Company Of Adventures - Merchant Prince Part 35

In contrast, the 11BC established a long-term commercial relations.h.i.+p with the natives across the territory that would later become Canada. Its traders never shot their customers. It was the Indians (and later the Inuit) who provided the furs swapped for imported goods at the Company stores. The terms of trade were not always fair, but being exploited was not as bad as being shot. In a curious way, it was a form of mutual exploitation because the Indians and Inuit were able to trade near-worthless pelts (they had previously killed animals mainly as food) for axes, guns, blankets, tea kettles and the many other desirable goods that made wilderness life easier.

While it is impossible to generalize about any large group of employees-especially when their tenure stretched over three centuries-the Hudson's Bay Company traders were more saints than sinners. Keeping in mind the fact that they ruled a large slice of the earth's territory for a dozen generations-with virtually no accountability-the Governors, officers and servants cannot be charged with any great burden of shame.

They were mostly good men, some better than others, who led expedient lives in harsh surroundings, and lived to tell the tale.

As well as deference to authority, the most significant strain they injected into the Canadian character was the Presbyterian notion of stressing life's sombre virtues. Mostly Scots, the early Bay men rejected creativity and joy, replacing these qualities with stoicism and the notion that hard work was the Lord's eleventh commandment. In contrast to the exuberant individualism of the American West, the idea was to be plainly dressed and plain spoken, never too free with one's money or emotions.

Until its Canadianization in 1970, perpetuating the HBC as a corporate ent.i.ty often seemed less a means to desirable financial goals (such as shareholder dividends EPILOGUE 581.

or capital reinvestment) than an end in itself That very special onus flowed from its genesis as a royally chartered trading company and the prestige of its early governors-Prince Rupert, the Duke of York, the Duke of Marlborough-and the imposing peers and knights who followed. The influence of these personages, plus the never-denied rumour thatthe Royal Family still owned its stock, marked the Company as an untouchable colonial agency.

Imperial troops and fleets of the Royal Navy were dispatched to defend its flanks; the Bank of England coddled its treasury, lending it credit and the occasional Governor.

Within its North American domain, the HBC became a significant instrument of empire, its explorers probing the West and North, planting across the frontier the necklace of forts that kept the American annexationists at bay, and laying down the commercial matrix for a national economy. "The honoured old initials HBC have been interpreted facetiously as meaning 'Here Before Christ,"' noted W Kaye Lamb, the fur-trade historian; "instead, they might more fittingly be taken as signifying'Here Before Canada.'And if this had not been so, it is unlikely that Canada as we know it today would now exist." The Company acted as a volunteer surrogate of the British Empire, occupying the territories beyond its founding North American colonies until Canada's own aspirations stretched across to the Pacific and up to the .A,rctic oceans.

The writ of the HBC's offbeat mercenary army of fur traders ran across the continent. By canoe, York boat, steams.h.i.+p and Red River cart, on snowshoes and aboard the backs of pack-ponies, they eventually established the viability of a transcontinental state. This was all heady stuff and it was no wonder that the Companys employees felt they were a very special breed, developing an almost canine loyalty to the HBC. It was as if signing on 582 EPILOGUE,.

with the Bay included an unspoken contract that in return for accepting relatively low pay and inadequate working conditions they could enter the faith-become adventurers and merchant princes. An essential element of that belief system required their acceptance of the notion that the Company had to be protected at all costs-human and fiscal-so that it would go on forever. Because the first duty of any faith is to perpetuate itself, that creed paralysed the HBCs policy planners. They took occasional risks, but they never bet the Company. At those moments when an intuitive leap was required to advance the HBC into fresh and potentially lucrative economic jurisdictions, its decision-makers almost always opted for safety and survival.

THERE ARE TWO WAYS TO VIEW the history of the Hudson's Bay Company's first three hundred and twenty years: what it did, and what it might have done.

What it did, as this three-volume study of the Bay doc.u.ments, was to endure and endure comfortably-to survive considerably longer than any of history's many chartered trading companies. Its traders moved across the empire of the Bay like a.s.sault platoons of an inland regiment, ready to defend the faith wherever it might be threatened.

There is nothing wrong with an organization determined to preserve itself; many more daring commercial enterprises have long since vanished from contention. Yet in strictly commercial terms, the Company's marathon was something of a bust. Its dividend record indicates that after an initial fourteen years without paybacks it earned a 50-percent dividend in 1684 and a similar rate four years later. It then took more than two centuries of modest profits averaging well under 10 percent before the 50-percent rate was achieved again, for EPILOGUE 583.

one year, in 1913. Despite its glorious history, the HBC was a spectacular financial underachiever, yet few of the Company's guiding spirits were willing to admit just how mediocre their performance had really been.

One exception was Sir Henry Benson (later Lord Benson), who resigned in a huff as the HBc's Deputy Governor in 1962 to become senior adviser to the Governor of the Bank of England. "I remember giving enormous offence to the Canadians when I said it was extraordinary how little the Company had achieved, bearing in mind that it had bv then been in existence for nearly three hundred years,;' he vividly recalled. "This was taken to be, quite wrongly, a reflection on the then management. I didn't mean that at all. I meant it was surprising that a company in existence for three centuries still only had a.s.sets of whatever they were at the time. This caused enormous offence, but it was true. I don't think that it used its position and its advantages very well for long periods in its history.

Looking back, it still surprises me that it wasn't a much greater trading corporation, operating all over Canada. It was asleep." John Ernest Harley Collins, a former naval captain (DSC and bar) who rose to head Morgan, Grenfell, one of England's leading merchant banks, and spent seventeen years as an HBC director, put the case more succinctly: "We fell into a folie de grandeur, became too conservative, allowed things to humble on, just because it was the HBC. "

Although it owned the world's most valuable land monopoly-a third of the still-to-be-explored northern part of the American continent-the Company spent most of the eighteenth century huddled in a handful of insignificant posts around Hudson Bay, trading a few pelts but doing almost nothing to claim the economic benefits of the great land ma.s.s at its back door. Between 1693 and 1714 it maintained only twenty-seven men on the Bay at a time when free traders from Quebec were 584 EPILOGUE.

ranging far inland in their quest for furs. (By 1688 the coureurs de bois had penetrated past Lake Superior nearly to the present site of Winnipeg.) Joseph Robson, an early HBC surveyor stationed on Hudson Bay, was dead right when he charged that "the Company have for eighty years slept at the edge of a frozen sea." This isolation was no accident. It was such strict corporate policy that when an I IBC trader named John Butler wanted to send his son inland to learn the Indian language, he was ordered to have the boy stay put. The Company didn't establish its first inland trading post until 1774 and in the next four decades was almost wiped out by the rampaging traders of Montreal's North West Company. The Nor'Westers sarcastically praised the Company of Adventurers for providing such a useful "cloak to protect the trade from more active opponents."

Except for the occasional jolt of imagination, the Company operated at its maximum effectiveness mainly during the four-decadc span when Sir George Simpson ran it, from 1821 to 1860. Unlike his predecessors, Simpson expanded its geographical limits and pushed it well beyond furs into trading lumber, cranberries, frozen salmon and even North Pacific icebergs and glaciers. (His crews sawed off chunks of the appropriate size and loaded them aboard a fleet of ]eased s.h.i.+ps for a quick journey to San Francisco, where the ice was sold for refrigerating meat.) Acting with the hauteur of a man in charge of his private universe, Simpson did any danin thing he pleased and in the process temporarily transformed the HBC into a dynamic and imaginative enterprise.

APART FROM ITS PRE0CCUPXrION with survival, the Hudson's Bay Company suffered from three centuries of being run on a part-time basis by well-connected (and well-intentioned) London financiers who didn't know EPILOGUE 585.

the going rate for stamina in the Canadian bush. They were the ultimate absentee landlords. Nothing was more symbolic of their stewards.h.i.+p than the fact that it took 264 years before any Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company-Sir Patrick Ashley Cooper, the twenty-ninth man to hold the office-actually visited Hudson Bay. At nearly every major turning point, the Company's London G.o.dfathers, not quite trusting their colonial appointees in Canada to do the right thing, chose to do as little and as late as possible. With a few enlightened exceptions, the British overlords seemed mainly concerned with not becoming agents of the HBCs demise. They neither granted their Canadian administrators full authority nor exercised it themselves-except at the beginning, when the stakes were too small to matter.

The Hudson's Bay Company was confronted by so many dazzling business opportunities it refused to exploit that it's a miracle it didn't founder out of a sense of corporate shame. Here was a company that dominated the world's fur trade for most of three hundred years yet never made a single fur coat. Here was a company that pioneered Canada's transportation arteries (even the TransCanada Highway runs along the old canoe routes) and for two centuries exercised a transportation monopoly in the West and later in the North, yet when it came time to build a transcontinental railway, opted out of the process. Here was a company that had the only functioning infrastructure in the Prairies and owned seven million acres of prime real estate, much of it along the new railway route, yet did little to capitalize on these invaluable a.s.sets except to sell off the land. Here was a company that established a world-wide market for its "Best Procurable" Scotch, for its high-quality gin and rye, but instead of continuing to distil its popular house brands turned the business over to Seagrams, harvesting no advantage from its good reputation in this high mark-up industry. "The Company could 586 EPILOGUE.

surely have developed more of the country in so many imaginative ways,"

complained IAalter Rose, a former head of both the Fur Sales and Wholesale departments at the HBC. "They had all that land, had been there for two centuries before the European immigrants arrived, and all they ever did was sell the raw acreage and take out dividends."

Even in its modern retailing phase, the Company, having had the money and opportunity to snare most of the desirable shopping-centre sites across western Canada, concentrated instead on the miniature versions of Harrods it had built in provincial capitals, nurturing these masonrv mausoleums even when they seemed as obsolete as trans-Atlantic ocean liners. While other department-store chains were busy constructing the suburban shopping malls that would capture the bulk of the retail business, the I IBC was throwing up grand concrete parking garages next to its downtown retail palaces.

The HBCs most obvious dereliction of opportunity was the failure to capitalize on its potential oil and gas reserves. In the mid-1920s the Company still held mineral rights on 4.5 million acres checkered across the Prairies. Rather than exploit that invaluable a.s.set, described by Fortune as "an oilman's dream," the HBC leased the entire package to Marland Oil of Ponca City, Oklahoma (and its successor, Continental), retaining only a 21 percent interest. By the late 1960s, the joint venture ranked as Canada's third-largest oil and gas producer, with 1,606 wells in production and 11.2 million acres under licence. Its earnings were twice as high as those of the HBC and its equity worth four times as much-even though the Company received less than a quarter of the royalties. "Instead of leasing out all those oil and gas lands," Alexander Maclntosh, Deputy Governor of the HBC, lamented, "we should have held on to them like the CPR."

EPILOGUE 587.

L.F. McCollum, former chairman of Continental Oil and a director of Hudson's Bay Oil & Gas, was more blunt: "They were years of lost opportunity. I felt sorry for the UBC. They had great a.s.sets and did nothing about them. They should have created their own oil company and, if they didn't want to keep it going, spun it off to the stockholders rather than allowing the benefits to flow to somebody else. The Hudson's Bay people used to tell me how proud they ~A ere to be the oldest company in the western hemisphere and I'd tell them, 'So what? What have you (lone?

Continental Oil is only twenty-five years old and our a.s.sets are worth ten times as much as yours, so please don't brag to me."'

FOR MORE THAN THREE HLYNDRF.D YEARS, the IIBC men were content to bask in the comforting faith that the Company of Adventurers was too old, too big and too important ever to disappear. They were right. The Company still exists, even if it has changed more dramatically in the past two decades than in the two previous centuries.

Although it was the 1979 purchase of the Hudson's Bay Company by Ken Thomson that eventually shuffled its components beyond recognition, the fundamental s.h.i.+ft in the Company's character occurred with its transfer to Canada nine years earlier. Before 1970, the HBC had been a very British company, its managing directors in Canada being English (like Philip Chester) or Anglophiles (like d.i.c.k Murray) who expended most of their energies defending their decisions, large and small, to the London board, which was composed of distinguished City men whose common strain was that they refused to think like North Americans. The appointment of Don McGiverin as president and later as governor changed all that. As North American as they 588 EPILOGUE.

come, he launched a dramatic sequence of risky takeovers that created one of the world's great retailing empires whose potential impressed Ken Thomson enough to buy in.

By mid-1991, the H13C had become a business like any other, except for the tug of its memories. Having buried its past and shed its glory, it had become an aggressive and successful retailing colossus, ready to jump into the United States if that seemed an appropriate tactic.

Like Canada, the Hudson's Bay Company has always shuttled between unstoppable momentum and impending collapse-a great might-have-been Company in a great might-have-been country, both facing an unpredictable future.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.

THE ORIGINAL IMPULSE to establish the Hudson's Bay Company in the mid-seventeenth century had come from London, and it was there that the mysterious sources of its astonis.h.i.+ng longevity had to be traced. That involved several journeys to England, where many interviews-some lasting most of a day~altered my preconceived notions of the British business mentality. I understood at last how the Company's huge domain could have been run with such enduring results for three centuries by men who seldom set foot in it.

Wry thoughts came to mind as I made my appointed rounds through the City, London's bustling financial district, meeting the dozen remarkable men who had been the Company's last British overlords. In few former seats of empire is there so much to occupy the eye, the imagination and the memory.

The men who built London's magnificent office structures, and whose descendants still occupy them, brought a touch of civility to the rough-and-tumble world of commerce. Former U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who knew his history, once remarked that he could think of no more delightful period or place in which to have lived than mid-nine- teenth-century England, when the country was run by a small group of highly intelligent and largely disinterested individuals. I know precisely what he meant, even if the merchant adventurers I met were anything but dis- interested. Their involvement with the Hudson's Bay Company had been a magic moment in their successful professional lives.

Interviewing them was no simple task. Steeped in discretion, they pleaded everything except ignorance to

589.

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avoid my questions, and it took several visits before they felt at ease with me and my tape recorder. (One former Governor kept eyeing the machine with suspicion, certain that whatever kind of contraption it was, the thing might explode in his face at any moment.) Though they eventually proved to be far more helpftil and forthcoming than their Canadian counterparts, their initial demeanour was reminiscent of John le Carr6s astute comment that "your extrovert Englishman or woman of the supposedly privileged cla.s.ses ...

can have a Force Fwelve nervous breakdown while he stands next to you in the bus queue, and you may be his best friend, but you'll never be the wiser."

That impression of reticence stayed with me as I visited a Royal Bank of Canada safehouse near Buckingham Palace. The site was so historic that I vaguely wondered what century I had blundered into; then, catching a glimpse of a 747 in a holding pattern above Hyde Park, I stepped inside.

The tight-lipped guests included Lord Adeane, financial adviser to the Queen; Jocelyn Hambro, a leading merchant banker and chairman of the Phoenix a.s.surance Company; Hugh Dwan, Managing Director in London for the HBC; Geoff Styles, in charge of the Royal Bank's British operations; and Lord Tweedsmuir. I had heard rumours that the Royal Family still owned the IIBC stock their ancestors had acquired three hundred years before, so I asked Lord Adeane whether they had a special interest in the Company.

"Yes," was the discreet reply-that, and not another word.*

*When I returned to Canada, I asked Donald McGiverin, the HBC's current Governor, the same question. His reply was slightly more illuminating. "I don't really know," he said, "because no record of royal stockholdings is published. But the last time I saw the Duke of Edinburgh during the Canadian royal tour in 1977, he took me aside and whispered, 'Tell me, how are we doing?"'

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 591.

Lord 'Rveedsmuir, son of John Buchan, first Baron Tweedsmuir of Elsfield and Canada's fifteenth Governor G eneral, turned out to be the most interesting guest of all. He had spent fourteen months as a trader for the Hudson's Bay Company at Cape Dorset on the southwestern tip of Baffin Island. That had been forty-one years earlier, but when he spoke about "our flag" he meant not the Union Jack but the HBCs house pennant. "I am a Scottish adventurer, and we do not change much with the centuries," he told me, recalling that the year at Dorset had been the happiest of his life, that the Company was a great link of empire, and that the Scots were its perfect servants.

THE HOUSE OF LORDS-repository for many former HBC characters-is a geriatric paradise, a venue out of time and place, with elderly dukes, earls, countesses, barons and bishops sitting about looking at one another, whispering in mildewed tones of past triumphs, terrified of dying with empty appointment books. Their inflexible graces are still in place but they look as if they would get winded playing chess. In a nearby lounge, I spotted Lord Home, Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, former Prime Ministers all, who looked like Tussaud replicas of themselves. ("In his dotage, sorry to say. Makes no sense at all," somebody breathed, pointing at Wilson, nodding in a corner with a fixed smile on his face.) My host was the fourth Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal, a great-grandson of the Labrador fur trader who had been a.s.sociated for seventy-five years with the Company, twenty-five of them as its Governor. The current Strathcona turned out to be a tall, vital and charming gentleman with a great white beard and hair growing all over him, sprouting out of his s.h.i.+rt cuffs and collar. "I'll risk the beef," he said, as we settled into the 592 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.

Peers' Dining Room, a setting straight out of an Alexander Korda extravaganza, with silver serving dishes and waiters who look as if they had been carved out of Pears soap. A graduate in engineering from McGill University and a former minister of state for defence in Margaret Thatcher's cabinet, he lived on one of his ancestor's many estates, on the Isle of Colonsay in the Inner Hebrides. He finally cleared up the mystery of what happened to the CPR's original last spike and produced some fascinating new evidence about his great-grandfather's relations with the HBC.

IN THE CORNER OF THE LORDS'TEA-ROOM sat Viscount Amory, who was first appointed to cabinet by Winston Churchill, had served as Chancellor of the Exchequer under Harold Macmillan, and was the last British Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company (1965-70). Derick Heathcoat Amory resembled a mellow and very wise owl. But his eyes were alive with that special look of absorbed experience that only a man with a million miles on his meter can convey. We chatted away the afternoon, looking at the barges heading along the Thames towards Ratcliffe Wharf, where HBC supply s.h.i.+ps had once been loaded for their ocean crossings. He was intrigued by my tape recorder ("Isn't that amazing-all in that little black box!") and spoke with barely concealed puzzlement about Lord Thomson, the Canadian billionaire who had acquired control of the HBC following his tenure. "I was amazed he put so many eggs in one basket," he said, "but he is a man of honour, and the last time I met him he became quite sentimental about the Company. He told me at dinner, almost with tears in his eyes, 'Derick, you may think of me as a hard-faced Canadian financier who wants to see what he can get out of this Company. If ever you catch ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 593.

me at that game, let me know. You will never find me doing that!"'

My final visit m as to Beaver House, the 11Bc's London headquarters, and lunch at the Strathcona Restaurant on Garlick Hill with Arthur Frayling.

Then head of the HBC's fur auction house-the world's largest-he had spent fifty-eight years with the Company yet could still muster the enthusiasm of a boy on the first day of summer camp. MunchingTrout Cleopatra, he described his obsession with the Bay. "It's nota job, it's a calling,"

said he. "To be a Bay man has always caused me to feet that one is working for a Company with a fairly big foot in history. Where is the value commercially in such a feeling? There is none. But I always felt, as did most oldtime Hudson's Bay employees, that I was contributing to something a little outside the ordinary commercial run. I can't really put it into words, because I can't see too much sense in it. But thats the way I feel."

THAT'S THE WAY I FEEL too, and it was while touring Canada's Axctic-between my British visits-that I came closest to touching the Company's spirit. The HBC then operated astring of 173 stores and fur-trading posts in Canada's Arctic. In a series of airborne sweeps , into Baffin Island, up to Resolute and around the great arcs ofJames and Hudson bays, I interviewed many of these Bay men and their aboriginal clients, the Injians and Inuit who people this volume.

The time-worn faces of these fur-trade veterans, durable mercenaries out of Scotland, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, were permanently feathered from liletimes spent outdoors. Even if the real glory days were long gone, it still meant something to work for the Company in Canada's North. Managemerit's cloying paternalism, poor pay and the frustration 594ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.

of being a cog in the machinery of an often comatose bureaucracy were tempered by the idea of being part of a tradition as grand as the Royal Navy's.

Canada's North is a state of mind, having more to do with att.i.tude than with lat.i.tude. Even official definitions of the Arctic differ, some restricted to territory above the Arctic Circle, an arbitrary line at 66.320 north, while others place its limits somewhere beyond the tree-line, a boundary that dips 870 miles below the Arctic Circle at James Bay and rises 220 miles above it at Horton River. The outrageous dimensions of Arctic geography~13 million square miles, spread over five time zones- dwarfed yetenchanted die Baymen. The best of them saw it as an empty land filled with wonders, even if they recognized that it offered only a temporary truce with their presence. Others regarded their surroundings as a prison where cold and wind erased the hope of meaningful human endeavour.

But most of the HBC field hands, at least those who stayed, viewed the North as a place with its own natural laws, where they could get to know their true feelings on a first-name basis. "h.e.l.l," I was told by James Deyell, then head of the HBCs Ungava District, who had arrived in 1965 from the Shetlands, "I was born the equivalent of three hundred miles north of here. I came right out of grammar school at seventeen because the only other choice I bad at home was joining the merchant navy or living off my father. I was getting $2,500 a year, which I thought was marvellous-an unheard-of salary in the Shetlands for a trainee. Since I arrived here, I've never had time for an ident.i.ty crisis. When you're surrounded by silence, you find out in a hurry who you are. Once the life grabs you, it's permanent and it never lets you go. Certainly working for the Bay is more than just a job-, for some reason, you perform above your imagined capacity. At the end of the day, you can certify that you were there, that you made a difference."

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 595.

The Canadian Arctic has oniv two seasons, winter and August, its weather varying from clear, sparkling heat waves to white-outs that reduce visibility to the inside of a dwelling and the human comfort zone to the immediate circ.u.mference of its stove. The cold is unimaginable. One HBC trader described how he and his companion managed to survive a typical winter in their Company house: "The weather grew colder and colder and, atjim's suggestion, I moved from my room upstairs down to the kitchen, where I slept on top of the table. Then came the day when even Jim was forced to leave his bedroom to sleep with me in the kitchen. Then the living room, and finally the office, became uninhabitable. . . . If I had to go only to the store I would dress as though I was going on a hunting trip." Another HBC Factor, WO. Douglas at Baker Lake, loved eggs and imported a few chickens every summer. In winter, lie not only had to bring them indoors but ended up knitting little duffel coats for them.

The resident Bay traders lived and worked in a strange world. In summer, the northern sun never sets; then for eight months it seldom rises. For two-thirds of each winter the moon remains below the horizon. During those gloomy intervals, the main natural light source is the s.h.i.+mmering Aurora Borealis, hanging over the polar horizon like a spangled theatre curtain.

Winter temperatures drop below -550F, causing steel to snap like celery stalks, tires to become as brittle as gla.s.s and to detonate. Human senses are stretched to their outer limits as the moisture in the atmosphere freezes, breaking down into countless ice particles that attack exposed skin. Ptarmigans make the sound of tearing silk as they painfully propel themselves through the fTigid atmosphere.

NORWAYHOUSE, NEAR THE TOP of Lake Winnipeg, was the inland rallying point for the I IBCs canoe brigades on their way to tidewater at York Factory on Hudson Bay.

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The Company's Northern Council met here intermittently between 1821 and 1860, and the ghost of Sir George Simpson still haunts the place. It was here, too, in 1875, that Treaty Number Five was negotiated by which the Saulteauxand Swampy Cree ceded to Canada their possessory rights over the surrounding hundred thousand square miles, one of the worst deals the Indians ever made. While on one of my northern probes, I met Adam d.i.c.k, Chief of the War Lake Indian Band, born in a tepee seven miles northwest of Split Lake in 1897, then living at Norway House. He had started trapping beaver and snaring rabbits at the age of eight. "My dad made me a bow and arrow and snowshoes, and my mum made me a bag," he recalled.

"When I began hunting by myself, I caught one rabbit and four prairie chickens. Later, I worked twenty-three years for the Hudson's Bay as a cribber, freighting supplies by dog team or canoe to twelve trappers'

camps. They paid me sixty-five dollars a month. I never got a raise and never got a pension. I brought them lots of furs but I didn't get anything from them." The chief, who was eighty-seven when I saw him and had yet to acquire his first grey hair, had only one kind thought about the Company.

"There was never any room in the sled for me because they piled all the s.p.a.ce up with supplies. So I had to run behind it ... I guess that's why I'm so healthy." Before leaving Norway House, I asked how nearby Bull Island got its name. I wish I hadn't. When a bull gored a local Bay man named Isbister, the animal was smeared with tar, taken by boat to the small rocky outcrop, and set on fire. n.o.body ever goes to Bull Island now.

At Fort Severn, I spent a long afternoon with Mana.s.seh Munzie Albany, aged ninety-seven, a hunter and s.h.i.+p's pilot who used to lug seven bags of mail to York Factory and back every winter, and his friends Reverend Jeremiah Albany and Abel Bluecoat. They told me about ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 597.

life at Fort Severn: gasoline costs $6 a gallon, there is no electricity, and it's $9 for a four-litre can of naphtha that lights a cabin for three nights. Nearly everybody is on welfare, barely getting by. Only 270 people live at Severn, but the Bay store's annual sales top $350,000, with average niark-ups of 40 percent. Not so long ago a ninety-foot freighter loaded with eighty tons of foodstuffs for the Bay, operated by an Inuk named Lewis Voisey, ran aground nearby, and the weather turned so nasty the s.h.i.+p had to be abandoned for the winter. Next spring, when she was refloated, not a single item of the vessel's cargo was missing except six cans of pop, con- sumed by the captain while cleaning out the bilge. He paid the HBC for the six-pack.

Rupert House, where I spent a fascinating two days, is the oldest of the Bay settlements, built in 1668 by M6dard Chouart, Sleur Des Groseilliers, who led the first trading expedition into the Bay. There is palpable tension here between the HBC' and its captive customers. The Cree measure their feelings for the Company by the price it pays for muskrat and beaver skins. "Why do they need to make me pay back my lousy $25 credit, when they arrive here in a $2-million plane?" is a common complaint. (Twenty whites and a thousand Cree live here, and there's enough traffic to fill a DC-3 four times a week.), A local Indian named Isaiah Salt, who spent forty years working for the LIBC, told me the most he ever made was $25 a month.