The trade of
the old Company was not brisk; but it paid.
[Illustration: An Eskimo Belle. Note the apron of ermine and sable].
It was the prod of keen French traders that stirred the slumbering
giant. In his search for the Western Sea, De la Verendrye had pushed
west by way of the Great Lakes to the Missouri and the Rocky Mountains
and the Saskatchewan. Henceforth, not so many furs came down-stream to
the English Company on the bay. De la Verendrye had been followed by
hosts of free-lances--_coureurs_ and _voyageurs_--who spread through
the wilderness from the Missouri to the Athabasca, intercepting the
fleets of furs that formerly went to Hudson Bay. The English Company
rubbed its eyes; and rivals at home began to ask what had been done in
return for the charter. France had never ceased seeking the mythical
Western Sea that was supposed to lie just beyond the Mississippi; and
when French buccaneers destroyed the English Company's forts on the
bay, the English ambassador at Paris exacted such an enormous bill of
damages that the Hudson Bay traders were enabled to build a stronger
fortress up at Prince of Wales on the mouth of Churchill River than the
French themselves possessed at Quebec on the St. Lawrence. What--asked
the rivals of the Company in London--had been done in return for such
national protection? France had discovered and explored a whole new
world north of the Missouri. What had the English done? Where did the
Western Sea of which Spain had possession in the South lie towards the
North? What lay between the Hudson Bay and that Western Sea? Was
there a Northwest passage by water through this region to Asia? If
not, was there an undiscovered world in the North, like Louisiana in
the South? There was talk of revoking the charter.
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