Parallel with these movements the British discovered the broad belt of sea between Greenland and North America and the whole area of Hudson Bay. After the French had ceased to reign in North America, the British were to reveal the great rivers flowing into the Arctic Ocean, the coasts and islands of the Arctic Ocean, the Yukon River, and the coasts and islands of British Columbia and Alaska.
The first Europeans, however, to reach Alaska were Russians led by Vitus Bering, a great Danish sea captain in the Russian service. Bering was born in 1680 at Horsens, in the province of Aarhuus, E. Denmark, and entered the service of Peter the Great, who was desirous of knowing where Asia terminated and America began. Bering discovered the straits which bear his name in 1728, and in 1741 was wrecked and died on Bering's Island. Captain James Cook, the British discoverer of Australia and of so many Pacific islands, completed the work of Bering in 1788 in charting the north-west American coast right into the Arctic Ocean.
It has already been related in Chapter III how the Hudson's Bay Chartered Company came to be founded. Soon after their first pioneers were established, in 1670, at Fort Nelson, on the west coast of Hudson Bay, near where York Factory now stands, there was born—or brought out from England as an infant—a little boy named Henry Kellsey, who as a child took a great fancy to the Amerindians who came to trade at Fort Nelson. As he played with them, and they returned his affection, he learnt their language, and—for some inconceivable reason—this gave great offence to the stupid governor of the fort (indeed, when Kellsey as a grown man, some years afterwards, compiled a vocabulary of the Kri language for the use of traders, the Hudson's Bay Company ordered it to be suppressed). Stupid Governor Geyer not only objected to Kellsey picking up the Kri language, but punished him most severely for that and for his boyish tricks and jokes; so much so, that Kellsey, when he was about ten years old, ran away with the returning Indians, some of whom had grown very fond of him whilst they stayed at Fort Nelson.
Six years afterwards an Indian brought to the governor of the fort a letter written by Kellsey in charcoal on a piece of white birch bark. In this he asked the governor's pardon for running away, and his permission to return to the fort. As a kind reply was sent, Kellsey appeared not long afterwards grown into a young man, accompanied by an Indian wife and attended by a party of Indians. He was dressed exactly like them, but differed from them in the respect which he showed to his native wife. She attempted to accompany her husband into the factory or place of business, and the governor stopped her; but Kellsey at once told him in English that he would not enter himself if his wife was not suffered to go with him, and so the governor relented. After this Kellsey (who must then have been about seventeen) seems to have regularly enrolled himself in 1688 in the service of the Company, and he was employed as a kind of commercial traveller who made long journeys to the north-west to beat up a fur trade for the Company and induce tribes of Indians to make long journeys every summer to the Company's factory with the skins they had secured between the autumn and the spring. In this way Kellsey penetrated into the country of the Assiniboines, and he finally reached a more distant tribe or nation called by the long name of Néwátamipoet.[1] Kellsey first of all made for Split Lake, up the Nelson River, and thence paddled westwards in his canoe for a distance of 71 miles. Here he abandoned the canoe, and, for what he estimated as 316 miles, he tramped through a wooded country, first covered with fir and pine trees, and farther on with poplar and birch. Apparently he then reached a river flowing into Reindeer Lake. In a general way his steps must have taken him in the direction of Lake Athapaska.
On the way he had much trouble with the Assiniboin Indians and Kris, with whom he had caught up, and with whom he was to travel in the direction of these mysterious Néwátamipoets. The last-named tribe, who were probably of the Athapaskan group, had killed, a few months previously, three of the Kri women, and the Kri Indians who belonged to Kellsey's party were bent, above all things, on attacking the Néwátamipoets and punishing them for this outrage. Kellsey only wished to open up peaceful relations with them and create a great trade in furs with the Hudson's Bay Company, so he kept pleading with the Indians not to go to war with the Néwátamipoets. On this journey, however, one of the Kri Indians fell ill and died. The next day the body was burnt with much ceremony—first the flesh, and then the bones—and after this funeral the companions of the dead man began to reason as to the cause of his death, and suddenly blamed Kellsey. Kellsey had obstructed them from their purpose of avenging their slain women, therefore the gods of the tribe were angry and claimed this victim in the man who had died. Kellsey was very near being sent to the other world to complete the sacrifice; but he arranged for "a feast of tobacco"—in other words, a calm deliberation and the smoking of the pipe of peace. He explained to the angry Indians that his Company had not supplied him with guns and ammunition with which to go to war, but to induce them to embark on the fur trade and to kill wild animals for their skins. If, instead of this, they went to war, or injured him, they need never again go down to Fort Nelson for any further trade or supplies. Four days afterwards, however, the attention of the whole party was concentrated on bison.
Bison could now be seen in abundance. Kellsey was already acquainted with the musk ox, which he had seen in the colder regions near to Hudson Bay; but the bison seemed to him quite different, with horns growing like those of an English ox, black and short. In the middle of September he reached the country of the Néwátamipoets, and presented to their chief, on behalf of the Hudson's Bay Company, a present of clothes, knives, awls, tobacco, and a gun, gunpowder, and shot. On this journey Kellsey encountered the grizzly bear, a more common denizen of the western regions of North America. According to his own account, he and one of the Indians with him were attacked by two grizzly bears and obliged to climb into the branches of trees. The bears followed them; but Kellsey fired and killed one, and later on the other also. For this feat he was greatly reverenced by the Indians, and received the name of Mistopashish, or "little giant". Kellsey afterwards rose to be governor of York Fort, on the west coast of Hudson Bay.
The next great explorer ranging westward from Hudson Bay was Anthony Hendry.[2] Anthony Hendry left York factory in 1754, with a company of Kri Indians, to make a great journey of exploration to the west, and with the deliberate intention of wintering with the natives and not returning for that purpose to Hudson Bay. By means of canoe travel and portages he reached Oxford Lake. From here he gained Moose Lake, and soon afterwards "the broad waters of the Saskatchewan—the first Englishman to see this great river of the western plains".[3] Twenty-two miles upstream from the point where it reached the Saskatchewan he came to a French fort which had only been standing for a year, and which represented probably the farthest advance northwards of the French Canadians.
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