The "Adventurers of England" on Hudson Bay Part 1

The "Adventurers of England" on Hudson Bay.

by Agnes C. (Agnes Christina) Laut.

CHAPTER I

THE FUR HUNTERS

Thirty or more years ago, one who stood at the foot of Main Street, Winnipeg, in front of the stone gate leading to the inner court of Fort Garry, and looked up across the river flats, would have seen a procession as picturesque as ever graced the streets of old Quebec--the dog brigades of the Hudson's Bay Company coming in from the winter's hunt.

Against the rolling snowdrifts appeared a line, at first grotesquely dwarfed under the mock suns of the eastern sky veiled in a soft frost fog. Then a husky-dog in bells and harness bounced up over the drifts, followed by another and yet another--eight or ten dogs to each long, low toboggan that slid along loaded and heaped with peltry. Beside each sleigh emerged out of the haze the form of the driver--a swarthy fellow, on snow-shoes, with hair bound back by a red scarf, and corduroy trousers belted in by another red scarf, and fur gauntlets to his elbows--flourishing his whip and yelling, in a high, snarling falsetto, 'marche! marche!'--the rallying-cry of the French wood-runner since first he set out from Quebec in the sixteen-hundreds to thread his way westward through the wilds of the continent.

Behind at a sort of dog-trot came women, clothed in skirts and shawls made of red and green blankets; papooses in moss bags on their mothers'

backs, their little heads wobbling under the fur flaps and capotes.

Then, as the dog teams sped from a trot to a gallop with whoops and jingling of bells, there whipped past a long, low, toboggan-shaped sleigh with the fastest dogs and the finest robes--the equipage of the chief factor or trader. Before the spectator could take in any more of the scene, dogs and sleighs, runners and women, had swept inside the gate.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A VIEW OF THE INTERIOR OF OLD FORT GARRY Drawn by H. A.

Strong]

At a still earlier period, say in the seventies, one who in summer chanced to be on Lake Winnipeg at the mouth of the great Saskatchewan river--which, by countless portages and interlinking lakes, is connected with all the vast water systems of the North--would have seen the fur traders sweeping down in huge flotillas of canoes and flat-bottomed Mackinaw boats--exultant after running the Grand Rapids, where the waters of the Great Plains converge to a width of some hundred rods and rush nine miles over rocks the size of a house in a furious cataract.

Summer or winter, it was a life of wild adventure and daily romance.

Here on the Saskatchewan every paddle-dip, every twist and turn of the supple canoes, revealed some new caprice of the river's moods. In places the current would be shallow and the canoes would lag. Then the paddlers must catch the veer of the flow or they would presently be out waist-deep shoving cargo and craft off sand bars. Again, as at Grand Rapids, where the banks were rock-faced and sheer, the canoes would run merrily in swift-flowing waters. No wonder the Indian voyageurs regarded all rivers as living personalities and made the River G.o.ddess offerings of tobacco for fair wind and good voyage. And it is to be kept in mind that no river like the Saskatchewan can be permanently mapped. No map or chart of such a river could serve its purpose for more than a year.

Chart it to-day, and perhaps to-morrow it jumps its river bed; and where was a current is now a swampy lake in which the paddlemen may lose their way.

When the waters chanced to be low at Grand Rapids, showing huge rocks through the white spray, cargoes would be unloaded and the peltry sent across the nine-mile portage by tramway; but when the river was high--as in June after the melting of the mountain snows--the voyageurs were always keen for the excitement of making the descent by canoe. Lestang, M'Kay, Mackenzie, a dozen famous guides, could boast two trips a day down the rapids, without so much as grazing a paddle on the rocks.

Indeed, the different crews would race each other into the very vortex of the wildest water; and woe betide the old voyageur whose crew failed of the strong pull into the right current just when the craft took the plunge! Here, where the waters of the vast prairie region are descending over huge boulders and rocky islets between banks not a third of a mile apart, there is a wild river scene. Far ahead the paddlers can hear the roar of the swirl. Now the surface of the river rounds and rises in the eddies of an undertow, and the canoe leaps forward; then, a swifter plunge through the middle of a furious overfall. The steersman rises at the stern and leans forward like a runner.

[Ill.u.s.tration: TRACK SURVEY of the SASKATCHEWAN between CEDAR LAKE & LAKE WINNIPEG]

'Pull!' shouts the steersman; and the canoe shoots past one rock to catch the current that will whirl it past the next, every man bending to his paddle and almost lifted to his feet. The canoe catches the right current and is catapulted past the roaring place where rocks make the water white. Instantly all but the steersman drop down, flat in the bottom of the canoe, paddles rigid athwart. No need to pull now! The waters do the work; and motion on the part of the men would be fatal.

Here the strongest swimmer would be as a chip on a cataract. The task now is not to paddle, but to steer--to keep the craft away from the rocks. This is the part of the steersman, who stands braced to his paddle used rudder-wise astern; and the canoe rides the wildest plunge like a sea-gull. One after another the brigades disappear in a white trough of spray and roaring waters. They are gone! No human power can bring them out of that maelstrom! But look! like corks on a wave, mounting and climbing and riding the highest billows, there they are again, one after another, sidling and lifting and falling and finally gliding out to calm water, where the men fall to their paddles and strike up one of their l.u.s.ty voyageur songs!

The Company would not venture its peltry on the lower rapid where the river rushes down almost like a waterfall. Above this the cargoes were transferred to the portage, and prosaically sent over the hill on a tram-car pulled by a horse. The men, however, would not be robbed of the glee of running that last rapid, and, with just enough weight for ballast in their canoes and boats, they would make the furious descent.

At the head of the tramway on the Grand Rapids portage stands the Great House, facing old warehouses through which have pa.s.sed millions of dollars' worth of furs. The Great House is gambrel-roofed and is built of heavily timbered logs whitewashed. Round it is a picket fence; below are wine cellars. It is dismantled and empty now; but here no doubt good wines abounded and big oaths rolled in the days when the lords of an unmapped empire held sway.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE PRINc.i.p.aL POSTS OF THE HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY Map by Bartholomew.]

A glance at the map of the Hudson's Bay Company's posts will show the extent of the fur traders' empire. To the Athabaska warehouses at Fort Chipewyan came the furs of Mackenzie river and the Arctic; to Fort Edmonton came the furs of the Athabaska and of the Rockies; to Fort Pitt came the peltry of the Barren Lands; and all pa.s.sed down the broad highway of the Saskatchewan to Lake Winnipeg, whence they were sent out to York Factory on Hudson Bay, there to be loaded on ships and taken to the Company's warehouses in London.

Incidentally, the fur hunters were explorers who had blazed a trail across a continent and penetrated to the uttermost reaches of a northern empire the size of Europe. But it was fur these explorers were seeking when they pushed their canoes up the Saskatchewan, crossed the Rocky Mountains, went down the Columbia. Fur, not glory, was the quest when the dog bells went ringing over the wintry wastes from Saskatchewan to Athabaska, across the Barren Lands, and north to the Arctic. Beaver, not empire, was the object in view when the horse brigades of one hundred and two hundred and three hundred hunters, led by Ogden, or Ross, or M'Kay or Ermatinger went winding south over the mountains from New Caledonia through the country that now comprises the states of Washington and Oregon and Idaho, across the deserts of Utah and Nevada, to the Spanish forts at San Francisco and Monterey. It is a question whether La Salle could have found his way to the Mississippi, or Radisson to the North Sea, or Mackenzie to the Pacific, if the little beaver had not inspired the search and paid the toll.

CHAPTER II

THE TRAGEDY OF HENRY HUDSON

Though the adventurers to Hudson Bay turned to fur trading and won wealth, and discovered an empire while pursuing the little beaver across a continent, the beginning of all this was not the beaver, but a myth--the North-West Pa.s.sage--a short way round the world to bring back the spices and silks and teas of India and j.a.pan. It was this quest, not the lure of the beaver, that first brought men into the heart of New World wilds by way of Hudson Bay.

In this search Henry Hudson led the way when he sent his little high-decked oak craft, the _Discovery_, b.u.t.ting through the ice-drive of Hudson Strait in July of 1610; 'worming a way' through the floes by anchor out to the fore and a pull on the rope from behind. Smith, Wolstenholme, and Digges, the English merchant adventurers who had supplied him with money for his brig and crew, cared for nothing but the short route to those spices and silks of the orient. They thought, since Hudson's progress had been blocked the year before in the same search up the bay of Chesapeake and up the Hudson river, that the only remaining way must lie through these northern straits. So now thought Hudson, as the ice jams closed behind him and a clear way opened before him to the west on a great inland sea that rocked to an ocean tide.

Was that tide from the Pacific? How easily does a wish become father to the thought! Ice lay north, open water south and west; and so south-west steered Hudson, standing by the wheel, though Juet, the old mate, raged in open mutiny because not enough provisions remained to warrant further voyaging, much less the wintering of a crew of twenty in an ice-locked world. Henry Greene, a gutter-snipe picked off the streets of London, as the most of the sailors of that day were, went whispering from man to man of the crew that the master's commands to go on ought not to be obeyed. But we must not forget two things when we sit in judgment on Henry Hudson's crew. First, nearly all sailors of that period were unwilling men seized forcibly and put on board. Secondly, in those days nearly all seamen, masters as well as men, were apt to turn pirate at the sight of an alien sail. The ships of all foreign nations were considered lawful prey to the mariner with the stronger crew or fleeter sail.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE ROUTES OF HUDSON AND MUNCK Map by Bartholomew.]

The waters that we know to-day as the Pacific were known to Hudson as the South Sea. And now the tide rolled south over shelving, sandy sh.o.r.es, past countless islands yellowing to the touch of September frosts, and silent as death but for the cries of gull, tern, bittern, the hooting piebald loon, match-legged phalaropes, and geese and ducks of every hue, collected for the autumnal flight south. It was a yellowish sea under a sky blue as turquoise; and it may be that Hudson recalled sailor yarns of China's seas, lying yellow under skies blue as a robin's egg. At any rate he continued to steer south in spite of the old mate's mutterings. Men in unwilling service at a few shillings a month do not court death for the sake of glory. The sh.o.r.e line of rocks and pine turned westward. So did Hudson, sounding the ship's line as he crept forward one sail up, the others rattling against the bare masts in the autumn wind--doleful music to the thoughts of the coward crew. The sh.o.r.e line at the south end of Hudson Bay, as the world now knows, is cut sharply by a ridge of swampy land that shoals to muddy flats in what is known as Hannah Bay.

Hudson's hopes must have been dimmed if not dashed as he saw the western sh.o.r.e turn north and bar his way. He must suddenly have understood the force of the fear that his provisions would not last him to England if this course did not open towards China. It was now October; and the furious equinoctial gales lashed the shallow sea to mountainous waves that swept clear over the decks of the _Discovery_, knocking the sailors from the capstan bars and setting all the lee scuppers spouting. In a rage Juet threw down his pole and declared that he would serve no longer. Hudson was compelled to arrest his old mate for mutiny and depose him with loss of wages. The trial brought out the fact that the crew had been plotting to break open the lockers and seize firearms. It must be remembered that most of Hudson's sailors were ragged, under-fed, under-clothed fellows, ill fitted for the rigorous climate of the north and unmoved by the glorious aims that, like a star of hope, led Hudson on. They saw no star of hope, and felt only hunger and cold and that dislike of the hardships of life which is the birthright of the weakling, as well as his Nemesis.

What with the north wind driving water back up the shallows, and with tamarac swamps on the landward side, Hudson deemed it unwise to anchor for the winter in the western corner of the Bay, and came back to the waters that, from the description of the hills, may now be identified as Rupert Bay, in the south-east corner. The furious autumn winds bobbled the little high-decked ship about on the water like a chip in a maelstrom, and finally, with a ripping crash that tore timbers asunder, sent her on the rocks, in the blackness of a November night. The starving crew dashed up the hatchway to decks gla.s.sed with ice and wrapped in the gloom of a snow-storm thick as wool. To any who have been on that sh.o.r.e in a storm it is quite unnecessary to explain why it was impossible to seek safety ash.o.r.e by lowering a boat. Shallow seas always beat to wilder turbulence in storm than do the great deeps. Even so do shallow natures, and one can guess how the mutinous crew, stung into unwonted fury by cold and despair, railed at Hudson with the rage of panic-stricken hysteria. But in daylight and calm, presumably on the morning of November 11, drenched and cold, they reached sh.o.r.e safely, and knocked together, out of the tamarac and pines and rocks, some semblance of winter cabins.

Of game there was abundance then, as now--rabbit and deer and grouse enough to provision an army; and Hudson offered reward for all provisions brought in. But the leaven of rebellion had worked its mischief. The men would not hunt. Probably they did not know how.

Certainly none of them had ever before felt such cold as this--cold that left the naked hand sticking to any metal that it touched, that filled the air with frost fog and mock suns, that set the wet ship's timbers crackling every night like musket shots, that left a lining of h.o.a.r-frost and snow on the under side of the berth-beds, that burst the great pines and fir trees ash.o.r.e in loud nightly explosions, and set the air whipping in lights of unearthly splendour that pa.s.sed them moving and rustling in curtains of blood and fire.[1] As anyone who has lived in the region knows, the cowardly incompetents should have been up and out hunting and wresting from nature the one means of protection against northern cold--fur clothing. That is the one demand the North makes of man--that he shall fight and strive for mastery; but these whimpering weaklings, convulsed with the poison of self-pity, sat inside shivering over the little pans and braziers of coal, cursing and cursing Hudson.

In the midst of the smouldering mutiny the ship's gunner died, and probably because the gutter boy, Greene, was the most poorly clad of all, Hudson gave the dead man's overcoat to the London lad. Instantly there was wild outcry from the other men. It was customary to auction a dead seaman's clothes from the mainmast. Why had the commander shown favour? In disgust Hudson turned the coat over to the new mate--thereby adding fresh fuel to the crew's wrath and making Greene a real source of danger. Greene was, to be sure, only a youth, but small snakes sometimes secrete deadly venom.

How the winter pa.s.sed there is no record, except that it was 'void of hope'; and one may guess the tension of the sulky atmosphere. The old captain, with his young son, stood his ground against the mutineers, like a bear baited by snapping curs. If they had hunted half as diligently as they snarled and complained, there would have been ample provisions and absolute security; and this statement holds good of more complainants against life than Henry Hudson's mutinous crew. It holds good of nearly all mutineers against life.

Spring came, as it always comes in that snow-washed northern land, with a ramp of the ice loosening its grip from the turbulent waters, and a whirr of the birds winging north in long, high, wedge-shaped lines, and a crunching of the icefloes riding turbulently out to sea, and a piping of the odorous spring winds through the resinous balsam-scented woods.

Hudson and the loyal members of the crew attempted to replenish provisions by fishing. Then a brilliant thought penetrated the wooden brains of the idle and incompetent crew--a thought that still works its poison in like brains of to-day--namely, if there were half as many people there would be twice as much provisions for each.

Ice out, anchor up, the gulls and wild geese winging northward again--all was ready for sail on June 18, 1611. With the tattered canvas and the seams tarred and the mends in the hull caulked, Hudson handed out all the bread that was left--a pound to each man.

He had failed to find the North-West Pa.s.sage. He was going home a failure, balked, beaten, thrown back by the waves that had been beating the icefloes to the mournful call of the desolate wind all winter.

There were tears in the eyes of the old captain as he handed out the last of the bread. Any one who has watched what snapping mongrels do when the big dog goes down, need not be told what happened now. There were whisperings that night as the ship slipped before the wind, whisperings and tale-bearings from berth to berth, threats uttered in shrill scared falsetto 'to end it or to mend it; better hang at home for mutiny than starve at sea.' p.r.i.c.kett, the agent for the merchant adventurers, pleaded for Hudson's life; the mutineers, led by Juet and Greene, roughly bade him look to his own. p.r.i.c.kett was ill in bed with scurvy, and the tremor of self-fear came into his plea. Then the mutineers swore on the Bible that what they planned was to sacrifice the lives of the few to save the many. When the destroyer profanes the Cross with unclean perjury, 'tis well to use the Cross for firewood and unsheath a sword. Peevish with sickness, p.r.i.c.kett punily acquiesced.

When Hudson stepped from the wheel-house or cabin next morning, they leaped upon him like a pack of wolves. No oaths on Scripture and Holy Cross this break of day! Oaths of another sort--oaths and blows and railings--all pretence of clean motives thrown off--malice with its teeth out snapping! Somewhere north of Rupert, probably off Charlton Island, Hudson, his son, and eight loyal members of the crew were thrown into one of the boats on the davits. The boat was lowered on its pulleys and touched sea. The _Discovery_ then spread sail and sped through open water to the wind. The little boat with the marooned crew came climbing after. Somebody threw into it some implements and ammunition, and some one cut the painter. The abandoned boat slacked and fell back in the wave wash; and that is all we know of the end of Henry Hudson, who had discovered a northern sea, the size of a Mediterranean, that was to be a future arena of nations warring for an empire, and who had before discovered a river that was to be a path of world commerce.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE LAST HOURS OF HUDSON From the painting by Collier]

What became of Hudson? A famous painting represents him, with his little son and the castaway crew, huddling among the engulfing icebergs. That may have been; but it is improbable that the dauntless old pathfinder would have succ.u.mbed so supinely. Three traditions, more or less reasonable, exist about his end. When Captain James came out twenty years later seeking the North-West Pa.s.sage he found on a little island (Danby), south-east from Charlton Island, a number of sticks standing in the ground, with the chip marks of a steel blade. Did the old timbers mark some winter house of Hudson and his castaways? When Radisson came cruising among these islands fifty years later, he discovered an old house 'all marked and battered with bullets'; and the Indians told Radisson stories of 'canoes with sails' having come to the Bay. Had Indians, supplied with firearms overland from Quebec traders, a.s.sailed that house where nine white men, standing at bay between starvation and their enemies, took their last stand? The third tradition is of a later day. A few years ago a resident of Fort Frances, who had spent the summer at the foot of James Bay, and who understood the Indian language, wrote that the Indians had told him legends of white men who had come to the Bay long long ago, before ever 'the Big Company came,'

and who had been cast away by their fellows, and who came ash.o.r.e and lived among the Indians and took Indian wives and left red-haired descendants. It is probable that fur traders had told the Indians the story of Hudson; and this would explain the origin of this tradition. On the other hand, in a race utterly isolated from the outside world, among whom neither printing nor telegraph ever existed, traditions handed down from father to son acquire peculiar value; and in them we can often find a germ of truth. The legends are given for what they are worth.

There is no need to relate the fate of the mutineers. The fate of mutineers is the same the world over. They quarrelled among themselves.

They lost themselves among the icefloes. When they found their way back through the straits all provisions were exhausted. While they were prisoners in the icefloes, scurvy a.s.sailed the crew. Landing to gather sorrel gra.s.s as an antidote to scurvy, they were attacked by Eskimos.

Only four men were left to man the ship home, and they were reduced to a diet of sea moss and offal before reaching Ireland. Greene perished miserably among the Indians, and his body was thrown into the sea. Old Juet died of starvation in sight of Ireland, raving impotent curses. But however dire Nemesis may be, or however deep may be repentance, neither undoes the wrong; and Hudson had gone to his unknown grave, sent thither by imbeciles, who would not work that they might eat, nor strive that they might win, but sat crouching, as their prototypes sit, ready to spring at the throat of Endeavour.

Thomas b.u.t.ton, afterwards knighted for his effort, came out the very next year at the expense of the merchant adventurers--Walstenholme, Smith, and Digges--to search for Hudson. He wintered (1612-13) at Port Nelson, which he explored and named after his mate, who died there of scurvy; but the sea gave up no secret of its dead. p.r.i.c.kett and Bylot, of Hudson's former crew, were there also with the old ship _Discovery_ and a large frigate called _Resolution_, an appropriate name. b.u.t.ton's crew became infected with scurvy, and Port Nelson a camp for the dead.

Then came Captain Gibbon in 1614; but the ice caught him at Labrador and turned him back. The merchant adventurers then fitted out Bylot, Hudson's second mate, and in 1615-16 he searched the desolate, lonely northern waters. He found no trace of Hudson, nor a pa.s.sage to the South Sea; but he gave his mate's name--Baffin--to the lonely land that lines the northern side of the straits. Novelists are frequently accused of sensationalism and exaggeration, but if, as tradition seems to suggest, Hudson were still alive seven hundred miles south at the lower end of the Bay, straining vain eyes for a sail at sea, like Alexander Selkirk of a later day--with a b.u.t.ton and a Gibbon and a Bylot and a Baffin searching for him with echoing cannon roll and useless call in the north--then the life and death of the old pathfinder are more like a tale from Defoe than a story of real life.

The English merchant adventurers then gave up--possibly for the very good reason that they had emptied their purses. This brings us to the year 1617 with no North-West Pa.s.sage discovered, and very little other reward for the toll of life and heroism during seven years.