Both these men bore a chief share in establishing trading posts on the other side of the Rocky Mountains, which are now associated with the Hudson's Bay Company.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
1787-1808.
Captain Vancouver—La Pérouse in the Pacific—The Straits of Anian—A Fantastic Episode—Russian Hunters and Traders—The Russian Company—Dissensions amongst the Northmen—They send the Beaver to Hudson's Bay—The Scheme of Mackenzie a Failure—A Ferocious Spirit Fostered—Abandoned Characters—A series of Outrages—The affair at Bad Lake.
When Mackenzie, in July, 1793, reached the Pacific by land from the east, he had been preceded by sea only three years by Captain George Vancouver, the discoverer of the British Columbian coast. The same year Gray, sailing from Boston in 1790, entered the Columbia River farther south. But the title of Muscovy to the northern coasts had already been made good by several Russians since Bering's time, and the Company's charter secured to them the lands drained by the Fraser, Mackenzie, and Peace rivers, to the west.
La Pérouse in the Pacific.
So little, however, was the Russian title recognized for some time, that when this unfortunate expedition of La Pérouse, with the frigates Boussole and Astralabe, stopped on this coast in 1787, that doughty destroyer of York and Prince of Wales' Forts did not hesitate to consider the friendly harbour in latitude 58° 36' as open to permanent occupation. Describing this harbour, which he named Port des François, he says that nature seemed to have created at this extremity of the world a port like that of Toulon, but vaster in plan and accommodation; and then, considering that it had never been discovered before, that it was situated thirty-three leagues north-west of Remedios, the limit of Spanish navigation, about two hundred and eighty-four leagues from Nootka, and one hundred leagues from Prince William Sound. The mariner records his judgment that "if the French Government had any project of a factory on this coast no nation could have the slightest right to oppose it."