houlder,
brained two Englishmen with an ax, liberated his comrades, and at
pistol point kept the other Englishmen up the masts till he and his
fellows had righted the ship and steered the vessel across to Rupert
River, where the provisions were just in time to save Iberville's party
from starvation.

{162} This episode is typical of what went on at the Hudson's Bay forts
for ten years. Each year, when the English ships came out to Nelson on
the west coast, armed bands were sent south to wrest the forts on James
Bay from the French; and each spring, when Iberville's bushrovers came
gliding down the rivers in their canoes from Canada, there was a fight
to drive out the English. Then the Indians would scatter to their
hunting grounds. No more loot of furs for a year! The English would
sail away in their ships, the French glide away in their canoes; and
for a winter the uneasy quiet of calm between two thunderclaps would
rest over the waters of Hudson Bay.

In the spring of 1688, about the time that the brave bush-rovers had
brought the English ship from Charlton Island across to Rupert River,
two English frigates under Captain Moon, with twenty-four soldiers over
and above the crews, had come south from Nelson to attack the French
fur traders at Albany. As ill luck would have it, the ice floes began
driving inshore. The English ships found themselves locked in the ice
before the besieged fort. Across the jam from Rupert River dashed
Iberville with his Indian bandits, portaging where the ice floes
covered the water, paddling where lanes of clear way parted the
floating drift. Iberville hid his men in the tamarack swamps till
eighty-two Englishmen had landed and all unsuspecting left their ships
unguarded. Iberville only waited till the furs in the fort had been
transferred to the holds of the vessels. The ice cleared. The
Frenchman rushed his bushrovers on board, seized the vessel with the
most valuable cargo, and sailed gayly out of Albany for Quebec. The
astounded English set fire to the other ship and retreated overland.

But the dare-devil bushrovers were not yet clear of trouble. As the
ice drive jammed and held them in Hudson Straits, they were aghast to
see, sailing full tilt with the roaring tide of the straits, a fleet of
English frigates, the Hudson's Bay Company's annual ships; but
Iberville sniffed at danger as a war horse glories in gunpowder. He
laughed his merriest, and as the ice drive locke