--In Defiance, the Explorers
steal off at Midnight--They return with a Fortune and are driven from
New France

Radisson was not yet twenty-six years of age, and his explorations of
the Great Northwest had won him both fame and fortune. As Spain sought
gold in the New Word, so France sought precious furs. Furs were the
only possible means of wealth to the French colony, and for ten years
the fur trade had languished owing to the Iroquois wars. For a year
after the migration of the Hurons to Onondaga, not a single beaver skin
was brought to Montreal. Then began the annual visits of the Indians
from the Upper Country to the forts of the St. Lawrence. Sweeping down
the northern rivers like wild-fowl, in far-spread, desultory flocks,
came the Indians of the _Pays d'en Haut_. Down the Ottawa to Montreal,
down the St. Maurice to Three Rivers, down the Saguenay and round to
Quebec, came the treasure-craft,--light fleets of birch canoes laden to
the water-line with beaver skins. Whence came the wealth that revived
the languishing trade of New France? From a vague, far Eldorado
somewhere round a sea in the North. Hudson had discovered this sea
half a century before Radisson's day; Jean Bourdon, a Frenchman, had
coasted up Labrador in 1657 seeking the Bay of the North; and on their
last trip the explorers had learned from the Crees who came through the
dense forests of the hinterland that there lay round this Bay of the
North a vast country with untold wealth of furs. The discovery of a
route overland to the north sea was to become the lodestar of
Radisson's life.[1]

[Illustration: Montreal in 1760: 1, the St. Lawrence; 20, the Dock;
18-19, Arsenal; 16, the Church; 13-15, the Convent and Hospital; 8-12,
Sally-ports, River Side; 17, Cannon and Wall; 3-4-5, Houses on Island.]

"We considered whether to reveal what we had learned," explains
Radisson, "for we had _not_ been in the Bay of the North, knowing only
what the Crees told us. We wished to discover it ourselves and have
assurance before revealing anything." But the secret leaked out.
Either Groseillers told his wife, or the Jesuits got wind of the news
from the Indians; for it was announced from Quebec that two priests,
young La Valliere, the son of the governor at Three Rivers, six other
Frenchmen, and some Indians would set out for the Bay of the North up
the Saguenay. Radisson was invited to join the company as a guide.
Needless to say that a man who had