SIR ALEXANDER MACKENZIE
(Celebrated North-West explorer)
About this time, however, loud complaints were heard on all hands of the want of enterprise of the Hudson's Bay Company in not seizing the opportunities afforded by the charter. Its trade was lethargic, its traders were timid or slothful, its people possessed none of that audacity and adventure which had sent Frenchmen like Du Lhut and La Vérendrye into the wilds intent on territory or trade. They yawned and were content with the trade which came their way. It seemed as though they smugly counted on their business virtue to attract, and their yearly gifts and patronage to allure the fur-hunting tribes. A world lay spread around them, and they remained at the doors of their posts and forts. No joy of the woods possessed them, no faith in the future drew them on; they followed the makers of Empire, guessing nothing of what Empire meant, hating their rivals for gifts they neither possessed nor desired. One Joseph Robson, who worked as surveyor in the northern forts in 1744, relates a conversation held that year with the captain at York Factory:—
"I expressed my surprise," he writes, "that the Company did not send Englishmen up the rivers to encourage and endear the natives, and by that means put a stop to the progress of the French....He said that he believed the French would have all the country in another century. To which I could not help immediately replying that such an alienation could only be effected through the remissness of the English." Robson next requested leave to travel inland; and "this brought on dismal tales of the difficulties to be encountered in such an expedition; and when I talked of going up rivers, I was told of stupendous heaps of ice and dreadful waterfalls, which would not only obstruct my passage but endanger my life. To confirm this, he said that Governor Maclish once attempted to go a little way up Nelson River to look for timber in order to build a factory, but found such heaps of ice in the river that they were discouraged from proceeding any higher." [42]
Umfreville, the writer and traveller already quoted, likewise challenges the Company for its "total want of spirit, to push on its work with that vigour which the importance of the contest deserves. The merchants from Canada," he continues, "have been heard to acknowledge that were the Hudson's Bay Company to prosecute their trade in a spirited manner, they must be soon obliged to give up all thoughts of penetrating into the country; as from the vicinity of the Company's factories to the inland parts, they can afford to undersell them in every branch."
SIR JOHN COLBORNE, (afterwards Lord Seaton)
Governor General of Canada 1838-1841.
This advantage enabled the older Company to reach the stations on the Bay at an earlier season of the year than was possible for their rivals by the overland route. Yet such was the zeal animating the Canadian companies that, conquering all difficulties of season and situation, they delivered goods to the Indians in their villages and tepees, thus anticipating their journey to the north; and some time after the Conquest forty canoes of about four tons burden each left the St. Lawrence every year for the interior.
The fall of Quebec marked a crisis in the affairs of the Hudson's Bay Company, and for a time indeed it seemed as if it also would pass away with the old régime. Their foes at this time began to multiply; for while the veteran coureurs de bois of Canada were ready enough, after the Conquest, to take service under their new masters, the Colonial forces were now further augmented by a large body of Scotch settlers, partly Jacobite refugees, and partly soldiers of the Highland regiments of Amherst and Wolfe. With vitality thus renewed the Canadians now turned to the west, their emissaries penetrating as far westward as Sturgeon Lake on the Saskatchewan, where a trading station was erected to divert the Indians from the forts at Hudson's Bay. But suddenly the "Adventurers of England" awoke from their long sleep, and Hearne, their agent, was forthwith sent to open up new territories, across which a chain of stations soon marked the successive stages of their progress, from Cumberland House to distant Athabasca. The spirit of competition was now aflame, and on many occasions in the course of the next fifty years it caused the opposing Companies to pass the limits of commercial strife and contend in open warfare, until mutual interest and vice-regal authority at last combined to reconcile them.
A great and threatening rival to the Hudson's Bay Company had come. The North-West Company, founded at Montreal in 1782, under the leadership of Simon M'Tavish, was founded on principles which made it a power against the older organisation, its agents receiving a stimulus to enterprise from a share in the profits of the undertaking and pay double that given by the English Company. These advantages proved so potent, that soon after beginning operations the North-Westers were able to send abroad skins to four times the value of those exported by their great rival.