Caught by winter at the south end of the Bay, Hudson and his crew landed and put up wooden shelters, where they spent an unhappy eight months. They failed to lay in a stock of game, and when the breaking ice set [a]A New Way In] the ship free, in the middle of June, food was running terribly short. The homeward voyage had barely started when mutineers laid hold of their captain, his young son and half a dozen others, and set them adrift in a boat. The few who survived, when the ship reached England at last, professed to believe that Hudson meant to leave them behind in the Bay if they had not played the trick first, as there was not food enough to keep all alive. Nothing was heard again of the great explorer, though ships were sent in search; but the sea that he won for a grave still bears the modest name of Hudson Bay.
Towing through the Ice—1600
Many a brave man after that met his death in the icy chaos, trying to find the North-west Passage to Asia. There were some, however, who had another aim—they saw in Hudson Strait and Bay a new way to the heart of North America, a way by which the wealth of the great [a]French and Indians at War] North-west might be drained off to England, in spite of the French who barred the St. Lawrence route.
Curiously enough, it was a couple of Frenchmen, named Radisson and Groseillers, who led the English in through this unguarded door.
The first French settlers on the St. Lawrence made friends of the Indians living there, the Hurons and Algonquins, and helped them to fight their enemies, the Iroquois. For many years, therefore, the Iroquois were constantly attacking the French, who could not even cultivate their little fields around the river-side towns without muskets slung over their shoulders. Even so, many of them were killed, and most of those taken alive were cruelly tortured.
At the village of Three Rivers, between Quebec and Montreal, lived Pierre Radisson. One spring morning in 1652, when he was about seventeen, he went out hunting, and was captured by a party of redskins in ambush. His life was spared, for an Indian and his wife took a fancy to him, adopted him as their son, and took him with them on their wanderings. He escaped, along with an Algonquin fellow-prisoner; but only by killing three Iroquois. He was captured again, and tortured; his feet were so badly burnt that he was lame for a month; but his Indian “father and mother” ransomed him with gifts to the head men of the tribe, and as he was a brave young fellow and a “good mixer” he became quite popular with his redskinned companions.
In the fall of the following year, these Indians went off raiding into the south, where the Dutch had settled in the present State of New York. At Fort Orange, or [a]Radisson and Groseillers Start] Albany, Radisson escaped again. From the Dutch town of New Amsterdam, now New York, he took ship for Europe; but after a few months in his native land of France he got back to his family in Canada, where he had long been given up for dead. He had another narrow escape from Indians when they attacked the fort of Onondaga; but nothing could satisfy his appetite for adventure. Two of his fellow-countrymen had travelled up the lakes as far as Green Bay in Wisconsin, where Indians had told them of other tribes who hunted great beasts on a treeless plain still farther west, and wandered in summer to a northern sea—no doubt our Hudson Bay. A big lake named Winnipeg also, they said, lay up there in the north.
Eager to explore, young Radisson and his sister’s husband, Médard Chouart des Groseillers, set off with a party of Algonquins in 1658, paddled up the Ottawa, through Lake Nipissing, across Lake Huron, and down Lake Michigan to Green Bay, where they spent the winter. Early in the following year they crossed Wisconsin, and came to a great brown river, worthy to rank with the green St. Lawrence. They had discovered the Mississippi. They crossed the river; and for the first time the red man of the West looked on a white man’s face.
The meeting was quite friendly. The Sioux were a warlike tribe, always breathing slaughter against their northern neighbors, the Crees; but as yet they had no quarrel with the whites. It mattered nothing to them if bearded white men were fighting Indians down in the south, as they had heard. The white men were evidently ready to trade as well as fight, for these Sioux were [a]White Men See the Prairie] already wearing European beads which must have been brought oversea by the Spaniards and passed up north from tribe to tribe.