Such, in brief, was the state of affairs in the year 1666 when two intrepid bushrangers, employees of the old Company,[4] dissatisfied with their prospects under the new régime, sought their way out from the depths of the wilderness to Quebec, and there propounded to the Intendant, Jean Talon, a scheme for the extension of the fur-trade to the shores of Hudson's Bay. This enterprising pair saw their project rejected, and as a sequel to this rejection came the inception and establishment of an English association,[5] which subsequently obtained a charter from the King, under the name and title of "The Governor and Company of Merchants-Adventurers trading into Hudson's Bay."
To narrate the causes which first led to the formation of this Company, the contemporary interest it excited, the thrilling adventures of its early servants, of the wars it waged with the French and drove so valiantly to a victorious end; its vicissitudes and gradual growth; the fierce and bloody rivalries it combated and eventually overbore; its notable expeditions of research by land and sea; the character of the vast country it ruled and the Indians inhabiting it; and last but not least, the stirring and romantic experiences contained in the letters and journals of the Great Company's factors and traders for a period of above two centuries—such will be the aim and purpose of this work.
CHAPTER II.
1659-1666.
Groseilliers and Radisson—Their Peregrinations in the North-West—They Return to Quebec and lay their Scheme before the Governor—Repulsed by him they Proceed to New England—And thence Sail for France, where they Endeavour to Interest M. Colbert.
The year 1659, notable in England as the last of the Puritan ascendancy and the herald of a stirring era of activity, may be reckoned as the first with which the annals of the Great Company are concerned. It is in this year that we first catch a glimpse of two figures who played an important part in shaping its destinies. Little as they suspected it, the two intrepid fur-traders, Groseilliers and Radisson, who in the spring of that year pushed their way westward from Quebec to the unknown shores of Lake Superior, animated in this, as in all their subsequent exploits, by a spirit of adventure as well as a love of gain, were to prove the ancestors of the Great Company.
Groseilliers' first marriage.
Medard Chouart, the first of this dauntless pair, was born in France, near Meaux, and had emigrated to Quebec when he was a little over sixteen years old. His father had been a pilot, and it was designed that the son should succeed him in the same calling. But long before this intention could be realized he fell in with a Jesuit, returned from Canada, who was full of thrilling tales about the New France beyond the seas; and so strongly did these anecdotes, with their suggestion of a rough and joyous career in the wilderness, appeal to his nature, that he determined to take his own part in the glowing life which the priest depicted. In 1641 he was one of the fifty-two emigrés who sailed with the heroic Maissoneuve from Rochelle. Five years later we find him trading amongst the Hurons, the tribe whose doom was already sealed by reason of the enmity and superior might of the Iroquois; and at the close of another year comes the record of his first marriage. The bride is Etienne, the daughter of a pilot, Abraham Martin of Quebec, the "eponymous hero" of that plateau adjoining Quebec where, a century later, was to take place the mortal struggle between Wolfe and Montcalm.
It was probably soon after this marriage that Chouart adopted the title "des Groseilliers," derived from a petty estate which his father had in part bequeathed to him.
Not long did his wife survive the marriage; and she died without leaving any legacy of children to alleviate his loss. But the young adventurer was not destined to remain for any length of time disconsolate. Within a year of his wife's death, there arrived in the colony a brother and sister named Pierre and Marguerite Radisson, Huguenots of good family, who had been so persistently hounded in France by the persecution which sought to exterminate their community, that the one key to happiness had seemed to them to lie beyond the seas. No sooner had their father died than they bade farewell to France and sailed for Canada, there to start a new life amidst new and more tranquil surroundings.