licenses were granted to enable the holders to discover new nations of Indians; to form alliances and carry on commerce with them ; to take possession of distant countries in the name of the King; to oppose the efforts of the English for territorial expansion.

By the year 1683, Louis XIV. had become fully alive to the importance of the trade of Hudson's Bay; and in a letter to M. de la Barre, August 5, he said: "I recommend you to prevent as much as possible the English from establishing themselves in Hudson's Bay, possession whereof was taken in my name several years ago;" and as he was aware that Col. Dongon, Governor of New York, had received special orders to be on good terms with the French in Canada, he thought the difficulties hitherto experienced would not again appear.

year

But things did not go well with the Canadian fur trade in the north. M. de la Barre, writing to M. Seignelay, Quebec, Nov. 16, 1683, says: "The English of Hudson's Bay have this attracted many of our Northern Indians, who have not this season come to Montreal." This year, a small French vessel returned from Hudson's Straits to Quebec. She had been two leagues north of the Bay, and brought back the men sent out the year before by order of Count de Frontenac. M. de la Barre was anxious to be informed whether the king would desire to maintain the post established there; for he had schemes of aiding the French, through Du L'Hut, overland from Lake Superior. The French, as admitted by English authorities,* had now made a settlement not above eight days' journey from the mouth of the Moose River.

By this time the two parties came to blows. The English drove the French from their establishment on Fort Bourbon.† In the previous year, a company formed at Quebec had sent two vessels to Hudson's Bay.

There is among the Paris documents a memoir, without date or signature, which recites what we know to be authentic, that, in 1627, the French King granted to the Company of the Hundred Associates the whole country up to the Arctic circle;

* (Oldmixon, The British Empire in America.)

+ (M. de Callièrs to M. de Seignelay, without date, but apparently written in 1784.)

but the question arises on the grounds on which the king founded his title. The English claim, on the ground of Button's discovery, might well be considered to have lapsed by abandonment; and the country was open to occupation by any nation that might have the enterprise to take possession of it.* But we do not find that the Company of the Hundred Associates entered on this part of their assumed domain. This memoir treats the Arctic circle as a natural boundary; it was rather one which it would be easy to understand. But the French Government could hardly have seriously entertained the idea of claiming the whole country to the Arctic circle, because Champlain was alleged to have taken possession of the Iroquois lands, when he ascended no higher than Lake Nipissing and Lake Huron. The ancient Register of the Council of New France, according to this memoir, records the fact that Jean Bourdon, in 1656, sailed along the coast of Labrador, with a vessel of thirty tons, and entered and took possession of the Baie du nord. The term is generally used as a substitute for Hudson's Bay; but it may here mean a Bay on the north side of Hudson's Strait. It is stated that Couture, with five others, went to the head of the Bay, overland, and set up the king's arms engraved on copper. The order of the Governor, Sieur D'Avaugour, for these men to set out on this mission, is said to be in existence, and to be dated May 20, 1663, as well as certificates of those who went. Seven years later, the account goes on to say, St. Lusson was sent by the Intendant of Canada to Sault Ste. Marie, where seventeen Indian nations, coming the distance of a hundred leagues, voluntarily submitted themselves to the dominion of the French King. These seventeen nations are described as including the Ottawas, the Indians of Lakes Huron and Superior, of the whole northern country and of Hudson's Bay. An assemblage of Indians did undoubtedly take place at the place and time named, and the ceremony of taking possession was gone through, but what effect it could have on the right of France to Hudson's Bay is not so clear. The Hudson's Bay Company had been chartered the

* Grotius.

year before; and English vessels had, according to the French official statements referred to above, wintered in the Bay in 1669.

This memoir resembles very closely, both in manner and argument, those of the French Commissioners appointed to settle the boundary of Acadie, or Nova Scotia, in 1750. One of its arguments is that "The settlement made by the English at the head of North Bay does not give them any title, because it has already been remarked that the French were in possession of those countries and had traded with the Indians of that Bay, which is proved still better by the knowledge the men named de Groiselier and Radison had of those parts where they introduced the English. They had traded thither, no doubt, with the old French coureurs des bois. Besides, it is a thing unheard of that rebellious subjects could convey any right to countries belonging to their sovereign." If it were certain that the country around Hudson's Bay belonged to the French at this time, the argument founded on that alleged fact would be irresistible. In one sense, it is true that these renegade Frenchmen, who betrayed both parties in turn, introduced the English, but not in the sense of taking them to a country of which they had no previous knowledge. They showed certain Englishmen what they induced them to believe would prove a profitable venture, and the latter embarked in it from motives of gain; but it remains true nevertheless that the English had a practical knowledge of the geography and navigation of Hudson's Bay before it was attained by the French. Still it is a question whether they had not by neglect and abandonment forfeited any rights they might have derived from prior discovery.

It might reasonably have been questioned whether the fact of the English establishing a trading post and port at one or two points on Hudson's Bay, a large inland sea, gave the man exclusive right to the whole Bay, to the prejudice of all other colonizing and commercial nations, France especially, whose Canadian possessions were conterminous with those claimed by the English, if they did not include part of them. The English commissioners, on the Acadie boundary question denounced with just severity the practice of "every pilot or admiral taking possession of a

vast tract of country he never saw, upon the pretence of having landed on a part of it."

The year 1685 saw the formation of the Compagnie du Nord, with the sanction of the king. Denonville suggested that, if the king did not like to take in hand the expulsion of the English from the Bay, he might help this company to do it by giving them a few vessels of 120 tons, well armed and equipped. A company of Canadian merchants could not hope to rival the wealth of a powerful English company. And in the semi-private war that was carried on, on the shores of Hudson's Bay, they lost in 1682 a very large quantity of furs taken by the English, after the Canadian company's vessel had returned to Quebec. In 1688 the English built a fort on James' Bay (au fond de la Baye du Nord), north of one occupied by the French. The Compagnie du Nord asked the assistance of the French Government in this emergency.*

The Canadians were carrying on the contest against all the difficulties of land travel over hundreds of miles of wilderness. The Marquis de Denonville, writing on the 10th October, 1686, describes the route by Temiskamin and Abitibes as un chemin terrible, and so difficult that all that was possible for a war party to do was to carry sufficient provisions for the journey to the Bay and back; that of Nemisco, by Tadousac, was believed to be more facile; but it was admitted to be a long and painful route, rendered the more difficult by the obstruction of fallen trees which lay across a narrow river. It was estimated to be 250 leagues from the post of Quichichouanne to Port Nelson; and the road was not well known to Canadians by land, but they were determined that this ignorance should not stand in their way another year. Denonville says distinctly, il n'est pas practicable pour y porter des marchandises; and that owing to the immense cost of carrying goods overland, the commerce of the Bay could only be carried on with advantage by sea. And yet what was that commerce not worth? The fattest beavers and the best furs

* Mémoire de la Compagnie du Nord, Nov. 15, 1690.

were both found at the North. The French wished to exchange the fort on James' Bay for Fort Nelson, partly for this reason, and partly because it would enable them to stop the Indians who hunted on the borders of Lake Alenimipegois (Nipegon), who were in the habit of going to Quichichouanne, at the head of the Bay. So far the Compagnie du Nord had lost money. The furs taken from it by the English, under the guidance of Radison, were valued at a hundred thousand écus, without counting the profit it would have made on them.

All this shows the vast importance attached by both countries to the Straits and Bay of Hudson.

This year, Nov. 6 (1686), a treaty of neutrality was concluded between Louis XIV. and James II. It stipulated for a firm peace, union, concord, and good understanding between the subjects of the two kings in America. No vessels of either sovereign were to be employed in attacking the subjects of the other in the colonies; and no soldiers of either king stationed in these colonies were to engage in any such act of hostility, or to give aid or succour in men or provisions to savages at war with the other. The fourth article, as applied to Hudson's Bay, only helped to entangle matters still

more:

"IV. It has been agreed that each of the said kings shall hold the domains, rights, preeminences in the seas, straits and other waters of America to which, and in the same extent which of right belongs to them, and in the same manner in which they enjoy them at present."

The French had then the Fort of Quichichouanne, on James' Bay, and the English had Fort Nelson. And it was agreed by the fifth article that the subjects of each king were to forbear to trade and fish in all places in America possessed by the other, whether havens, bays, creeks, roads, shoals or other places, under penalty of confiscation; but the liberty of navigation was in no manner to be disturbed where nothing was done contrary to the genuine sense of the treaty. This seems to have given the French a right to navigate the Hudson's Bay. If not, how were they to enjoy the right of fishing, which must have been an incident of