certain portion of land, the Company parted with not a few of the factors, trappers, voyageurs, and labourers, that had grown grey in its service. It parted with its millions of acres of territory, some of its isolated posts, and their treasuries of foxskin, marten, mink, musk-rat, and otter. It parted with the traditions and associations of centuries of traffic, and all the pretensions that adhere to absolute power in the hands of an old and wealthy corporation and a long-established monopoly. So scattered and distant were the possessions of the Company that many moons rose and waned ere the news reached the secluded inmates of its lonely stockaded posts that the great trading Company had transferred its interests to the British Government, and from it to the Canadian people. The price of the transfer was a million and a half of dollars.

The cession of the interests of the Hudson Bay Company, in the vast tract of country known as Rupert's Land, set at rest the long vexed question of the right of that corporation to the lordship of the region known as the Hudson Bay Territories. It set at rest, also, not only the validity of the Company's title to the territory, but the equally delicate question of the area over which the Company was supposed to rule. Both questions often disturbed the councils of the Company, and at successive periods were the subjects of contemplated parliamentary enquiry. Not only was it held that the Company, in the course of time, had extended its territorial claims much further than the charter, or any sound construction of it, would warrant, but the charter itself was repeatedly called in question. In the year 1670, when the Company was founded, it seems clear that the English Sovereign, Charles II, had no legal right to the country, for it was then and for long after the possession of France. By the treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye (1632) the English had resigned to the French Crown all interest in Nouvelle France. The Treaty of Ryswick, (1697) moreover, confirmed French right to the country. Hence Charles's gift to his cousin, Prince Rupert, and to those associated with him in the

organisation of the Hudson Bay Company, was gratuitous if not illegal. The subsequent re-transfer of the country to Britain, by the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), may be said, however, to have given the Company a right to its possessions, a right which was practically confirmed by the Conquest, and by the Treaty of Paris, in 1763. But conceding this, there arose the other question, namely, to what extent of territory, by the terms of the original charter, was the Company entitled. The text of the charter conveys only those lands whose waters drain into Hudson Bay, or, more specifically, "all the lands and territories upon the countries, coasts, and confines of the seas, etc., that lie within Hudson Straits." This very materially limited the area of the Company's sway in the North-West, and nullified its claim over the country which drains into the St. Lawrence, into the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Arctic Oceans. The Company, of course, never acknowledged this view of the matter; but had its title been tested in a court of law, its territorial assumptions would have been greatly abridged.

But, as we have said, all these disturbing questions, as to the title and the area of the possessions of the Hudson Bay Company, were settled by the sale and transfer of the territory to the Canadian Dominion. That territory, which included at first only the land bordering on Hudson Bay and Strait, by process, partly of territorial aggrandisement and partly of later trading-license, came to include: (1.) Labrador; (2.) Prince Rupert Land; (3.) The districts of the Red River, Swan River, and the Saskatchewan; (4.) The North-West Territories; and (5.) Mackenzie river, British Columbia and Vancouver. By the expiry of a special charter, the two latter districts, in 1858, reverted to the Crown, and, in 1863, were erected into a British colony. All the other districts, with the reservation of the trading-posts, and one-twentieth of the land, passed in 1869, as we have stated, to the Imperial Government, and, for the compensation named, from it to the Dominion of Canada.

To what national and commercial purposes this great acqui sition has been put by the Dominion Government will be seen from later chapters in the present work. Meantime let us review briefly the more prominent incidents in the history of this great trading corporation, which so long held sway over the country. In 1610, the Bay that bears his name, or, as the French called it, "the great North Sea," was discovered by the ill-fated Henry Hudson, who found himself within its waters in quest of that will-o'-the-wisp of the period, a northwest passage to India. The winter of 1610 Hudson spent at the foot of the inland sea now known as James' Bay. The rigours of the season, and want of food, led his men to mutiny, and to leave him with his son and a small following to the tender mercies of the region, when they betook themselves with a lie in their mouth to England. In 1612 an expedition was fitted out for the relief of Hudson, under the command of Captain, afterwards Sir Thomas, Button; but no trace of the navigator or of his party was ever found.

The next venture westward was that of Champlain, who, in 1615, made his untoward voyage from the St. Lawrence, by way of the Ottawa and Lake Nipissing, to la Mer Douce, the inland sea of the Hurons, and the seat of the Jesuit missions on the Matchedash peninsula. Following upon Champlain's expedition came the organisation of the One Hundred Associates, which had been given its charter, in 1627, by Cardinal Richelieu, prime minister to Louis XIII. The operations of this Company were interrupted by the first English conquest of Canada; hence little was done in prosecuting trade in the West, if we except M. De Caen's enterprises, until the period of M. Montmagny's governorship. Under this Governor, another trading company was established, known as La Compagnie de Montréal, and M. Maisonneuve, a gallant and much-tried Frenchman, was appointed to the charge of its affairs. The calamitous condition of the Colony, owing to wars with the Iroquois, seriously hampered this Company's work;

and we have consequently little record of its operations during the period of its existence, viz., from 1640 to 1663. Three years afterwards, however, two French Huguenots made their way round Lake Superior, ascended the Kaministiquia river, and following the water-way, subsequently known as the Dawson route, reached Winnipeg river and lake, and probed a route for themselves down the Nelson to the sea discovered by Henry Hudson. In process of time they returned to Quebec, and proceeded to France, where they endeavoured to interest capitalists in opening up the fur-bearing regions of Hudson Bay to commerce. But French enterprise was then looking to the East rather than to the West, to the extension of trade in the rich archipelago of the East Indies, rather than to that in the frozen seas of the North. Silks and spices, and the diamonds of the Orient, were more attractive just then to the Gallic sense than the skins of wild beasts. The two French explorers we have referred to were thus foiled in the attempt to enlist French capital in their enterprise. One of the two, M. de Grosseliez, was, however, not to be baulked. He proceeded to England, and there met with the retired student-soldier, Prince Rupert, whose head was filled with many curious schemes of enterprise; and his imagination was readily fired with the story M. de Grosseliez had to tell him.

The result after a time was the formation of the English Hudson Bay Company, and the grant of Charles II. over the region in which the Company intended to operate. In the interval, Hudson Bay had been explored by mariners, who, in 1631, had set out from London and from Bristol, with the still delusive hope of reaching the Pacific and the far-distant Cathay. The London venture was commanded by Captain Fox, and the Bristol expedition by Captain James, the latter giving his name to the Southern inlet of Hudson Bay. Both expeditions were barren of result, save to impress upon the

minds of their commanders the inhospitable character of the region and the terrors of a winter on its coasts.*

A New England captain connected with the Newfoundland trade was the first to sail to Hudson Bay to further the interests of the new-formed Company. Presently, a governor was dispatched to establish and take charge of a fort on the Rupert river, and one on the Nelson. By the year 1686 the Hudson Bay Company had organised five trading-posts round the shores of James and Hudson Bay. These were known as the Albany, the Moose, the Rupert, the Nelson, and the Severn factories. The right to establish these posts was actively combated by the French, who sent contingents from Quebec, by the Ottawa and by Lake Superior, to harass the English in their possession of them. For a number of years a keen conflict was maintained between the two races, and the forts successively changed hands as fortune happened to favour the one or the other. Possession was further varied by the Treaties of Ryswick and Utrecht, previously referred to.

Meanwhile the French were active in the lower waters of the continent; for in 1672 La Salle had discovered the Mississippi, Joliet and Marquette had traced the outline of the Georgian Bay and Lake Superior, and Father Hennepin had seen and made a chart of the Falls of Niagara. Later on M. du Luth and M. de la Verandrye had penetrated into all the bays of Lake Superior, and the latter, in 1732, had constructed a fort on the Lake of the Woods. At the period of the Conquest the French had done far more to discover and open up what is now our North-West than the English. Up to 1763, they had gone even as far west as the Assiniboine and the Saskatchewan. They had established Fort Maurepas on the Winnipeg, Fort Dauphin on Lake Manitoba, Fort Bourbon

*For an account of the earlier voyages to Hudson Bay-those of Wm. Baffin, Sir Martin Frobisher, and Master John Davis, with the voyages of Sebastian Cabot to Newfoundland - see Rundall's Narrative of Voyages towards the North-West, 1496-1631-one of the Hakluyt Society Publications: London, 1849.