The White and the Gold (52 page)

The King was sufficiently impressed to order that for the balance of the year, by which time he expected to have definite plans made for the conquest of the North, the sum of forty shillings a week was to be given the two Frenchmen.

The next important step was their introduction to Prince Rupert at Windsor. This was done on the King’s instructions. Charles was anxious to relieve his famous cousin of the financial worries which beset him and saw in the fur trade the chance he had been seeking. Prince Rupert needs no introduction: the brave and headlong commander of cavalry who led the royal horse for his uncle, Charles I, in the battles of the civil war. He was without a doubt an able and dangerous fighting man, although he seems to have been continuously on the losing side; beaten by that much abler soldier, Oliver Cromwell, and later as an admiral engaged in some hard-fought but not too successful naval battles with the Dutch fleets. A son of Elizabeth, the beautiful granddaughter of Mary Queen of Scots who lost a German throne in the Thirty Years’ War, Rupert bore
her a close resemblance: his stern features beautifully chiseled, his skin ivory, his eyes brown and passionately warm. He was living now at Windsor Castle and had turned his apartments into workrooms where he tinkered with inventions and developed his gift for making mezzotints.

King Charles felt very sorry for this cousin who was so poor that he had to remain a bachelor, although the Merry Monarch knew what all England had heard, that Rupert maintained a fine house in London for a gay and pretty actress named Peg Hughes, a great friend of Nell Gwyn. He felt that the Hudson’s Bay adventure offered the best method of providing his exiled cousin with an income apart from the royal funds.

Rupert, abrupt in manner, sardonic in speech, somewhat lacking in sense of humor, listened to the tales of Radisson and shared his royal cousin’s reaction to the skill of that articulate tongue. Radisson and Groseilliers (the English found the latter name a difficult mouthful and even allowed it to get into one official record as “Mister Gooseberry”) were kept at Windsor for the better part of a year while the plans matured. King Charles paid visits to his royal castle, where he played tennis with Rupert and went for long walks with him, surrounded by a screen of dogs; and sometimes he saw the two adventurers, who were now pensioned at an indeterminate figure running from two to four pounds a month. The royal interest in the plan did not lessen, but there were delays because the continuance of the war with the Dutch made sea ventures unsafe.

The two promoters were fortunate that Prince Rupert had as his secretary a very shrewd and farsighted man named James Hayes. The latter took fire almost immediately over the plans of the Frenchmen, and it may have been that his enthusiasm was transmitted to the more conservative Rupert. At any rate, Hayes became the strongest supporter of the plan and was allowed a prominent part in the affairs of the company which was formed finally. He it was who pried out of the strongbox the sum of five pounds which paid for the publishing of Radisson’s book. It was a just thing that Hayes acted as second-in-command to Rupert for the first ten years of the life of the company.

The first exploratory venture was in the nature of a test. King Charles ordered his brother, the Duke of York, who would later succeed him on the throne as James II, to loan the
Eaglet
of the South Seas fleet for the purpose. It was a small vessel, forty feet
by sixteen, with a war complement of thirty-five men. This was put under the command of a Captain Stannard. A second ship called the
Nonsuch
was put into service in addition, a vessel of much the same size, which was assigned to the same Captain Zachariah Gillam who had tried once before. A start was made for the West on June 3, 1888, after the investors had tested the contents of some of Gillam’s best bottles of Madeira wine.

Radisson was on the
Eaglet
, which was unlucky for him. The ship was disabled early and had to put back to Plymouth. The
Nonsuch
with Groseilliers on board reached the northern waters and penetrated as far south as James Bay at the southern end of Hudson’s Bay. Here, at the mouth of a river which they named after Prince Rupert, a small fort was raised and the business of trading with the natives began. On the advice of the Frenchmen, the cargo included all the right articles for barter. Half a pound of beads or five pounds of sugar were given for one beaver skin, twenty fishhooks for five skins, a gun for twenty. As the result of a year’s trading the
Nonsuch
returned with a cargo valued at nineteen thousand pounds, which was ample to meet all expenses and leave a margin of profit to be divided among those who had contributed the funds. The result, certainly, was good enough to convince everyone that there was money to be made in the bay.

On May 2, 1870, the famous charter of “the Governor and Company of Adventurers of England, Trading into Hudson’s Bay” was introduced and signed. And thus one of the most profitable and fascinating ventures in the whole history of business the world over was begun.

This historic charter was a document of five sheets, written in curiously involved sentences, and giving the Adventurers practically the whole of the North and the waters and seas thereabouts. There were eighteen men listed as members, including the Duke of York, Prince Rupert, Carteret, Colleton, Sir James Hayes, Sir John Kirke (whose daughter Mary became Mrs. Radisson shortly thereafter), an assorted lot of peers, the Duke of Albemarle, the Earl of Craven, Lord Arlington and Lord Ashley, and a number of plain baronets and knights. John Portman, listed as citizen and goldsmith, was made the treasurer.

What of Radisson and Groseilliers? They were not mentioned, although it was understood they were to continue on some kind of dole, and the King himself gave each of them “a gold chain and
meddall.” They were treated throughout in such a cavalier manner, in fact, that ultimately they went back to the allegiance of their birth, as will be told later.

The company was handled in a casual way for a time. The members met at unstated intervals at any one of three places, the White Tower in the Tower of London, at Whitehall, which the King used as a town residence, or at the Jerusalem Coffee House. The financing seems to have been quite hit-and-miss at the start. Several of the original Adventurers did not put in money for the shares they held. The company made profits almost from the start and very shortly paid dividends as high as 50 per cent. The sales they held were colorful and exciting events, and the buyers who came to them were treated much better than the two men who had made all this possible. On one occasion Sir James Hayes purchased three dozen bottles of sack and three dozen of claret to be used in slaking the thirst, and perhaps unloosening the purse strings, of the buyers who attended one auction.

Rupert continued to experiment with his inventions and worked on his mezzotints, taking little interest in the company. His visits to London were infrequent and were mostly to see Peg Hughes. On one occasion, however, several years after the charter had been engrossed and signed and the posts on Hudson’s Bay had begun doing a thumping fine trade with the northern Indians, he wandered into one of the auctions. They were not using the candle method of auctioneering by which the last bid heard before the light on a mere thumb-point of tallow went out was declared the winner. This was a highly exciting method and led to a pandemonium of bids as the light guttered low. The sale, however, was brisk enough, and staccato offers filled the room as three thousand pelts were disposed of at good round prices. The prince, being still as straight of back as ever, looked as though he would have been more at ease on horseback. He did not seem to understand just what was going on. He listened courteously but without comment, bowed to his associates and gave a stiff inclination of his head to some of the eager, clamoring buyers, and walked out. It was clear that he was unconscious of the fact, and quite indifferent to it, that what he had been witnessing would put many hundred sound, jingling guineas into his own pockets.

He went away without any thought that in years to come the Adventurers would be known as the Lords of the North, with an
empire of their own and the best-managed and -controlled string of trading posts the world had perhaps ever seen, and that for centuries thereafter money would jingle in lordly amounts in lordly pockets because of the unprecedented success this company, of which he was the head, would enjoy. Certainly he had no appreciation of the fact that the two down-at-heels Frenchmen, who may also have been present and watching with the resentful reflection that at least some of these lordly guineas should be going into their pockets, had been responsible for creating all this welcome prosperity.

T
HERE can be no doubt that Radisson and Groseilliers were an unscrupulous pair, but their side of the much-vexed question which developed is not hard to see. Knowing the value of their services to the English, they believed they were entitled to a fair share of the profits they were making for other men; for men who stayed comfortably at home and toasted their fat shins in front of warm fires and avidly drank their claret to the toast of bigger dividends. “We were Caesars,” wrote Radisson the Irrepressible. Like Caesar, they were conquerors. But grasping hands in high places were taking the rewards from them.

The French habit of impoverishing them with fines because they were so successful drove them to England and to the formation of the Hudson’s Bay Company. The suspicions and the social contempt of the English drove them again to the French service. They shuttled back and forth until the story becomes too complicated to follow in detail. Yes, they were unscrupulous, crafty, and glib. Their heads were filled with schemes, and so the men they dealt with had to be wary. But the French officials were as blind as bats, seeing these brave and somewhat mad adventurers as nothing but disobedient servants of the Crown. The English looked down their noses at these “renegades” and refused to give them any share in the company, fobbing them off with small and reluctant doles. In view of the bureaucratic stubbornness of the French and the cheese-paring of the English, there is some excuse for the pendulum-like course of these disgruntled pioneers.

The issue has been fought over so vehemently down the years that no clear pattern of the story emerges. One thing only is certain, that the blame must be divided. The censure of history cannot be withheld from any of the parties concerned.

Hudson’s Bay was a prize worth struggling for; Versailles knew this now as well as London. The Adventurers had been sending ships to the bay every year, and those which came back (the percentage of loss by shipwreck was heavy) carried wonderful cargoes. Although the system of having a governor on the ground had been started, the first being a certain Mr. Charles Bayly, the direction of trading and the matter of policy were still in the hands of these two superlative pioneers, or the two bold knaves, according to one’s reading of what happened.

In 1672, just before the Comte de Frontenac arrived in Quebec to become governor of New France, a disquieting state of affairs developed. The number of Indians bringing in their furs to Fort Charles on the Rupert River and the posts which had been established on the western side of the bay began to fall off. Radisson made an uneasy survey of the western shore where the Moose and the Severn and the Nelson emptied their waters into the bay, and on his return found a Jesuit priest, Charles Albanel, at Fort Charles. Father Albanel, a native of Auvergne, was one of the boldest of priestly explorers and had been sent to the North by Talon to claim the land for France. Coming overland by the Saguenay route, he had arrived some time before and had sat himself down to wait. He presented his credentials to Charles Bayly in the form of passports. At the same time he turned over some letters he had been carrying for Radisson and Groseilliers.