‘We were Caesars, being nobody to contradict us.’
Médard Chouart, Sieur des Groseilliers
Before he became constable of the castle, Rupert was a frequent guest at Windsor, with regular use of a set of apartments there. In the winter of 1665-6, with the Plague still raging throughout London, his stay there was a prolonged one. It overlapped with the three-month visit of a pair of fascinating Frenchmen.
Pierre-Esprit Radisson and Médard Chouart were brothers-in-law who arrived with tales of unimaginable wealth and the tantalising possibility of finding the mariner’s Holy Grail, the Northwest Passage leading from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. Rupert found their extraordinary story credible and enthralling.
The two men were very different. The bumptious Radisson was nearly 30 and had left the family’s smallholding in the Rhone Valley to seek his fortune in New France. This colony, part of modern-day Canada, had its centre in Quebec and an overall population of 5,000 Frenchmen. Most were involved in the fur trade, especially the acquiring and selling of beaver pelts, which were made into warm, waterproof headgear for Europeans in the era before umbrellas. Because of its special properties, beaver was then the most valuable fur in the world.
Radisson settled in Trois Rivières, a farming community midway between Quebec and Montreal, deep in Mohawk territory. One day, ignoring warnings that the indigenous tribe was on the warpath, he and two companions left the settlement to go wildfowling. Radisson, never an easy man, fell out with his friends and ventured off by himself. It is extremely likely that Radisson’s tricky nature saved his life: for, heading home that evening, he stumbled across his colleagues’ remains, horribly mutilated. The Mohawks had killed them and they now took Radisson prisoner. For some reason, they spared Radisson’s life and made a great fuss of him. One of the Mohawk families was headed by a fearsome figure, a bloodthirsty warrior who was proud of his tally of nineteen white scalps. This man took Radisson to live in his village on Lake Champlain.
Over the following months, the young Frenchman absorbed the ways and the psychology of his captors. He learnt their language, their songs, and their hunting methods, and he joined them in their skirmishes against neighbouring tribes. There is no record of his trying to escape, until a fellow prisoner — an Algonquin tribesman — suggested running away during a hunting expedition. The two men murdered the Mohawks in their sleep, staving in their skulls, before making a dash for Trois Rivières, and freedom. But, terrified that they would be recaptured, the pair made too much haste: trying to cross a river in daylight, they were captured by Iroqois. The Algonquin was tortured to death, while Radisson was forced to look on.
This was not the only grim spectacle that Radisson witnessed. He was placed with a larger group of prisoners, among them the wives and children of fellow settlers, taken from their homes by raiding parties. They, too, were all slain, their executions public, protracted affairs, involving the singeing and slashing of flesh, and the tearing out of finger- and toenails. They were finished off with a sadistic flourish: sheaths of birch-tree bark were forced over the torsos of the condemned, then set alight. Death was the postscript to final, screaming agony.
Radisson’s astonishing grip on life continued. He was forced to endure preliminary tortures of such savage intensity that they left physical and mental scars that could never heal. His tormentors branded the soles of both feet with iron instruments, fresh from the fire. They then punched a sizzling blade through one of his feet. Turning to his upper limbs, they ripped out his fingernails, then forced his bloodied hands into pails of hot coals, whose contents seared, then charred, his wounds. But, compared to his fellow captives, who were all killed, Radisson was extremely lucky. As the village children began to gnaw on the blackened flesh of his hands and the adults prepared his suit of burning bark, members of his adoptive family suddenly appeared. They reclaimed him and he returned to captivity.
Radisson finally escaped to a Dutch outpost in late 1653, from where he went to New Amsterdam (New York) and then to France. Remarkably, though, given his earlier cruel treatment, Radisson returned to Trois Rivières the following spring. He had come to profit from the knowledge garnered as both freeman and prisoner. Accompanying him on this trip was Médard Chouart, twenty years his senior, who had recently married Radisson’s widowed half-sister.
Chouart was known as the Sieur des Groseilliers — the Master of Gooseberries — after his family’s landholding in the Marne country. English contemporaries, failing to grasp the subtlety of the honorary, French title, frequently referred to him in good faith as ‘Mr Gooseberry’. This naming after a soft fruit is a good joke, but such an impressive figure — physically and mentally strong, resourceful and brave — deserves a more robust sobriquet.
Des Groseilliers had spent the 1640s in New France, part of the time as a disciple and lay assistant to the Jesuits of the local mission. But religion was not his vocation; the fur trade was. Trapping animals was a tough and dangerous business, which took the hunters ever further northwards and westwards, as each colony of beavers was annihilated in turn, its lodges torn open and all its occupants killed. Des Groseilliers noted that the further northwest he progressed, the thicker (and therefore more valuable) the furs became — Nature’s answer to the escalating cold. His work in the woods helped him to build up an impressive knowledge of a primitive, largely uncharted, land.
Between 1654 and 1660 des Groseilliers and Radisson made three journeys deep into the northwest, the first two separately, with other companions, and the third together. Groseilliers’s initial exploration, in 1654, opened up a swathe of territory almost unknown to Europeans. He crossed lakes Huron, St Clair, and Michigan, eventually arriving at Green Bay, where his beard startled the indigenous Pottowatami people — it was the first time they had seen facial hair on a man.
Des Groseilliers also experienced the shock of the new. When he witnessed herds of bison pounding across the Great Plains and spotted beavers living in huge numbers in a largely undisturbed state, he realised the rewards on offer to the hunter bold enough to venture north of Lake Superior. Of still greater interest, he heard Cree tribesmen talk about ‘the Bay of the North’, which Groseilliers realised must be Hudson’s Bay, whose reputation was known to all trappers: a generation earlier, Henry Hudson, an English explorer, had written of this gigantic inlet that it was ‘the home of many of the choicest fur-bearing animals in the world’.[fn1] Groseilliers returned from this initial foray wiser and richer: he and his companion brought furs to market that fetched 15,000 livres. But he knew that greater prizes beckoned.
Des Groseilliers returned the following summer with Huron guides, accompanied by two compatriots, who were Jesuit missionaries. He now encountered the savage disregard for life that Radisson had also witnessed. The party was overwhelmed by an Iroquois war party, which slaughtered most of the Hurons as part of an ongoing feud. The three Frenchmen were spared, though they were in the thick of the slaughter: des Groseilliers was drenched in the blood of one of the butchered guides and was not allowed to change his clothes.
Understanding that the Iroquois intended to kill them as well, des Groseilliers and the priests offered to prepare their captors a rich feast. The hunter-gatherers’ finely tuned metabolisms were overwhelmed by the surfeit of rich food, and after eating they began to doze off. The prisoners made a speedy escape by water.
*
In 1659, Radisson and des Groseilliers mounted a joint expedition, pooling their differing expertise. Radisson was a convincing communicator, with a keen appreciation of the ways of the indigenous people. Des Groseilliers was more adept at logistics and organisation. Together they had a clear understanding of the realities of life in the wilderness and an eagerness to profit from its natural wealth. Above all, they celebrated the freedom and power they felt, as they headed into ungoverned territories.
They were hampered in their goal, however, by the unhelpfulness of their fellow countrymen: in particular, the governor, the Marquis d’Argenson, forbade their expedition unless it contained a high proportion of his staff and dependants. The two traders reluctantly agreed to this condition, because they were compelled to do so. However, early in the journey, they gave their unwanted companions the slip. Their subsequent, independent trek confirmed the two men in their optimism. The northern lands were teeming with thickly coated wild animals, so it was logical that further north, in Hudson’s Bay, the potential crop would be even more fertile.
Radisson and des Groseilliers took care to examine the topography of the wilderness. Their experiences convinced them that the best way to access Hudson’s Bay was by sea: traversing the inland waterways was simply too laborious. In the meantime, they enjoyed an extremely fruitful time, hunting and trapping. On their return to Montreal, with sixty canoes laden with pelts, their hopes were similarly brimming over — surely now they would receive unequivocal official backing for the next phase of their venture. They had failed to anticipate the stifling hand of small-minded officialdom, however. The Marquis d’Argenson, in the most regrettable and far-reaching decision of his governorship, was deaf to the men’s excitement. He chose instead to focus on their disobedience, imprisoning des Groseilliers for trading without a licence and confiscating much of the pair’s harvest of furs.
On his release, determined to sidestep such suffocating pettiness, des Groseilliers sailed to France. But he found no backers there, either: the common view was that the North American colony was a brutish place, whose savagery was best avoided. If there were Frenchmen who chose to inhabit such a heartless, godless, environment, their material greed exceeding their better judgement, then that was their lookout. Besides, many suspected des Groseilliers’s tales were mere fancy and they would not subsidise his further ventures.
Deflated, des Groseilliers rejoined his brother-in-law in New France. After further disappointments, they decided on a different course. Pretending to set off for Hudson’s Bay, they in fact moved to New England, hoping that the merchants there would be more accepting of their vision. They eventually spent three years in Boston, where their accounts of fabulous, untapped natural riches aroused interest, but failed to attract a sponsor.
Eventually the Frenchmen’s tale came to the attention of two commissioners. These officers had been sent by Charles II to begin English rule in the freshly captured prize of New York. One of these, Colonel George Cartwright, persuaded the duo to go with him to England. When they agreed, Cartwright was confident that he had pulled off a coup, boasting to Lord Arlington that Radisson and des Groseilliers were: ‘the best present I could possibly make to his sacred Majesty’.[fn2]
Charles took the men seriously. He accepted their estimation of the possibilities from the fur trade. He believed their sightings of copper, glistening in rocky outcrops. He also dared to hope that Hudson’s Bay might offer the longed for Northwest Passage: the Frenchmen claimed this could be reached in a canoe from Hudson’s Bay in two weeks, via Lake Winnipeg. Two English expeditions in 1631 had independently concluded that no such route existed. But, in an age when science was regularly causing the surrender of long-held preconceptions, anything seemed possible. Even the Royal Society’s Robert Boyle deviated from his analytical norm, writing excitedly of the discovery of a navigable path to the ‘South Sea’. It seemed as though the king had found an outlet for the energies of courtiers eager to enrich themselves, as well as the possibility of a new income stream. This would be particularly welcome if it could make him less dependent on Parliament, or on the handouts secretly negotiated with Louis XIV.
Rupert proved a clever choice to follow through the hopes of an adventurous, intelligent, but impecunious monarch. The prince’s youthful hopes of sailing to Madagascar and ruling it, while opening up its trading possibilities, had come to nothing. In early 1662, Charles had permitted him to form the ‘Company of the Royal Adventurers of England trading into Africa’, with ‘the privilege of exclusive trade from Sallee to the Cape of Good Hope’.[fn3] This was an investment with huge potential: when one of its convoys was waylaid by the Dutch in 1664, it was found to contain 1,420 ivory tusks, 1,000 copper kettles and bowls, and three tons of pepper.
However, this venture led to the prince’s direct involvement in the slave trade of West Africa. It would be harsh to judge Rupert by modern standards, for participating in a trade we find utterly obnoxious. During most of his lifetime, slavery was rarely criticised on moral grounds. It was not until 1671 that the Quakers began publicly to condemn the market’s cruel inhumanity, but few thought such objections worth listening to: they were seen as the rantings of an eccentric minority. The Royal Society invested in the Royal Africa Company, as did the king and the Duke of York.
Yet not even the enthusiastic trading of human flesh could bring the Royal Adventurers success: the Anglo-Dutch War and poor financial control both played a part in stymieing its prospects. It slowly unravelled, under the governorship of the Duke of York, eventually folding in 1670, its existence brief and undistinguished. Now, thanks to Radisson and des Groseilliers, a further opportunity to arrange a successful overseas trading empire beckoned. Rupert was not prepared to let it fail and invested £270 of his own money at the outset of the scheme, remaining enthused by the project for the rest of his life.
The first years were frustrating. In 1666 the French, suddenly scared that their lack of enterprise had handed England a very valuable prize, sent secret agents to try to entice des Groseilliers back to the Continent. That same year, much of the City of London was destroyed in the Great Fire, impeding Rupert’s organisation of investors — this was an exciting but dangerous venture that, despite its royal patronage, required private finance. The following year, the Anglo-Dutch War provided a further stumbling block: ships were needed for fighting, not for speculative voyages. But still the prince persevered, keeping the project in focus despite the distractions.
By the end of 1667 he secured his first investor when Sir George Carteret bought £20 worth of stock. Others followed, including one woman, Lady Margaret Drax. Early the next year, Rupert had formed a private syndicate with enough credibility to persuade Charles II to lease it a small ship, the 54-ton Eaglet. She was to make an exploratory voyage to Hudson’s Bay with the Nonsuch — which, at 43 tons, was an even more diminutive vessel, bought by the company for £290. Crews were found for the Atlantic crossing, and the mixed list of passengers included an array of artisans capable of building a base in the bay: it was clear from the outset that Rupert intended the company to be a long-term concept.
On the eve of the voyage the prince invited his fellow syndicate members to dinner at his townhouse in Spring Gardens. These not only included grandees — the 2nd Duke of Albermarle, the ever-dependable Earl of Craven, and the Earl of Arlington — but also self-made men — John Portman and Sir Robert Vyner, bankers both, as well as John Fenn and Francis Millington, civil servants. They toasted the success of their joint venture and congratulated themselves on their bold involvement in a business with such potential: they were the original eighteen who had ‘at their own great cost and charge undertaken an Expedition for Hudson’s Bay in the Northwest part of America for the discovery of a new Passage into the South Sea and for the finding some Trade for Furs, Minerals and other considerable Commodities’.[fn4]
The next morning they excitedly boarded a barge, which rowed them to a point off Gravesend. From here they witnessed the company’s ships disappear over the horizon. The vessels’ captains took with them orders, signed by Prince Rupert, that confirmed the purposes of their mission, and a reminder to ‘use the said Mr Gooseberry and Mr Radisson with all manner of civility and courtesy and to take care that all your company do bear a particular respect unto them, they being the persons upon whose credit we have undertaken this expedition’.[fn5]
Radisson’s participation in the voyage was short-lived: the Eaglet was too flimsy for the Atlantic gales and lost its mast before limping back to Plymouth. The Frenchman used his unexpected free time to write a report of his former travels. Meanwhile, the Nonsuch, a hardy veteran of the navy, successfully handled the waves. After nearly four months at sea, she dropped anchor in James Bay. In recognition of the prince’s importance to the venture, the nearest freshwater source was immediately named Rupert River.
Trading was brisk and peaceful. The Indians of James Bay traded their furs for the Englishmen’s assorted cargo of weapons, tools, and baubles. Des Groseilliers also provided — at a cost — wampum, the shells used by Indians as currency. This oiled the wheels of commerce. As winter approached, the Nonsuch was beached, in order to stop it being crushed by the ice. The expedition’s artisans then constructed the first of five forts, which were to provide shelter from the snow and to deter other nations — essentially, France — from seeking to profit from the local trade. This first building, made of spruce trees, was initially called ‘Fort Charles’, but to later generations it was known as ‘Rupert’s House’.
Winter was long that year and the Nonsuch was only able to penetrate the thawing ice of Hudson Strait in mid August, 1669. The ship returned to London two months later with a consignment of furs worth £1,400. Although there was nothing by way of profit, the expedition had been a success, offering real hope that this was the start of a lucrative business. The king, sniffing a potential bonanza, acted decisively. He ordered the preparation of ‘The Charter of the Governor and Company of Adventurers’. It was formally signed in Whitehall on 2 May 1670 and Rupert was appointed governor. His ‘Adventurers’ — all British — were eleven aristocrats and six gentlemen. Of these, seven formed a board with the prince, overseeing the running of the corporation. Rupert’s committee was drawn entirely from the business-minded section of his colleagues as this was to be a professional outfit, not an aristocratic caper. To ensure openness and effectiveness, all eighteen Adventurers were answerable to an annual shareholders’ meeting, where elections for the coming year were held.
Charles’s ignorance of the potential scale of the operation led to the governor and company being granted an extraordinarily generous commission. ‘We do grant,’ he proclaimed, on the sheepskin parchment of the founding document, ‘unto the said Governor and Company and their successors the sole Trade and Commerce of all those Seas, Straits, Bays, Rivers, Lakes, Creeks, and Sounds that lie within the entrance of Hudson’s Straits — and make, create, and constitute [them] the true and absolute Lords and Proprietors of the same Territory.’[fn6]
Not only Hudson’s Bay, but also all the drainage area of its myriad tributaries, was entrusted to the entrepreneurs. A strict interpretation of the terms of the founding document meant that Rupert and his colleagues were ‘true and absolute Lords and Proprietors’ of a territory covering 1.5 million square miles: what was now known as ‘Rupert’s Land’ comprised roughly half of America north of the Rio Grande. (If the Northwest Passage had existed, Rupert would have been nominal governor of the largest empire known to man.) In return for his largesse, Charles accepted meagre payment: he was to receive two elks and two black beavers per year. Rupert, eager to keep his cousin sweet, occasionally added extra small gifts from the company: the king was reported to be delighted with a pair of beaver stockings.
From its true inception, the Hudson’s Bay Company promised success, which the shareholders backed with continuing investment. A three-masted, 75-ton frigate was built, her storage areas designed to transport beaver pelts with the maximum of care and efficiency. She was named the Prince Rupert. At the end of May 1670, less than a month since the king signed the company’s charter, the Prince Rupert and the Wivenhoe (loaned by the king) began a voyage to the bay with not just Radisson and des Groseilliers aboard, but also a jailbird called Charles Bayley.
Bayley’s most recent detention had been in the Tower of London, on charges of sedition, but he had also spent time in various European prisons. A Quaker with a long beard, Bayley certainly did not want for optimism: he had once tried to convert the Pope to Protestantism. Despite his eccentricity, Bayley was selected by Rupert and his colleagues to protect the corporation’s interests in North America. He proved to be an inspired choice.
Bayley remained at his post for nearly a decade, during which time the company progressed from promising much, to delivering plenty. He had a clear understanding of what was needed: he concentrated his efforts on the most important points in the forbidding landscape, erecting factories to process and receive the animal furs, and ensuring that nobody else controlled the waterways that drained into the bay. He had a hands-on style of leadership, physically helping to erect buildings and assisting in their thatching. Bayley also maintained good relations with the indigenous people. This peaceful co-existence — a result of his Quaker beliefs — meant his men were never short of game and fish to eat: either they shot or caught for the pot themselves or they bought fresh flesh from native hunters.
So successful was Bayley in his empire-building that he put Radisson’s and des Groseilliers’s noses out of joint. In 1674 they were lured back into the service of their motherland, their passage eased by the payment of lavish inducements and made easier by the encouragement of a Jesuit priest. However, the efforts of Prince Rupert in England, and Bayley in America, meant that the English had scooped the prize from under French noses.
The expansion was steady to start with. The Prince Rupert and the Wivenhoe returned from the bay in 1671 with enough furs to attract more, eager investors. The following January, 11,000lb of beaver furs were disposed of in twenty-seven lots, at a public auction in Garraway’s Coffee House, for nearly £4,000. (In its first dozen years, the company had no permanent offices: its business took place in taverns and coffee houses.) Slightly larger returns were recorded the following year, when three ships returned from the burgeoning outpost.
Prince Rupert’s efforts on behalf of commerce were publicly recognised when he was granted the honour of laying the cornerstone of the Royal Exchange. In August 1670 he was one of the first men appointed councillors for trade and plantations.
By 1676, the company was making a profit of £19,000 against costs of £650. However, during Rupert’s governorship, the Hudson’s Bay Company never paid its investors a dividend: this was to be a long-term investment and one that its founders were determined should have every chance of success. There were also disappointments: in 1678 the company’s ship the Shaftesbury was sunk on its return journey, with the loss of all of that year’s furs.
The prince remained fully involved with the promotion of the company. Minutes show his tireless energy and his appreciation of contemporary business practices: bribes — pieces of silver and hogsheads of claret — found their way to those able to progress the investors’ fortunes. Rupert’s Land was a significant territory by the time of the prince’s death. Out of its ashes rose an important part of modern Canada: without the company’s presence, it is probable that American settlers would have claimed the land for themselves. Furthermore, three of today’s provincial capitals — Winnipeg, Edmonton, and Victoria — started life as trading outposts for the Hudson’s Bay Company.