Beckles Willson

Effect of the Restoration on Trade—Adventurers at Whitehall—The East India Company Monopoly—English interest in North America—Prince Rupert's claims—The Fur Trade of Canada—Aim of the Work.

That page in the nation's history which records the years immediately following the Restoration of the Stewarts to the English throne, has often been regarded as sinister and inauspicious. Crushed and broken by the long strain of civil war, apparently bankrupt in letters, commerce and arms, above all, sick of the restraints imposed upon them by the Roundheads, the nation has too often been represented as abandoning itself wholly to the pursuit of pleasure, while folly and license reigned supreme at court. The almost startling rapidity with which England recovered her pride of place in the commercial world has been too little dwelt upon. Hardly had Charles the Second settled down to enjoy his heritage when the spirit of mercantile activity began to make itself felt once more. The arts of trade and commerce, of discovery and colonization, which had languished under the Puritan ascendancy, revived; the fever of "Imperial Expansion" burst out with an ardour which no probability of failure was able to cool; and the court of the "Merry Monarch" speedily swarmed with adventurers, eager to win his favour for the advancement of schemes to which the chiefs of the Commonwealth would have turned but a deaf ear.

Of just claimants to the royal bounty, in the persons of ruined cavaliers and their children, there was no lack. With these there also mingled, in the throng which daily beset the throne with petitions for grants, charters, patents and monopolies,—returned free-booters, buccaneers in embryo, upstarts and company-promoters. Every London tavern and coffee-house resounded with projects for conquest, trade, or the exploitation of remote regions.

From the news-letters and diaries of the period, and from the minutes of the Council of Trade and the Royal Society, one may form an excellent notion of the risks which zealous capital ran during this memorable decade.

For two centuries and more mercantile speculation had been busy with the far East. There, it was believed, in the realms of Cathay and Hindustan, lay England's supreme market. A large number of the marine expeditions of the sixteenth century were associated with an enterprise in which the English nation, of all the nations in Europe, had long borne, and long continued to bear, the chief part. From the time of Cabot's discovery of the mainland in 1498, our mariners had dared more and ventured oftener in quest of that passage through the ice and barren lands of the New World which should conduct them to the sunny and opulent countries of the East.

English right to Hudson's Bay.

The mercantile revival came; it found the Orient robbed of none of its charm, but monopoly had laid its hand on East India. For over half a century the East India Company had enjoyed the exclusive right of trading in the Pacific between the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn, and the merchants of London therefore were forced to cast about for other fields of possible wealth. As far as North America was concerned, the merest reference to a map of this period will reveal the very hazy conception which then prevailed as to this vast territory. Few courtiers, as yet, either at Whitehall or Versailles, had begun to concern themselves with nice questions of frontier, or the precise delimitation of boundaries in parts of the continent which were as yet unoccupied, still less in those hyperborean regions described by the mariners Frobisher, Button and Fox. To these voyagers, themselves, the northern half of the continent was merely a huge barrier to the accomplishment of their designs.

EARLY MAP OF NORTH AMERICA.

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Yet in spite of this destructive creed, it had long been a cardinal belief in the nation that the English crown had by virtue of Cabot's, and of subsequent discoveries, a right to such territories, even though such right had never been actively affirmed.[1]

In the year 1664 the King granted the territory now comprised in the States of New York, New Jersey and Delaware to his brother, the Duke of York, and the courtiers became curious to know what similar mark of favour would be bestowed upon his Majesty's yet unrewarded cousin, Prince Rupert, Duke of Cumberland and Count Palatine of the Rhine.[2]

The Duke of York succeeded in wresting his new Transatlantic possession from the Dutch, and the fur-trade of New Amsterdam fell into English hands. Soon afterwards the first cargo of furs from that region arrived in the Thames.

Naturally, it was not long before some of the keener-sighted London merchants began to see behind this transaction vast possibilities of future wealth. The extent of the fur-trade driven in Canada by the French was no secret.[3] Twice annually, for many years, had vessels anchored at Havre, laden with the skins of fox, marten and beaver, collected and shipped by the Company of the Hundred Associates or their successors in the Quebec monopoly. A feeling was current that England ought by right to have a larger share in this promising traffic, but, it was remarked, "it is not well seen by those cognizant of the extent of the new plantations how this is to be obtained, unless we dislodge the French as we have the Dutch, which his present Majesty would never countenance."

Charles had little reason to be envious of the possession by his neighbour Lewis, of the country known as New France.

French fur-trade.

Those tragic and melancholy narratives, the "Relations des Jesuites," had found their way to the English Court. From these it would seem that the terrors of cold, hunger, hardships, and Indian hostility, added to the cost and difficulties of civil government, and the chronic prevalence of official intrigue, were hardly compensated for by the glories of French ascendancy in Canada. The leading spirits of the fur-trade then being prosecuted in the northern wilds, were well aware that they derived their profits from but an infinitesimal portion of the fur-trading territory; the advantages of extension and development were perfectly apparent to them; but the difficulties involved in dealing with the savage tribes, and the dangers attending the establishment of further connections with the remote interior, conspired to make them content with the results attained by the methods then in vogue. The security from rivalry which was guaranteed to them by their monopoly did not fail to increase their aversion to a more active policy. Any efforts, therefore, which were made to extend the French Company's operations were made by Jesuit missionaries, or by individual traders acting without authority.

Such, in brief, was the state of affairs in the year 1666 when two intrepid bushrangers, employees of the old Company,[4] dissatisfied with their prospects under the new rÉgime, sought their way out from the depths of the wilderness to Quebec, and there propounded to the Intendant, Jean Talon, a scheme for the extension of the fur-trade to the shores of Hudson's Bay. This enterprising pair saw their project rejected, and as a sequel to this rejection came the inception and establishment of an English association,[5] which subsequently obtained a charter from the King, under the name and title of "The Governor and Company of Merchants-Adventurers trading into Hudson's Bay."

To narrate the causes which first led to the formation of this Company, the contemporary interest it excited, the thrilling adventures of its early servants, of the wars it waged with the French and drove so valiantly to a victorious end; its vicissitudes and gradual growth; the fierce and bloody rivalries it combated and eventually overbore; its notable expeditions of research by land and sea; the character of the vast country it ruled and the Indians inhabiting it; and last but not least, the stirring and romantic experiences contained in the letters and journals of the Great Company's factors and traders for a period of above two centuries—such will be the aim and purpose of this work.