space, and see its
influence working in the wilds which it had commanded by the valour of
its adventurers and traders. While England and France had been
contending on the St. Lawrence for mastery, and the struggle to gain
or to retain the Gibraltar of America had dragged its length through
generations, far off in the white north another strife between the
civil energies of both nations was being waged. The English
explorers--Frobisher, Davis, Hudson, and Baffin--had been the first to
reach the northern coast from the sea, giving their names to water and
territory which have since become familiar to the civilised world.
Theirs was the old dream--a north-western route to India and China. No
such vision, however, had presented itself to the French explorers
who, about the same time as the English, planted their flag upon those
barren shores, and pushed up from the south, partly to explore, but
more certainly to develop the trade in furs which the _Compagnie
des cents Associes_, founded by Richelieu in 1627, had already worked
to advantage. The charter of this Company, indeed, did not include the
regions of Hudson's Bay, but was confined to the province of Canada
alone. To-day, Canada comprises all the vast territory north of the
49th parallel of latitude, even to the pole; then its sphere of
influence stretched westward to the Missouri and the Mississippi, and
southward to Louisiana; while those regions now called Manitoba,
Saskatchewan, Athabasca, Assiniboine, and the Klondike were as yet
unknown. When Hearne, the Hudson's Bay Company explorer, pushed his
way northward and westward to the copper mine on the Copper River, it
seemed as if the ultimate ends of the world had been reached, and that
the vast region of ice and snow, inhabited by wandering tribes of
Indians, would be for ever the property of a trading company.

[Illustration: Gen. Lord Aylmer. Born in 1775.
Governor General of Canada.
1830-1831--1831-1835]

So far back as 1630 an agency of commerce and exploration was founded
in Quebec, under the name of the Beaver Company. This was forty years
before the Hudson's Bay Company received its charter from the second
Charles. The French went so far in their eagerness for territory that
they even claim to have discovered Hudson's Bay, through one Jean
Bourdon, in 1656. This claim is not admitted, however, in the _Jesuit
Relations_, where, in 1672, Father Albanel writes: "Hitherto this
voyage had been considered imp