Hudson Bay

Hudson Bay, by R.M. Ballantyne

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Title: Hudson Bay
Author: R.M. Ballantyne
Release Date: June 7, 2007 [EBook #21758]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HUDSON
BAY ***

Produced by Nick Hodson of London, England

HUDSON BAY, BY R.M. BALLANTYNE.

PREFACE.
In publishing the present work, the Author rests his hopes of its

favourable reception chiefly upon the fact that its subject is
comparatively new. Although touched upon by other writers in
narratives of Arctic discovery, and in works of general information, the
very nature of those publications prohibited a lengthened or minute
description of that EVERYDAY LIFE whose delineation is the chief
aim of the following pages.

PREFACE TO FOURTH EDITION.
Since this book was written, very considerable changes have taken
place in the affairs and management of the Hudson Bay Company. The
original charter of the Company is now extinct. Red River Settlement
has become a much more important colony than it was, and bids fair to
become still more important--for railway communication will doubtless,
ere long, connect it with Canada on the one hand and the Pacific
seaboard on the other, while the presence of gold in the Saskatchewan
and elsewhere has already made the country much more generally
known than it was when the Author sojourned there. Nevertheless, all
these changes--actual and prospective--have only scratched the skirt of
the vast wilderness occupied by the fur-traders; and as these still
continue their work at the numerous and distant outposts in much the
same style as in days of yore, it has been deemed advisable to reprint
the book almost without alteration, but with a few corrections.
R.M. Ballantyne.
CHAPTER ONE.
APPOINTMENT TO THE SERVICE OF THE HUDSON BAY
COMPANY--THE "PRINCE RUPERT"--THE ANNUAL DINNER
OF THE "H.B.C."--FELLOW-VOYAGERS--THREATENING
WEATHER--A SQUALL--ISLAND OF LEWIS.
Reader,--I take for granted that you are tolerably well acquainted with
the different modes of life and travelling peculiar to European nations. I
also presume that you know something of the inhabitants of the East;

and, it may be, a good deal of the Americans in general. But I
suspect--at least I would fain hope--that you have only a vague and
indefinite knowledge of life in those wild, uncivilised regions of the
northern continent of America that surround the shores of Hudson Bay.
I would fain hope this, I say, that I may have the satisfaction of giving
you information on the subject, and of showing you that there is a body
of civilised men who move, and breathe (pretty cool air, by the way!),
and spend their lives in a quarter of the globe as totally different, in
most respects, from the part you inhabit, as a beaver, roaming among
the ponds and marshes of his native home, is from that sagacious
animal when converted into a fashionable hat.
About the middle of May eighteen hundred and forty-one, I was thrown
into a state of ecstatic joy by the arrival of a letter appointing me to the
enviable situation of apprentice clerk in the service of the Honourable
Hudson Bay Company. To describe the immense extent to which I
expanded, both mentally and bodily, upon the receipt of this letter, is
impossible; it is sufficient to know that from that moment I fancied
myself a complete man of business, and treated my old companions
with the condescending suavity of one who knows that he is talking to
his inferiors.
A few days after, however, my pride was brought very low indeed, as I
lay tossing about in my berth on the tumbling waves of the German
Ocean, eschewing breakfast as a dangerous meal, and looking upon
dinner with a species of horror utterly incomprehensible by those who
have not experienced an attack of sea-sickness. Miseries of this
description, fortunately, do not last long. In a couple of days we got
into the comparatively still water of the Thames; and I, with a host of
pale-faced young ladies and cadaverous-looking young gentlemen,
emerged for the first time from the interior of the ship, to behold the
beauties and wonders of the great metropolis, as we glided slowly up
the crowded river.
Leave-taking is a disagreeable subject either to reflect upon or to write
about, so we will skip that part of the business and proceed at once to
Gravesend, where I stood (having parted from all my friends) on the

deck of the good ship Prince Rupert, contemplating the boats and
crowds of shipping that