Canada: The Empire of the North — From 1679 to 1713, part 1
Radisson quarrels with company--Up Labrador coast--Radisson captures his rivals--Radisson ordered back to England--Death of Radisson--Jan Peré the spy--The raid on Moose Factory--Sargeant besieged Before leaving for France, Jean Talon, the Intendant, had set another exploration in motion.
English trade was now in full sway on Hudson Bay.
In possession of the Mississippi, the Ohio, the Illinois, the Great Lakes, France controlled all avenues of approach to the Great Northwest except Hudson Bay.
This she had lost through injustice to Radisson; and already the troublesome question had come up,--What was to be the boundary between the fur-trading domain of the French northward from the St. Lawrence and the fur-trading domain of the English southward from Hudson Bay.
Fewer furs came down to Quebec from Labrador, the King's Domain, from Kaministiquia (Fort William), the stamping ground of Duluth, the forest ranger.
The furs of these regions were being drained by the English of Hudson Bay.
Talon determined to put a stop to this, and had advised Frontenac accordingly.
August, 1671, Governor Frontenac dispatched the English Jesuit--Father Albanel--with French guides and Indian voyageurs to set up French arms on Hudson Bay and to bear letters to Radisson and Groseillers.
The journey was terrific.
I have told the story elsewhere.
Autumn found the voyageurs beyond the forested shores of the Saguenay and Lake St. John, ascending a current full of boiling cascades towards Lake Mistassini.
Then the frost-painted woods became naked as antlers, with wintry winds setting the dead boughs crashing;
and the ice, thin as mica, forming at the edges of the streams, had presently thickened too hard for the voyageurs to break with their paddles.
Albanel and his comrades wintered in the Montaignais' lodges, which were banked so heavily with snow that scarcely a breath of pure air could penetrate the {144} stench.
By day the priest wandered from lodge to lodge, preaching the gospel.
At night he was to be found afar in the snow-padded solitudes of the forest engaged in prayer.
At last, in the spring of 1672, thaw set the ice loose and the torrents rushing.
Downstream on June 10 launched Albanel, running many a wild-rushing rapid, taking the leap with the torrential waters over the lesser cataracts, and avoiding the larger falls by long detours over rocks slippery as ice, through swamps to a man's armpits.
The hinterland of Hudson Bay, with its swamps and rough portages and dank forests of unbroken windfall, was then and is to-day the hardest canoe trip in North America; but towards the end of June the French canoes glided out on the arm of the sea called James Bay, hoisted the French flag, and in solemn council with the Indians presented gifts to induce them to come down the Saguenay to Quebec.
Fort Rupert, the Hudson's Bay Company's post, consisted of two barrack-like log structures.
When Albanel came to the houses he found not a soul, only boxes of provisions and one lonely dog.
A few weeks previously the men of the English company had gone on up the west coast of Hudson Bay, prospecting for the site of a new settlement.
Before Albanel had come at all, there was friction among the English.
Radisson and Groseillers were Catholics and French, and they were supervisors of the entire trade.
Bayly, the English governor, was subject to them.
So was Captain Gillam, with whom they had quarreled long ago, when he refused to take his boat into Hudson Straits on the voyage from Port Royal.
Radisson and Groseillers were for establishing more posts up the west coast of Hudson Bay, farther from the competition of Duluth's forest rovers on Lake Superior.
They had examined the great River Nelson and urged Bayly, the English governor, to build a fort there.
Bayly sulked and blustered by turns.
In this mood they had come back to Prince Rupert to find the French flag flying above their fort and the English Jesuit, Albanel, snugly ensconced, with passports from Governor Frontenac and personal letters for Radisson and Groseillers.
{145} England and France were at peace.
Bayly had to respect Albanel's passports, but he wished this English envoy of French rivals far enough; and when Captain Gillam came from England the old quarrel flamed out in open hostility.
Radisson and Groseillers were accused of being in league with the French traders.
A thousand rumors of what next happened have gained currency.
One writer says that the English and French came to blows; another, that Radisson and Groseillers deserted, going back overland with Albanel.
In the Archives of Hudson's Bay House I found a letter stating that the English captain kidnapped the Jesuit Albanel and carried him a captive to England.
It may as well be frankly stated these rumors are all sheer fiction.
Albanel went back overland as he came.
Radisson and Groseillers did not go with him, though there may have been blows.
Instead, they went to England on Gillam's ship to present their case to the company.
[Illustration: PRINCE RUPERT (After the painting by Sir P. Lely)] The Hudson's Bay Company was uneasy.
Radisson and Groseillers were aliens.
True, Radisson had married Mary Kirke, the daughter of a shareholder, and was bound to the English; but if Radisson and Groseillers had forsworn one land, might they not forswear another, and go back to the French, as Frontenac's letters no doubt urged?
The company offered Radisson a salary of 100 pounds a year to stay as clerk in England.
They did not want him out on the bay again; but {146} France had offered Radisson a commission in the French navy.
Without more ado the two Frenchmen left London for Paris, and Paris for America.
The year 1676 finds Radisson back in Quebec engaged in the beaver trade with all those friends of his youth whose names have become famous,--La Salle of Fort Frontenac, and Charles Le Moyne the interpreter of Montreal, and Jolliet of the Mississippi, and La Fôrest who befriended La Salle, Le Chesnaye who opposed him, and Duluth whose forest rangers roved from Lake Superior to Hudson Bay.
It can be guessed what these men talked about over the table of the Sovereign Council at Quebec, whither they had been called to discuss the price of beaver and the use of brandy.
The fur traders were at that time in two distinct rings,--the ring of La Salle and La Fôrest, supported by Frontenac; the Montreal ring, headed by Le Chesnaye, who fought against the opening of the west because Lake Ontario trade would divert his trade from the Ottawa.
Radisson's report of that west coast of Hudson Bay, in area large as all New France, interested both factions of the fur trade intensely.
He was offered two ships for Hudson Bay by the men of both rings.
Because England and France were at peace, Frontenac dared not recognize the expedition officially; but he winked at it,--as he winked at many irregularities in the fur trade,--granted the Company of the North license to trade on Hudson Bay, and gave Radisson's party passports "to fish off Gaspé."
In the venture Radisson, Groseillers, and the son Chouart Groseillers, invested their all, possibly amounting to each.
The rest of the money for the expedition came from the Godfreys, titled seigneurs of Three Rivers; Dame Sorel, widow of an officer in the Carignan Regiment; Le Chesnaye, La Salle's lieutenant, and others.
The boats were rickety little tubs unfit for rough northern seas, and the crews sulky, underfed men, who threatened mutiny at every watering place and only refrained from cutting Radisson's {147} throat because he kept them busy.
July 11, 1682, the explorers sheered away from the fishing fleet of the St. Lawrence and began coasting up the lonely iron shore of Labrador.
Ice was met sweeping south in mountainous bergs.
Over Isle Demons in the Straits of Belle Isle hung storm wrack and brown fog as in the days when Marguerite Roberval pined there.
Then the ships were cutting the tides of Labrador; here through fog; there skimming a coast that was sheer masonry to the very sky; again, scudding from storm to refuge of some hole in the wall.
[Illustration: MAP OF HUDSON BAY] {148} Before September the ships rode triumphantly into Five-Fathom-Hole off Nelson River, Hudson Bay.
Here two great rivers, wide as the St. Lawrence, rolled to the sea, separated by a long tongue of sandy dunes.
The north river was the Nelson; the south, the Hayes.
Approach to both was dangerous, shallow, sandy, and bowlder strewn; but Radisson's vessels were light draught, and he ran them in on the tide to Hayes River on the south, where his men took possession for France and erected log huts as a fort.
Groseillers remained at the fort to command the twenty-seven men.
Young Chouart ranged the swamps and woods for Indians, and Radisson had paddled down the Hayes from meeting some Assiniboine hunters, when, to his amazement, there rolled across the wooded swamps the most astonishing report that could be heard in desolate solitudes.
It was the rolling reverberation, the dull echo of a far-away cannon firing signal after signal.
Like a flash Radisson guessed the game.
After all, the Hudson's Bay Company had taken his advice and were sending ships to trade on the west coast.
The most of men, supported by only twenty-seven mutineers, would have scuttled ships and escaped overland, but the explorers of New France, Champlain and Jolliet and La Salle, were not made of the stuff that runs from trouble.
Picking out three men, Radisson crossed the marsh northward to reconnoiter on Nelson River.
Through the brush he espied a white tent on what is now known as Gillam's Island, a fortress half built, and a ship at anchor.
All night he and his spies watched, but none of the builders came near enough to be seized, and next day at noon Radisson put a bold face on and paddled within cannon shot of the island.
Here was a pretty to-do, indeed!
The Frenchman must have laughed till he shook with glee!
It was not the Hudson's Bay Company ship at all, but a poacher, a pirate, an interloper, forbidden by the laws of the English Company's monopoly; and who was the poacher but Ben Gillam, of Boston, son of Captain Gillam of the Hudson's Bay Company, with whom, no doubt, he was in collusion to defraud the English traders!
Calling for {149} Englishmen to come down to the shore as hostages for fair treatment, Radisson went boldly aboard the young man's ship, saw everything, counted the men, noted the fact that Gillam's crew were mutinous, and half frightened the life out of the young Boston captain by telling him of the magnificent fort the French had on the south river, of the frigates and cannon and the powder magazines.
As a friend he advised young Gillam not to permit his men to approach the French; otherwise they might be attacked by the Quebec soldiers.
Then the crafty Radisson paddled off, smiling to himself; but not so fast, not so easy!
As he drifted down Nelson River, what should he run into full tilt but the Hudson's Bay Company ship itself, bristling with cannon, manned by his old enemy, Captain Gillam!
If the two English parties came together, Radisson was lost.
He must beat them singly before they met; and again putting on a bold face, he marched out, met his former associates, and as a friend advised them not to ascend the river farther.
Fortunately for Radisson, both Gillam and Bridgar, the Hudson's Bay governor, were drinking heavily and glad to take his advice.
The winter passed, with Radisson perpetrating such tricks on his rivals as a player might with the dummy men on a chessboard; but the chessboard, with the English rivals for pawns, was suddenly upset by the unexpected.
Young Gillam discovered that Radisson had no fort at all,--only log cabins with a handful of ragamuffin bushrovers; and Captain Gillam senior got word of young Gillam's presence.
Radisson had to act, act quickly, and on the nail.
Leaving half a dozen men as hostages in young Gillam's fort, Radisson invited the youth to visit the French fort for which the young Boston fellow had expressed such skeptical scorn.
To make a long story short, young Gillam was no sooner out of his own fort than the French hostages took peaceable possession of it, and Gillam was no sooner in Radisson's fort than the French clapped him a prisoner in their guardroom.
Ignorant that the French had captured young Gillam's fort, the Hudson's Bay Company men had marched upstream at dead of night to his {150} rescue.
The English knocked for admittance.
The French guards threw open the gates.
In marched the English traders.
The French clapped the gates to.
The English were now themselves prisoners.
Such a double victory would have been impossible to the French if the Hudson's Bay Company men had not fuddled themselves with drink and allowed their fine ship, the _Prince Rupert_, to be wrecked in the ice drive.
In spring the ice jam wrecked Radisson's vessels, too, so he was compelled to send the most of his prisoners in a sloop down Hudson Bay to Prince Rupert, while he carried the rest with him on young Gillam's ship down to Quebec with an enormous cargo of furs.
By all the laws of navigation Ben Gillam was nothing more or less than pirate.
The monopoly of the Hudson's Bay Company forbade him trading on Hudson Bay.
The license of the Company of the North at Quebec also excluded him.
In later years, indeed, young Gillam turned pirate outright, was captured in connection with Captain Kidd at Boston, and is supposed to have been executed with the famous pirate.
But when Radisson left Nelson in charge of young Chouart and came down to Quebec with young Gillam's ship as prize, a change had taken place at Quebec.
Governor Frontenac had been recalled.
In his place was La Barre, whose favor could be bought by any man who would pay the bribe, and who had already ruined La Salle by permitting creditors to seize Fort Frontenac.
England and France were at peace.
Therefore La Barre gave Gillam's vessel back to him.
The revenue collectors were permitted to seize all the furs which La Chesnaye had not already shipped to France.
Though La Barre was reprimanded by the King for both acts, not a sou did Radisson and Groseillers and Chouart ever receive for their investment; and Radisson was ordered to report at once to the King in France.
