“And now there came both
mist and snow,
And it grew wondrous cold;
And ice mast-high came floating by,
As green as emerald. . . .
The ice was here, the
ice was there,
The ice was all around,
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like voices in a swound.”
S. T. Coleridge,
THE story of the
counties and districts of Ontario is now all but completed as it has
been found possible to tell it in the very limited space available for
each. There remains to be spoken of one district only—the last, but
(very literally) “not the least”—for Patricia— so named in honour of the
popular young princess then resident in Canada—was added to the Province
by Act of the Dominion Parliament only in 1912. In extent it compares
with all the rest of Ontario—Old and “New," as we have been accustomed
to call its northern portion— as 55 or 60 to 100. In fact the area of
the new district is about one and one-fifth times the size of the
British Isles, and being bounded on the east and north by James and
Hudson Bays, it lengthens out Ontario's salt-water shore to 600 miles in
all.
It is true that many
people regard the region as hopelessly frozen and inhospitable to man ;
but the reports of the explorers sent out in connection with the
Geological Survey tell of indications of mineral wealth; of forests
which, though the trees are rarely of very large size, and though some
districts have evidently been burnt over more or less recently, may
furnish large quantities of pulpwood and timber for other uses; of fish
in lakes and rivers and in the vast salt-water bays; of fur bearing
animals, still numerous in spite of the depredations wrought by hunters
and traders for nearly two and a half centuries ; of great navigable
rivers, of water-powers, chiefly inland; and of possibilities (proved by
the cultivation of vegetables in the gardens of many generations of
Hudson’s Bay Company’s factors) not small even in agriculture. It is not
easy for most of us to realise that the new district is by no means
Arctic in its latitudes; but its most northerly and most southerly
points are (roughly) in about the same latitudes as the most northerly
and southerly points of the British Isles. It has been well said,
however, that the agricultural value of the land is “of less immediate
interest,” whilst there still remain “such vast unsettled areas in other
more readily accessible parts of northern Ontario.”
It may well be, indeed,
that the question of comparative accessibility may have to be revised,
when the long-discussed railways are built to Hudson Bay, and that
ancient waterway from the heart of the West to Europe is restored to the
importance it had in the palmy days of the fur trade. The consensus of
opinion of sea-captains who have had experience of the navigation of the
Bay seems to be that for three months of the year at least “Hudson
Strait and Bay afford a safe commercial route to Europe.” It is stated,
moreover, that “in the course of a century and three-quarters (to 1870)
750 vessels, ranging from 70-gun ships to 10-ton pinnaces, crossed the
ocean, passed through the straits, and sailed the bay in the service of
the (Hudson’s Bay) Company. And only two were lost. A marvellous record,
when it is remembered that all the craft were sailors, and most of them
small and of crude construction, and that the bay and strait afforded
none of the modern accessories to navigation in the way of coast aids.”
But not all the
navigators of the Bay were so fortunate as the Company's servants. The
very name reminds one of a tragedy in which indeed the treachery of man
played part as well as the cruelty of the sea. Sailing in 1610 in his
little Discovery to seek the elusive North-West Passage to the East,
Henry Hudson entered the hay which bears his name and wintered on what
was later called James Bay. Curiously enough, Hudson and the navigators
who immediately followed him represented this smaller bay on their
charts as cut in two by a great peninsula running up from the south.
During the winter provisions ran very low, and Hudson had hardly set
forth on his return voyage, when, according to the account of one of the
mutineers, some of the crew conspired against “the master,” whom they
bound and forced with eight other men into a shallop, to shift for
themselves. One man alone, John King, the carpenter, elected to leave
the ship, if he might take with him his chest of tools; and one fancies
that in this he played the hero, for all the rest were sick or disabled.
Fearing lest the doomed men should overtake the ship, as they seem to
have tried to do, the mutineers crowded on all sail, and the last
chapter in Hudson’s story was never known to mortal man.
About six months after
the mutineers reached England (themselves having suffered terrible
things), Hudson’s little Discovery sailed again with a larger consort,
the Resolution, under command of Sir Thomas Button, who was commissioned
to make another search for the “North-West Passage.” He was provided by
King James with a letter to tne Emperor of Japan, and was bitterly
disappointed to iind the western shores of the great bay utterly
impenetrable. At Port Nelson, which he named after his sailing-master,
Button and his company spent a wretched winter, somehow losing the
Resolution, for it was in their smaller vessel that the survivors sailed
for home. Two years later, "the good and luckie ship Discovery" carried
Bylot and Baffin into Hudson Bay, and in 1619 a Danish navigator, Jens
Munk, came with two ships to Port Churchill, but his crews suffered so
terribly that, of sixty-four persons, only himself and two others
survived the winter, and managed, in their smaller vessel, with great
difficulty to reach Norway.
The stretch of coast
recently added to Ontario was almost the last to be explored; but in
1631 two expeditions, commanded respectively by Luke Foxe, of Hull, and
Thomas James, of Bristol, sailed from England within two days of each
other in the Charles (a pinnace of something less than 150 tons, lent to
Foxe by the King) and the Henrietta Maria (of 70 tons, fitted out by
James's fellow-citizens). The two vessels met at the mouth of the Winisk
River off the coast of “Patricia," and the captains dined together, on
August 29, on James’s ship, whose guest and rival seems, however, to
have treated him with scam politeness, holding him to be “no seaman.”
Both sailed on to Cape
Henrietta Maria, so named by James; but from this point Foxe sailed
northwards to the channel now bearing his name, and then home, while
James sailed along the west coast of the bay called after him, to winter
on Charlton Island, where in the spring the adventurers were sorely
tormented by an “infinite abundance of blood-thirsty Muskitoes.” Leaving
his winter quarters on July 3, 1632, James sailed back to Cape Henrietta
Maria and planted a cross, bearing the royal arms and those of the city
of Bristol. It was he who discovered and named the new “Severne,” after
the English river; and it is said that the account of his “strange and
dangerous voyage” suggested to Coleridge his weird, beautiful poem of
“The Ancient Mariner."
Henceforth seekers for
the “North-West Passage" came no more into Hudson Bay; but some
thirty-five years later the ships of the Hudson’s Bay Company began to
frequent it for the sake of the furs collected by the Indians scattered
through the surrounding wilderness. It is still largely an Indian
country, though the red men are probabiy much less numerous than they
were two and a half centuries ago. There are other changes, wrought not
only by the coming of the traders, but also by the self-denying labours
of both Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries. There are now few
pagans amongst them, and, thanks to the wonderfully simple syllabic
alphabet, invented by the Methodist missionary, Rev. James Evans,
“practically all the Indians can read and write.” In fact, “every Indian
camping-place and every point where canoe routes diverge become local
post-offices, where letters written on birch-bark’" are left for the
information of persons coming after. A few of the Indians of Patricia
have built, for use in winter, log-huts “with fireplaces and chimneys of
wattle: and mud," but most still cling to the bark teepees. In the
matter of clothing the present-day Indians are scarcely as well off as
their forefathers, who dressed in the skins of the animals they hunted
or trapped, for they sell everything marketable to the traders, and in
place of furs garb themselves in manufactured cloth, net always of good
quality. There is, however, no sale for rabbit j skins, and these, cut
(spirally) into long strips and sewn together at the ends, are woven and
fashioned into warm, rough blankets and coats.
By 1685 there were five
trading posts on the bay, and in the following year it began to be the
scene of the daring exploits of D’Iberville. In 1694, and again in 1697,
he captured Fort Nelson, which then remained in his countrymen’s hands
till the resignation of all French claims on the Hudson Bay territory by
the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. Afterwards, as York Factory, it was the
headquarters on the bay of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and as such was the
stage for many interesting scenes. But just now the people of Ontario
are thinking rather of the future of this old port than of its past,
for, though not properly within Patricia, it is to be connected
therewith (for the building of a railway) by the “Five-mile Strip”
through the territory of Manitoba. Nor is this all. At the mouth of the
Nelson River an additional space of five miles by hall' a mile will
bring Ontario’s water-frontage up to ten miles, so that the Province may
construct a full equipment of docks, warehouses, and grain-elevators at
this new “Archangel of the West." |