Sir,—The Governor and Company of Merchants trading to Hudson's Bay having presented a memorial to us, stating their claims with respect to limits and other matters provided for by the Treaty of Utrecht, and praying that in case of a peace with France, his Majesty would be graciously pleased to cause satisfaction to be made to them with respect to such claims, pursuant to the stipulations of the tenth and eleventh articles of the said treaty; we beg leave to transmit to you the enclosed copy of the said memorial for his Majesty's directions thereupon.
Conquest of Canada.
While England went mad with joy over Wolfe's victory at Quebec, the Company thought the time had, at last, come when the indemnity it claimed so long should be exacted in the treaty of peace which could not be long delayed. But its sanguine expectations were not destined to be realized. In vain did the Governor wait at the door of Mr. Secretary Pitts; in vain did Lord Halifax assure the Company's secretary that he would make it his own personal business to have the affair attended to. It was too late in the day.[67] With reason might the Company's zealous secretary trace in the minutes: "Locked up this day (November 22nd, 1759), in the Great Iron Chest, a Book containing estimates of the Company's losses sustained from the French, from 1682 to 1688."
The "Great Iron Chest" was to hold the book for many a day, and though the Company evinced a never-failing alacrity to produce it, yet never was there to be inscribed the words "settled with thanks," at the foot of this "little bill against the French."
We have already been made familiar with the character of the Company's forts in the Bay so late as the reign of Queen Anne. There had been almost from the beginning a party amongst the Honourable Adventurers favourable to the erection of strong forts, not built of logs with bastions of stone, but of stone throughout, from the designs of competent engineers.
A few years after the Company had regained possession of York Factory, it built (1718) a wooden fort at Churchill River, to which was given the name of Prince of Wales. In 1730 it constructed another at Moose River; and about the same time a small post, capable of containing eight or ten men at Slude River, on the East Main. In 1720 Henley House, one hundred and fifty miles up Albany River, was built to contain a garrison of eight men, as a check to the Indians who carried on a trade with the French.
Building of stone forts.
But the wooden fort Prince of Wales did not remain long. The remembrance of their former posts destroyed by fire, and Iberville's cannon, caused the Company at length to undertake the fortification on a splendid scale of its best harbour, to safeguard what it designed to be its principal entrepôt from the French, as well as from the Indians. Opposition was cried down, and the "fortification party," as it was called, carried the day. A massive thirty-feet wide foundation was begun at Churchill, from the plans of military engineers who had served under Marlborough, and, after many vicissitudes, in 1734 Fort Prince of Wales, one of the strongest forts on the continent, was reared at the mouth of Churchill River.
