Captain Coats, who for twenty-four years commanded ships sailing between England and Hudson Bay, from 1727 to 1751, wrote the story of his experiences for the benefit of his sons, who had taken up his own adventurous trade. “The tides,” he says, are “so violent and surprising, especially when disturbed and distracted by ice, that nothing but experience can comprehend or imagine.” An ordinary spring tide “rises near 30 foot all along the streights,” “boyling up in eddies and whirlpools in a most amazing manner,” and “shattering in shivers immense bodys of ice.” In 1727, near the meridian of Cape Farewell, “two pieces of ice shutt upon us and sunk our ship.” In 1736 he was “entangled in ice which shutt upon us, by the tides only (for it was dead calm) and crushed our sides in, and sunk her in 20 minutes.”
A vessel had to leave England by May 20 to be sure of reaching the mouth of Hudson Straits by 6th July, and then the trouble began. One year the captain tried six times to enter the straits, from the 1st to the 12th of July, and had to stand out to sea every time.
“Sometimes,” he says, “in favorable seasons, we have entred the streights sooner.” Once he got in by June 26, “and got up with great labour about 60 degrees, but there we found such banks and walls of ice from side to side that we did little or nothing untill the 20th July.” And “as it is very hazardous to enter the streights before [a]Travelling by the Lakes] the beginning of July, for ice, so it is dangerous to be in that bay after the middle of September; the gales of wind and snow setts in for a continuence, with very short calm intervals; the severe frost are such that you cannot work a ship;” there are “violent piercing winds, which no creature can face for a continuence.” Even on shore, at the forts, “those terrible snowdrifts and dark condensed foggs are hardly to be guarded against.” “So apprehensive are our people of being caught out in those frightful drifts that they never suffer a stranger to go a bow shott from the palisades without a person of experience with them.”
When steamers took the place of sailing ships, the length and the risk of the voyage were greatly reduced, but nothing could abolish the “dark condensed foggs” and “immense bodys of ice” in Hudson Straits.
Far less dangerous and disagreeable was the inland water route by which the North-west Company sent its furs down to Montreal—the route opened up by the old French explorers; but no risk could be much worse than a sudden storm when the traders came out on the lakes in their boats and canoes. There were plenty of other hardships too, on that long voyage; yet there were plenty of hardy French voyageurs to undertake and even enjoy the adventure.
Others made the adventure too, on occasion. Sir George Simpson, the young Scot who was made Governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company on its union with the North-west Company in 1821, made the long trip from Montreal to Manitoba about forty times. He travelled in state, with a Highland piper to rouse the echoes and excite the wondering awe of the natives when he was nearing an outpost. [a]An Artist’s Trip in 1846]
A lively picture of the West is given us by Paul Kane, who undertook that journey in 1846, not as a trader but as an artist. Paul Kane set out, as he tells us, “with no companions but my portfolio and box of paints, my gun and a stock of ammunition,” to make pictures of Indian life and “the scenery of an almost unknown country.”
Such a journey as it was! Leaving Toronto on the 9th of May, he reached “Fort Vancouver,” ninety miles from the mouth of the Columbia River—now in the States, but then “the largest port in the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Dominions”—only on the 8th of December.
From the head of Lake Superior he had to travel practically all the way by canoe, though occasionally on horseback. His route lay through the Lake of the Woods and Lake Winnipeg to Norway House, up the North Saskatchewan to Edmonton House, up the Athabasca to Jasper’s, across the Yellowhead Pass—through which the Canadian National Railway now runs—then down the whole length of the Columbia, by the Arrow Lakes and Fort Okanagan.
At Edmonton he found quite “a large establishment,” forty or fifty men, with their wives and children, amounting altogether to about 139, all living within the pickets of the fort. The men were occupied chiefly in building the company’s boats, sawing timber and cutting up firewood. The women, all, without exception, either Indian or Métis, were employed making moccasins and clothing for the men, and converting buffalo meat into “pimmi-kon.”