MAP OF MOOSONEE (SCALE, 400 MILES TO THE INCH).
Stanford’s Geogˡ. Estabᵗ. London
FORTY-TWO YEARS
AMONGST THE
INDIANS AND ESKIMO
CHAPTER I
THE VOYAGE OUT
In the year 1670, a few English gentlemen, ‘the Governor and Company of Adventurers of England trading to Hudson’s Bay,’ obtained a charter from King Charles II. The company consisted of but nine or ten merchants. They made large profits by bartering English goods with the Indians of those wild, and almost unknown, regions for furs of the fox, otter, beaver, bear, lynx, musk, minx, and ermine.
The company established forts, and garrisoned them with Highlanders and Norwegians. The climate was too cold and the food too coarse to attract Englishmen to the service. The forts, or posts, were about a hundred and fifty or two hundred miles apart, and to them the Indians resorted in the spring of the year with the furs obtained by hunting, snaring, and other modes of capture. In return for these they obtained guns, powder and shot, traps, kettles, axes, cloth, and blankets. The standard of value for everything was a beaver skin. Two white foxes were worth one beaver skin, two silver foxes were worth eight beaver skins, one pocket-handkerchief was worth one beaver skin, one yard of blue cloth was worth one-and-a-half beaver skins, a frying-pan was worth two beaver skins. As time went on, and the value of furs in the market rose or fell, the prices of certain things altered. But this is a sample of what they were when the hero of our tale first went out to Hudson’s Bay in 1851.
Let us accompany the young missionary on his voyage to Moose Fort, the chief of the company’s trading posts. ‘We, that is, my dear wife and myself,’ he writes, ‘went on board ship at Gravesend on June 6, 1851. Our ship was strongly built, double throughout; it was armed with thick blocks of timber, called ice chocks, at the bows, to enable it to do battle with the ice it would have to encounter. At Stromness we remained a fortnight, taking in a portion of our cargo and a number of men who were going to Hudson’s Bay in the service of the company. It was a solitary voyage. All the way we saw but one vessel. On a Saturday afternoon we entered the Straits.