nglish done? Where did the
Western Sea of which Spain had possession in the South lie towards the
North? What lay between the Hudson Bay and that Western Sea? Was
there a Northwest passage by water through this region to Asia? If
not, was there an undiscovered world in the North, like Louisiana in
the South? There was talk of revoking the charter. Then the Company
awakened from its long sleep with a mighty stir.

The annual boats that came out to Hudson Bay in the summer of 1769
anchored on the offing, six miles from the gray walls of Fort Prince of
Wales, and roared out a salute of cannon becoming the importance of
ships that bore almost revolutionary commissions. The fort cannon on
the walls of Churchill River thundered their answer. A pinnace came
scudding over the waves from the ships. A gig boat launched out from
the fort to welcome the messengers. Where the two met halfway, packets
of letters were handed to Moses Norton, governor at Fort Prince of
Wales, commanding him to despatch his most intrepid explorers for the
discovery of unknown rivers, strange lands, rumored copper mines, and
the mythical Northwest Passage that was supposed to lead directly to
China.

The fort lay on a spit of sand running out into the bay at the mouth of
Churchill River. It was three hundred yards long by three hundred
yards wide, with four bastions, in three of which were stores and wells
of water. The fourth bastion contained the powder-magazine. The walls
were thirty feet wide at the bottom and twenty feet wide at the top, of
hammer-dressed stone, mounted with forty great cannon. A commodious
stone house, furnished with all the luxuries of the chase, stood in the
centre of the courtyard. This was the residence of the governor.
Offices, warehouses, barracks, and hunters' lodges were banked round
the inner walls of the fort. The garrison consisted of thirty-nine
common soldiers and a few officers. In addition, there hung about the
fort the usual habitues of a Northern fur post,--young clerks from
England, who had come out for a year's experience in the wilds;
underpaid artisans, striving to mend their fortunes by illicit trade;
hunters and _coureurs_ and _voyageurs_, living like Indians but with a
strain of white blood that forever distinguished them from their
comrades; stately Indian sachems, stalking about the fort with whiffs
of contempt from their long calumets for all this white-man luxury; and
a ragamuffin brig