine but whose real object was the occupation of a vast region not yet preempted by the Canadians. The story of Hearne’s travels would fill a volume. Norton, the governor, was a curious compound of ability and sham, strength and vice. Born of an Indian mother and English father, he seemed to have inherited all the superstitions of one and vices of the other. He was educated in England and married an English woman. Yet when he came to the wilderness, he had a seraglio of native wives that would have put a Mormon to the blush. These he kept apart in rudely but gorgeously furnished apartments to which he alone possessed the keys. At the mess-room table, he wearied the souls of his officers by long-winded and saintly sermons on virtue which were expounded as regularly as the night supper came round. Did some blackleg expiating dissipations by life in the wilds judge Norton’s sermons by his conduct and emulate his example rather than his precepts, Norton had the culprit tied to the triangle and flogged till his back was raw. An Indian is never a hypocrite. Why would he be? His code is to do as he wishes, to follow his desires, to be stronger than his enemies, to impose on the weak. He has no religion to hold a higher example up like a mirror that reflects his own face as loathsome, and he has no science to teach him that what religion calls “evil” means in the long run, wretchedness and rottenness and ruin. But the hypocrisy in Norton was the white man strain—the fig leaf peculiar to civilized man—living a lie so long that he finally believes the lie himself. Knowledge of white man’s science, Norton had; but to the Indian in him, it was still mystery; “medicine,” a secret means to kill an enemy, arsenic in medicine, laudanum in whiskey, or poison that caused convulsions to an Indian who refused either a daughter for the seraglio or beaver at Norton’s terms. A white man who could wield such power was to the Indians a god, and Norton held them in the hollow of his hand. Equally successful was the half-breed governor managing the governing committee of the Hudson’s Bay Company in London; for he sent them enormous returns in beaver at small outlay.
Seven great guns roared their God-speed as the fort gates opened and Hearne sped out by dog train for his inland trip north on November 6, 1769. Norton waved a farewell and Hearne disappeared over the rolling drifts with two Indians as guides, two white men as packers to look after provisions. Striking northwest, Hearne was joined by other traveling Indians. Bitterly cold weather set in. One Indian guide deserted the first night out and the other proved himself an impudent beggar, who camped when it was cold and camped when it was wet and paused to hunt when it was fair, but laid up no stock of provisions, giving Hearne plainly to understand that the whole Indian cavalcade looked to the white men’s sleighs for food. The travelers did not make ten miles a day. At the end of the month Hearne wakened one morning to find his stores plundered and gales of laughter ringing back as the Indians marched off with their booty. Not even guns were left. Rabbit and partridge-snaring saved the three white men from starving as they retreated. They were safe inside the fort once more by December 11. Hearne’s object setting out in midwinter had been to reach the North before summer, and nothing daunted, he again set forth with five fresh guides on February 23, 1770, again depending on snares for food. April saw the marchers halted on the borders of the Barren Lands, scouring the wide wastes of treeless swamps and rock for game. Caribou had retreated inland and not yet begun their traverse to the bay. Until wild fowls came winging north, the camp lived on snow water, tobacco and such scraps of leather and dried meat as had not already been devoured. A chance herd of wandering deer relieved the famine till June, when rations were again reduced; this time, to wild cranberries. Then the traverse of the caribou herds came—a rush of countless myriads with the tramp of an army and the clicking of a multitude of horns from west to east for weeks. Indians had gathered to the traverse in hundreds. Moss served as fuel. Provisions were abundant. Hearne had almost decided to winter with the wandering Chippewyans when they again began to plunder his store of ammunition. Wind had smashed some of the survey instruments, so he joined a band of hunters on their way to the fort, which he reached on November 25.