Company Of Adventures - Merchant Prince Part 17

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them look like pregnant mountain goats. "Growing numbers of fur buyers and traders, many of whom were Americans, were drawn into the Canadian north seeking new sources of supply," noted Arthur Ray, a University of British Columbia historian who specializes in the fur trade. Canada's northern edges-though not yet the Arctic-were being opened up through the Klondike gold rush and construction of railways towards Port Nelson on Hudson Bay and into the Peace River country. Traders and merchants poured into the Mackenzie River Valley and Great Slave Lake territory KILLING THE COMPEt.i.tION 281.

so fast that the hamlet of Fort Resolution eventually boasted six retail stores, and Fort Chipewyan on Lake Athabasca counted more than a dozen fur-trading posts cl.u.s.tered around the HBCs historic fort. Because these newcomers enjoyed much lower overheads and were not subject to decisions made by boards of directors on the other side of the world, they cut deeply into the HBCs established business. At the same time, consignment and mail-order houses appeared in Canada for the first time, buying and selling furs on commission, allowing compet.i.tors quick and simple entry into the trade.*

Occasionally, the IFIBC deliberately-and deviouslycompeted with itself John Montague of North West River in Labrador recalled, witha touch of humour and an exaggerated accent, how he had once been fooled into selling to an "Independent," with unexpected results: "I remember one time for sure when I had quite a little bit of fur and there was this feller come from Cartwright. Martin he was, Jim or Frank, I fergits now.

I thought this feller was a fur buyer, not from H13C at all. I took my fur to HBC and they priced it. I took my fur to Martin and he didn't offer me quite as much, but I sold it to 'en anyway because I wanted to encourage hirn to come back. After he was gone I found out he was buyin'

fer HBC. That was wonderful funny." But more often, the compet.i.tion was real, and it nearly drove the Company's fur business to the wall.

*The impact of th(se innovations forced the FIBC in 1920 to abandon its 2 50-year-old policy of auctioning only its own furs and to begin moving consignment pelts as well. Compet.i.tors opened alternative auction houses in London (C.Al. Larripson & Company and k.W Nesbitt), New York (New York Fur Auction Sales Company), St Louis (international Fur Exchange), IA'mmpcg(FurAuctIonSaies Company), Vancouver (Little Brothers), Montreal (Canadian Fur Auction Sales Comp~uiy) and Leipzig ((;. Gaudig,", Blurn).

282 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

First to follow the 11BC into the Mackenzie district was Hislop and Nagle, which eventually opened twentvfour posts between Athabasca L,anding and Arctic Red River, built three steams.h.i.+ps, and even had its own sawmill and engineering shop. James Hislop, a niathematician and civil engineer from Pictou, Nova Scotia, had gone West as a surveyor on the Pembina Branch of the CPR and later move~ to Edmonton. His partner, Edniund Barry Nagle, was a millwright who had served with the St Hyacinthe Infantr~ Company during the Fenian raids and had taken part in :46tis buffalo hunts out of Fort Garry before joining Hislop in Edmonton. "They were considered outlaws at the time, because the Hudson's Bay Company behaved as if it still had a monopoly," notedJordan Zinovich, who studied the history of the enterprise.

"When Mrs. Nagle arrived at Fort Resolution, the 11BC Factors and their wives would not talk to her. She was so socially ostracized that she had to bring in a 'professional friend' from the Outside." After harvesting fur worth $200,000, Hislop and Nagle in 1913 sold out to the Northern Trading Company of Edmonton, which eventually manned thirty-two small posts, obtaining financial sponsors.h.i.+p from London's A.W. Nesbitt and temporarily diminis.h.i.+ng the HBC trade. When Nesbitt went bankrupt in 1919, Northern was pushed into receiN ers.h.i.+p. A group of Winnipeg auctioneers led bv Max Finkelstein and fronted by Colonel J.K. Cornwail (the celebrated Alberta entrepreneur known as Peace Riverjim) obtained control and moved its headquarters to Fort Smith, but it never fully recovered and went bankrupt in 193 1; the HBC picked up its remaining a.s.sets.

Lamson and Hubbard Corporation, Bostons leading fur dealers, arrived in C anada right after the First World War, erecting a dozen outlets on the Mackenzie and two short-lived Arctic posts at Chesterfield Inlet and Baker KILLING THE COMPEt.i.tION 283.

Lamson and Hubbard employee R. D. Ferrier guarding winter suppliesfor Little Red River post

Lake. The firm moved in like an invading army, or rather navy, launching an impressive sternwheeler (the SS Distributor) that shuttled between Fort Smith and Fort McPherson, two other steamers, a pair of large gas boats, several gas-powered tugs and a fleet of fifty twenty-ton scows. Within six years its heavy overhead sank the firm, with the HBC yet again absorbing the pieces. Several smaller trading outfits tried to buck the Company, but none succeeded. The most tragic attempt was that of a group of retired British naval officers who incorporated the Sabellum Trading Company in 1911 and for the next dozen years dispatched trading vessels to Baffin Island. One of their s.h.i.+ps, the Erme, was blown up by a German submarine; another, the Vera, a forty four-year-old wooden Cowes-built racing yacht, proved comically unsuitable for Arctic voyages. Sabellum managed to land only one representative on Baffin, an elderly stone-deaf gunnery officer named Hector 284 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

Pitchforth, who starved to death in his ten-by-fifteenfoot shack at Cape Kater on the isolated Brodeur Peninsula during the cruel winter of 1927.

The following year Sabellum sold its few belongings to the IIBC.*

THEONLY SERIOUS LONGTERM RfVAL faced by the HBC in the North was Revillon Fr&res of Paris. Like that of the Nor'Westers who had challenged the Company's hegeniony a century earlier, Revillon's a.s.sault lasted for most of four decades and was led by far more enterprising spirits than the bureaucratic duffers who inhabited the 1113C'S middle management. Exactly like the Nor'Westers, Revillon ultimately failed because it expanded too fast, and its backers-unlike the Hudson's Bay Company, which had put aside adequate financial reserves and enjoyed access to guarantees from the Bank of England-were unable to withstand long periods of financial drought. A successor firm to the veteran (172 3) French furrier Franqols Givelet, Louis Victor Revillon's company had revolutionized the industry. It broadened the market by selling fur coats through drygoods shops. Instead of purchasing all its pelts from wholesalers, it established its own trading outlets to obtain the raw product from Russian and Canadian trappers. At the turn of the century, Revillon purchased a string of Mackenzie River posts from Colonel Cornwall, and also established half a dozen stores on the north sh.o.r.e of the St Lawrence and up the Labrador coast.

*Another inglorious venture backed by British interests was the Arctic Gold Exploration Syndicate, inaugurated by Captain Henry Toke Munn, forinerly of Pond Inlet. Munn persuaded Lord Lascelles and othei s to back him in seeking gold on Baffin Island, mainly by showing thern art photographs he had taken of soine "naked Inuit girls reflected in pools."

KILLING THE COMPEt.i.tION 285.

Revillon's a.s.sault on Hudson Bay, planned for the summer of 1903, was predicated on impressing local trappers by installing one of its prefabricated stores beside nearly everv HBC outlet. The necessary staff and material were gat~ered in Montreal and loajed on the Stord, a Norwegian -built merchant s.h.i.+p, which promptly ran aground at Pointe des Monts in the Gulf of St Lawrence. To get into the Bay before freeze-up, Revillon chartered the 820-ton Eldorado, then employed on the London-Liverpool run, whose skipper, Captain William Berry, had never ventured beyond England's coastal waters. He successfully crossed the Atlantic, picked up the Stord's crew and cargo, then somehow muddled his way through Hudson Strait. The crew and pa.s.sengers, numbering forty-seven, included Revillon's Montreal representative, a Monsieur d'Aigneaux, who was travelling with his wife, daughter and a governess, a doctor, four clerks and fourteen Quebec carpenters hired to erect the stores. Drawing a deep sixteen feet and carrying 1,450 tons of cargo, the Eldorado, her decks crowded with sections for the prefabricated buildings, lumbered into Hudson Bay bound for Fort George on the eastern sh.o.r.e ot'james Bay. After several close calls, the s.h.i.+p rammed a reef nine miles out of the settlement. "When the tide fell, she listed so badly that her decks became almost vertical," Third Engineer George Venables wrote in his journal. ". . . So serious were matters now that the captain insisted that the ladies, child, and other pa.s.sengers should go in boats to Fort George, so as to be safe. It was "ell this was done, for on the Wednesday [September 2, 1903] a terrible storm came on, the s.h.i.+p b.u.mped tip and down on the cruel rocks, and finally tore a great hole in her bottom, through which the water rushed in volumes. We saved wbat food we could, and, with some clothes, got away to an island ere the doomed vessel was lost."

286 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

Donald Gillies, the HBC' Factor resident at Fort George, counted the four dozen survivors and quickly realized his spare supplies would feed them for only two days. Ile lent them boats and advised them to hurry South to Charlton Island, where an IJBC steamer, the Lady Head, "as due to leave for London. After a hazardous pa.s.sage the Eldorado's crew reached Charlton the day after the steamer's departure-which was lucky, because the Lady Head was shortly afterwards wrecked on Gasket Shoals. The unhappy travellers made their way down to Moose Factory in borrowed HBC lighters, then had to travel five hundred miles tip the Moose and Abitibi rivers before they reached civilization. It was a harrowing journey.

"When we got tip each morning," wrote Venables, "it was invariabl~, to find that the blanket with which each person was provided was a solid piece of ice, as hard as iron, and we had to get it thawed and free as best we could. . . . We endeavoured to bake some of the flour into cakes each night; but as we had no baking powder you can imagine what the result was like. Our rations at best did not run to more than half a cake each per night, and wc began to feel very weak and ill from being so underfed and so much exposed." When they came out of the bush at New Liskeard, without having lost a soul along the way, a correspondent for the Toronto Globe who interviewed the survivors wrote that they had portaged their "lifeboats" around the rapids through a terrain "as unknown to the partv as if it had been in the heart of Africa."

The mishap set back Revillon's Hudson Bay venture, but by 1908, with supplies brought in on the 2,500-ton icebreaker Adventurer, Revillon had seven posts on line, including a dock and warehouse at Strutton Island in the lower bay. The Adveniurer was eventually wrecked in Hudson Strait, but not before she helped erect other KILLING THE COMPEt.i.tION 287.

Revillon posts at Baker Lake, Repulse Bay and the Belcher Islands.*

The French concern eventually operated forty-seven Canadian trading posts, mostly concentrated in the northwest. The firm's huge warehouse in Edmonton, its stock supplied from Montreal aboard a special twenty- six-car freight train, became the Wests largest departinent store, offering everything from food products, china, fabrics and farin equipment to bronze bells and missionaries' chasubles. Revillon was soon doing annual business in excess of $5 million, including supply contracts for the Indian treaties and Mounted Police on the Peace and Yukon rivers, but like the IIBC it had great difficulty supplying some of its western land posts. To move goods from F-dirionton to Hudson's Hope on the Peace River, for example, required taking them by sleigh injanuary as far asAthabasca, where theywere stored for the rest of the winter. In spring they were poled over by scow to Lesser Slax e Lake, where they were stored again until the primitive road to the Peace River became pa.s.sable.

That oxcart pa.s.sage was followed by another scow expedition to Hudson's Hope-the entire one-way journey having taken eight months.

It was typical of the Bay men that, although they had lost their official monopoly in 1870, they still behaved more than a generation later as if they owned the

*Revillon commissioned the explorer filin -maker Robert Flaherty to shoot Nanook oft& North on the Belchers and at Port Harrison during the winter of 1920--2 1. The first doc.u.mentary of its kind to achieve world-wide distribution, the movie was an instant hit, so much so that Americans marketed a new brand of ice-cream called Nanook, while Germans sold Nanook ashtrays. Brilliantly shot and edited, the film helped perpetuate the stereotype of Inuit as happy victims of their environment.

288 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

country. "Only those who have worked for the Company," explained Philip G.o.dsell, "can understand the feeling that existed against the average opposition trader, and the perhaps misguided sense of loyalty which would, literally, cause a Hudson's Bay man to push even his own brother to the wall if he happened to be trading in opposition to the 'Gentlemen Adventurers."' Bill Cobb, who traded against Revillon, echoed the thought.

'16 open tip a store against the Bay, that was heresy. Why, you were committing an act against G.o.d. It was G.o.d who gave the Hudson's Bay, that land!" he recalled in mock anger forty-eight years later, adding, "I laugh about it now, but that's the way I felt-and still do, to some degree."

In the field, compet.i.tion between the two firms quickly turned vicious.

Startled Inuit and Indians were treated to the sight of the only two white men in their settlements childishly squabbling over each pelt, spying on one another, outbidding each other's prices' It became standard practice for HBc Factors to decree that any trapper caught trading with Revillon could no longer sell to the Company. The Cree sensed this was a potent threat; then- name for Revillon was Tustowichuk-the "people between them and the Company." The French firm's post managers complained that their customers refused to trade in the daytime lest they be spotted by the HBC traders, who had ostentatiously trained telescopes on their compet.i.tors' front doors. Even at night, exchanges at the Revillon posts had to be carried out behind drawn blinds.

Revillon's first managers were mostly retired French armv and navy officers and superannuated bureaucrats, more familiar with wine vintages than the crude ways of the Canadian frontier. ['hey underestimated their opponems and patronized their customers. The Bay traders KILLING THE COMPEt.i.tION 289.

derisively referred to Revillon as "the Frenchmen" and were not above delivering some low slurs. One Christmas at Moose Factory, a Revillon trader was celebrating alone while there was a big party at the Bay post.

The Anglican missionary R.J. Renison, later an archbishop, who was visiting Moose Factory, urged the Bay man to go over and invite his rival.

After grumbling about the idea for most of a morning, the Factor, a litimourless Scotsman, agreed. But the Revillon man didn't show up. When Remson demanded to know how the invitation had been issued, the burred reply was: "I just asked him who won the Battle of Waterloo-any G.o.dd.a.m.ned Frenchman should know that." Revillon eventually switched to recruiting in Dundee, Scotland. It signed on good men-at forty dollars a month, all found, twice the wage offered by the HBC-but its traders could not compete in the down cycles of the fur trade. Wallace Laird, who was one of them, claimed that lie had never been at a Revillon post "that showed a profit.

The cost of goods was so high ... that a generous mark-up was still not sufficient to keep the posts out of the red."

By the spring of 1925, Revillon's owners initiated discussions with the IIBC on a co-operative agreement that would reduce expenditures of both concerns. The contract, signed on July 17, 192 6, was in fact a takeover, with the HBC agreeing to acquire 51 percent of Revillon Canada for up to $918,000 during the next eight years. Ralph Parsons was named the HBCs representative director on the Revillon board; the French firm had Canadian a.s.sets of $2,981,214 and current liabilities of $879,642 at the tinie. There was no doubt about the HBC's motives for the takeover.

"Arrangements should be definitely made, for the fixing of the prices of Furs and Merchandise at all Posts affected directly, or 290 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

indirectly, by the compet.i.tion of Revillon Fr&res," stated an internal memo prepared for the HBC management. "These prices can be fixed periodically by the District Managers concerned, with Revillon managers.

Compet.i.tion between the companies for employees will be eliminated; thus eliminating salary increases unwarranted for any reason, other than the possibility of injury being done to our trade by a transfer of an employee."

Revillon continued to operate into the 1930s as a quasi-independent ent.i.ty. By then an exasperated Jean Revillon was writing to the HBc Governor: "After more and more consideration on the subject, we came to the final conclusion that the active management of the Hudson's Bay Company's Trading Posts: i.e. Mr Parsons and his subordinates, were so deadly opposed to any compet.i.tion held out against the Hudson's Bay Co., even though this compet.i.tion be afforded by the Revillon Fr&res Trading Co. in which the Hudson's Bay Company holds the majority of shares, that they did everything in order to crush Revillon Fr~res Trading Company and the conclusion reached was that it was preferable for this Company to have a single owner."

When the Bay argued about the price it would pay for his firm's remaining a.s.sets, Jean Revillon didn't hide his anger: "We have good grounds to claim that the present state of Revillon Fr~res Trading Company is due to nilsmanagement on the part of your Winnipeg office," he wrote to the 11BC Governor. "The co-operation in the North, which was an important factor of our 1926 Agreement, and carried most weight towards our accep- tance of it as far as our interests were concerned, was not lived up to by your managers. The results have proved disastrous.... The a.s.sets of the Revil Ion Fr~res Trading Company have been stripped and laid bare to the bone, KILLING THE COMPEt.i.tION 291.

which has been a m ise policy on your part, as it certainly favours your claim when establis.h.i.+ng the price of shares." By this time, net a.s.sets had been reduced to $1,158,000, and the 1IBC' purchased all of Revillon's outstanding shares for $380,000. Liquidation of the French Ili-in's Canadian holdings was completed during 1937, with twent~-rwo of its seventy-three employees joining the Bay.

There then followed a bizarre mop-up operation. The 1113(: didn't intend to stop at having beaten its rival; the Company wanted to obliterate Revillon's every trace, so that no other freebooter would again be pre- sumptuous enough to a.s.sume the North belonged to anyone but the Coiripany of Adventurers. "hen Revillon decampe,l, one of its district inspectors, a former French naval captain named jean Berthe, decided to remain in the Arctic as an independent trader. A highly civilized Parisian with a NA ry sense of life's absurdities, he found pleasure in the eternal solitude of the Ungava Peninsula and, gathering a few trading supplies, settled near Burgoyne Bay, on the south sh.o.r.e of Hudson Strait. The Hudson's Bay Company panicked. Determined to hound the Frenchman out of the North, Fur Trade Commissioner Ralph Parsons placed three of his toughest subordinates-Alex Stevenson, John Stanners and Bruce Campbell--in charge of mobile trading posts code-named U-X, U-Y and U-Z. The outfits were dropped at locations near Berthe's camp and loaded into peterhead boats, so that as soon as the French trader made a move in any direction an HBC post could immediately be set up near him to undercut his trades.

Thev chased him for three months and finally cornered gerthe at Payne Bay, where the Bay men erected their instant shop to head off the Inuit trappers. After 292 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

two seasons of mounting losses, the French naval captain departed, his purse empty but his dignity intact.*

The Revillon episode was a turning point. The Company won, but the cost had been high. The North, like the West, could not much longer remain the private preserve of any commercial enterprise.

*A happier tale was the adventure of the American biologist Clarence Birdseve, who purchased Revillon's abandoned post on Sandwich Bay, near Cartwright in Labrador, for a fur-farm ing venture. He watched the catch of native fishermen freeze in -50'1,'weather, the inornent the fish were taken out of the water.

"Alonths later, when thev were thawed out," he noted, "sonle of those fish A ere so fresh that they "ere still alive!" Appl i ying similar techniques to neats and vegetables, he graduall ' N, pcrt*Ccted the famous fro ,en food product,; that bear his name.

CHAPTER 11.

THE NASCOPIE.

CHRONICLES.

"Signifying many things to many people and, on occasi . on, everything to a veryfew, Nascopie acquired a unique personality endowed with almost human chai acteristics.

-Henny Nixon

CHIEF AGENT OF CHANGE in the Canadian North was not a man or a company, but a s.h.i.+p. On July 10, 1911, Lord Strathcona had commissioned construction of a 2,500-ton supply vessel from Swan Hunter of Newcastle-on-Tyne. The coal-burning Nascopie's unique design-her stern cut away like a yacht from above the waterline, a semicircular hull and undercut bow, every steel plate reinforced and slightly curved to deflect the ice-fitted the vessel ideally for the treacherous journeys that would earn her pride of place among the s.h.i.+ps that altered the perception of Canada's northern geography.* Not precisely an icebreaker-though often used as one-the Nascopie was designed to open a seapath by sliding over the ice, then shattering it under her own weight. She had a bottom as smooth and rounded as that of a racing sh.e.l.l and no bilge keel, so that ice pressure around the sides would lift rather than crush her. Her bow was fitted

*The Nascopie took her name from the Montagnais designation for the local tribe of Ungava and Labrador Indians, whose own name for themselves was Nenenot-"true men."

29S.

296 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

with a "shoe"-a st.u.r.dy casing riveted to the keel plate that occasionally allowed her to batter ice formations until a crack appeared wide enough to sail through. "Signif~ying many things to many people and, on occasion, everything to a very few, Nascopie acquired a unique personality endowed with almost human characteristics," wrote Henny Nixon, an Ottawa maritime historian.

.,fter her maiden voyage across the Atlantic, the Nascopie was employed in the Newfoundland seal hunt before setting off on her first voyage into Hudson Bay and the Eastern Arctic. When she arrived at the Chariton Island suppl) depot near the bottom of the Bay, local natives, astounded at Nascopie's size, got b.a.l.l.s of string to measure her 2 85-foot hull, and later they would stretch out the twine and explain to friends up the coast that the great new s.h.i.+p was "as long as that!" At the end of her 11) 15 voyage, with the GreatWar presenting new problems, the Nascopie was a.s.signed to the BrestMurmansk-Archangel supply run and armed with a three-pounder Hotchkiss, a gun built in 1857 to help quell the Indian Mutiny. The ancient weapon's range was uncertain, but it made as much noise as a six-incher. On June 14, 1917, when the Nascopie was attacked by the German submarine U-28 off Archangel, she drove off the boat with four well-placed shots. Later that year, command of the Nascopie was a.s.sumed by Captain Thomas Farrar Smellic, one of the few mariners who had master's papers for both sail and steam. For most of the next thirty years he sailed the largely uncharted waters of the Canadian North, turning his s.h.i.+p and himself into a legend. "There may have been some 'luck' about it," wrote Roland Wild, the Nascopie's lively biographer, "but the happy partners.h.i.+p of Captain and s.h.i.+p was based on a much surer foundation. These partners knew one another, the), each had st.u.r.dy beginnings; you could say they had each been built by craftsmen, each knew the THE NASCOPIE CHRONICLES 297.

Captain Smellie (right) aboard the Nascopie, zvith fur-trade bead Ralph Parsons, 1933

qualities and endurance of the other-they were as one, not Captain and s.h.i.+p, but a unit."

The Nascopie made thirty-four trips to resupply the HBC's Eastern Arctic and Hudson Bay posts, bringing back furs, mail and rotating personnel, serving an area then not otherwise accessible. She went about her riskv business in waters virtually unmarked by navigational aids, sailing through lat.i.tudes where compa.s.ses were useless because of underwater iron ore deposits and proximity to the north magnetic pole. In parts of Hudson Bay, the earth's magnetism is so powerful that compa.s.s needles point nowhere except down; at the entrance to Pond Inlet, the earth's variation is more than 100 degrees, so that s.h.i.+ps have to be steered 10 degrees east of north to be heading west. Available maps were so amateurish Captain Smellie once complained that if he followed the Admirolty charts at his disposal, his s.h.i.+p's position would be 150 miles inLind. The distances the 298 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

Nascopie had to cover in the briefseason of open water between the widely dispersed HBC posts were immense; each trip averaged 10.500 miles-Arctic Bay, then the northernmost of the HBC outposts, was 2,800 miles by sea from Montreal.

Fach voyage was an adventure. Smellie was tough; he had to be. A steward who served under him recalled a hazardous climb to the bridge as the s.h.i.+p, battered by blizzards and waves higher than her funnel, seerned ready to pitch-pole. The steward managed to reach the captain and shouted in his ear: "Would you like anything to eat?"

"Bowl of soup!" Sniellie yelled back.

The steward laboriously climbed down to the galley, was instructed to carry the bowl not on a tray but in the hollow of a napkin held by its four corners, and climbed back up to the bridge, olmost losing the soup and his life in the process. Feeling that he had been miraculously spared from the elements to fulfil his mission, he proudly presented the still-steaming brew to his captain. Smellie took one look at the soup bowl and bellowed: "Where~ the spoon?"

THE NASCOPIE'S JOURNEY NORTH from her berth in Montreal quickly became a ritual. Her decks, noisy with penned sheep, chickens and pigs bound for traders' skillets, also carried an occasional milk cow. Her holds bursting with supplies, the vessel was so overloaded that s.h.i.+pping officials and Smellie had to play an unusual game. "When the Port inspectors made their routine check before departure," Roland Wild observed, "the Captain would show them the port side first, and give a vague kind of opinion that the s.h.i.+p must be listing to port, since the Plimsoll Line was invisible. When the inspectors repaired to the starboard side, the s.h.i.+p must THE NASCOPIE CHRONICLES 299.