Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (14 page)

O
N the other side of the world, on a summer day in those same 1840s, there sits around a polished oak table a group of men so far removed from the world of Akhbar and Elphinstone, so indifferent we may suppose to the aims of evangelical imperialism, that they might be living in another century, or another civilization. Yet they represent an imperial dynamic no less potent than strategy or philanthropy: profit.

There are ten men in the room, with a secretary in attendance, and they are sitting around the table as in a board room. They look a grave but weather-beaten lot, like businessmen hardened, and most of their faces are of a gaunt Scottish cast. The room is comfortably dignified. A log fire burns, and on a side-table are the minutes of previous meetings, in large leather-bound volumes, with quill pens, and bottles of ink, and sand-blotters. The hours pass in earnest deliberation, expert and hard-headed, and the talk is of trade percentages, available stocks, staff promotions, distribution problems. Scratch, scratch goes the pen of the secretary, page after page across the foolscap, and at the end of the session the ten men file up to sign their names and ranks at the bottom of the page, in steady unostentatious hands, before following their chairman through the door into the corridor outside—down which, when the door is opened, a fragrance of wine and roast victuals comfortably drifts.

They are in an elegant white house upon a creek. It is made of painted clapboard, and it has wide shuttered windows, a belfry over the adjoining warehouse, gardens and outhouses behind: all around thickets of trees run darkly to the creek, and to the wide islet-speckled lake which lies below. It looks an urbane and cosy place—a well-stocked, warm, carefully cherished place, where men can do
their business in a civilized way, with pleasure in each other’s company, and plenty to eat and drink.

These are the Governor-in-Chief, the Chief Factors and the Chief Traders of the Northern Department of Rupert’s Land of the Honourable Company of Adventurers of England Trading Into Hudson’s Bay, and they are meeting for their annual council meeting at the trading settlement called Norway House, which lies on the shore of Playgreen Lake in largely uninhabited, mostly unexplored, and almost inconceivably remote forest country 1,500 miles west of Montreal. They have come there by boat and canoe from the far corners of the Canadian wilderness: and Sir George Simpson, their formidable little chairman, has arrived in a canoe so splendidly accoutred, so gorgeously manned, that his immense journey through the forests has been almost a royal progress.

Trade and Empire had always gone together—had once, indeed, seemed virtually synonymous. That trade necessarily followed the flag was an often specious theory not yet formulated, but since the earliest days of British overseas settlement, the chance of fortune had been a prime motive of expansion. The bartering white man on the alien shore was an original archetype of empire: beads, skins, gunpowder, cowrie shells, calicos, rum and slaves were staples of English glory. Trade had first taken the British to India, and though the lost colonies of America were profit-seeking enterprises of a different kind, still the old 18th century empire had been frankly a commercial structure.

The tradition of the English merchant venturers was born in the sixteenth century, when Edward VI gave a Royal Charter to a company formed by some 100 English gentlemen, and three ladies, called ‘The Mysterie and Companie of the Merchants Adventurers for the discoverie of Regions, Dominions, Islands and places unknown’. This concern, later the Muscovy Company, set the pattern for all the chartered companies that were to follow. It was formed with royal approval to perform, at a profit to itself, some service to the State—which in those days had few ships and little cash of its
own. It was specifically a trading company, but it was incidentally an instrument of policy—the three little ships of its first expedition failed in their attempts to find a northern route to Cathay, but instead the company opened up trade with Russia, founded the first British trading stations or ‘factories’ in foreign territory, and learnt a great deal about the geography of Central Asia. The Muscovy Company never aspired to foreign dominion, but in establishing diplomatic contacts, in assembling intelligence, in exploration and in the establishment of trade routes, its merchants were in effect doing the work of the State.

By the early decades of Victoria’s reign two great exemplars of this tradition survived, and were now assuming a new role in national affairs. The relationship between trade and dominion was becoming more complex. As Disraeli said of that traditional colonial commodity, sugar, all considerations now mingled in it: ‘not merely commercial, but imperial, philanthropic, religious; confounding and crossing each other, and confusing the legislature and the nation lost in a maze of conflicting interests and contending emotions’. On the one hand were those, like Cobden, Bright and the economists of the Manchester School, who believed that the advent of free trade would make empire altogether obsolete: even Disraeli himself, presently to become the most eloquent of imperialists, thought in the 1830s that colonies were ‘millstones around our necks’. On the other hand were those who saw Britain’s new worldwide supremacy as an unequalled opportunity of profit. The British had just satisfactorily concluded a small war intended only to persuade the Chinese that the continuing importation of opium from British India would be to everyone’s advantage, and the financiers of the City of London were beginning to see that the scattered possessions of empire, so many of them acquired as trophies of war, might be as useful to trade as they were to strategy.

The Chartered Companies reflected this transient uncertainty, and stood recognizably betwixt and between. The East India Company no longer had mercantile functions at all. In 1833 it had surrendered its monopoly of the India and China trades, except only in opium, and it was now a kind of sovereign agency, administering its Indian possessions on behalf of the Crown, and only incidentally
paying its stockholders their guaranteed 10 per cent dividend. Its governing Court of Directors was subject to an official Board of Control, and with its own civil service, its own fleets and armies, its own military academy and its own administrative college, it was not exactly a company any more, nor exactly a ministry, nor quite a Power, but rather, as Macaulay said of it, ‘the strangest of all governments, designed for the strangest of all empires’ (and properly exemplified, perhaps, by the cart-loads of jewelry, silks and ceremonial weapons which, presented to the Governor-General of India on any tour, must scrupulously be handed over to the Company’s accountants when His Excellency returned to Calcutta).

The other Chartered Company of Queen Victoria’s empire was the Company of Adventurers of England Trading Into Hudson’s Bay, whose factors we have observed leaving their council chamber for dinner (smoked buffalo tongues, moose noses, beaver tails, wild duck, trout, whitefish and venison—though discipline being, as a contemporary observer recalled, ‘very strict in those days’, sherry and old port was all they drank).

Canada in 1845 was almost all empty. There were busy settlements in the east, along the St Lawrence River, in the maritime provinces and around the eastern shores of the Great Lakes, but most of the vast territory to the west was inhabited only by scattered Indian tribes, Eskimos, wandering trappers and isolated traders. In theory the whole country was British. Since the end of the French wars Canada had formed one of the weirder of the Crown’s dependencies, peopled, where it was peopled at all, mostly by Frenchmen, American loyalists and dispossessed Highlanders. The eastern settlements had been grouped into five separate colonies. The whole of the rest of the country, from the Great Lakes in the east to Vancouver Island in the west, from the American frontier to well over the Arctic Circle, was the domain of the Company of Adventurers: all the land draining into Hudson Bay was actually their property, and everywhere else they held the exclusive right to trade.

The Company was founded in 1670, when Charles II granted
Prince Rupert and a group of associates the right to be the ‘true and absolute Lordes and Proprietors’ of the territory, most of it never seen by Europeans, ‘in whatsoever latitude they shall bee that lye within the entrance of the Streightes commonly called Hudson’s Streightes’. Not only were they granted a trading monopoly within this vast region, Rupert’s land, but they were to hold possession of it all ‘in free and common socage, on the same terms as the Manor of East Greenwich’, paying the Crown two elks and two black beavers whenever the King should enter the territories—which must have seemed to the Adventurers, in 1670, a sufficiently improbable contingency.

Fur was the principal object, and for the next 150 years the Company’s agents lived lives of gruesome hardship to confirm their lien upon the Canadian fauna. They fought wars with the French. They built fortresses. They established trading posts of nightmare isolation. They explored, by canoe and on snowshoe, the limitless creeks and lakes of the interior. They sailed their little ships 7,000 miles each year, from Gravesend to Hudson Bay and back again, to load up with the skins of foxes, bears, martens, otters and above all beavers. In the 1780s the company was challenged by a fierce group of interlopers, mostly Scots and French-Canadian, called the North West Company—Nor’-Westers for short—who defied the Charter and fought the company with guile and virulence, corrupting the local Indians with rum or slaughtering them with gunfire, undercutting Company prices, sometimes burning Company posts: but after thirty years of competition the Adventurers, failing to obliterate these piratical newcomers, amalgamated with them instead, and absorbed many of their qualities. In 1821 Parliament extended the Company’s trading rights to cover all the western Canadian regions discovered since Charles II’s day; within Rupert’s land itself the Adventurers were in quasi-sovereign possession of some 1½ million square miles of territory, unquestionably the largest slab of real estate ever controlled by a board of directors.

So when the Factors of the Northern Department assembled at
Norway House for their annual council, it was an occasion full of consequence. From Lac la Pluie and Saskatchewan, Mackenzie River and Athabasca, Peace River, Isle à la Crosse, Red River, York Factory on the shores of the Bay itself, the great Company canoes converged upon Playgreen Lake. Indians and half-breeds rowed them. From each stern flew the Company flag, bearing the Union Jack and the letters H.B.C., and magisterially amidships sat the Company officer, bearded or mutton-chopped, with his wide hat rammed on his head and his Scottish face impassive—as the free-and-easy crew, in gay kerchiefs or speckled headbands, smoking clay pipes and slung all about with mugs and sheath-knives, sang wild French songs of the
voyageurs
, or exchanged bawdy witticisms in the patois of the west.

Hundreds of lesser travellers, too, converged upon Norway House in June, for this was the great clearing-session of the year’s work, when prices were fixed, routes mapped, and agreement reached on what the Minute Book formally described as Arrangements. There were traders from half Canada, who came there in bark canoes, or in the big York boats, evolved by the Company’s own boatmen, whose square-sailed silhouettes, with their steersmen standing aft like gondoliers, were by now the familiars of the Canadian west. There were Indians out of the forest, whose tepees were clumped among the trees around the post, and whose canoes scudded busily up and down the creek. There were half-breeds and their families, most of them crossed Iroquois with French, with some who claimed MacTavish, Frazer or Mackenzie blood: tough brown people, whose language was a queer singing mixture of French and Indian dialects, and who knew more about travel by canoe, with all the incidental expertise of portage and woodcraft, than anyone else in Canada. All this colourful crew hung about the landing-stage of Norway House, to cheer and shout and fire off feux-de-joie as the big canoes splashed in one by one, to the blowing of bugles, the handshaking of Scotsmen, the volatile embraces of reunited
voyageurs
and the ceremonial greetings of Indians.

The annual climax came when George Simpson himself, the Governor-in-Chief, made his own spectacular arrival, direct from Hudson’s Bay House at Lachine, 1,500 miles away on the St Lawrence River above Montreal. This was a dramatic moment always.
The blast of a bugle preceded him around the point, and as the crowd swarmed down to the waterfront, and the Norway House officials straightened their cravats and assumed their beaver hats, nobly into sight there swept the gubernatorial canoe, bigger and grander than anyone else’s, with a brighter ensign at its stern, more stalwart half-breeds at its paddles, and an altogether matchless air of importance.

Sir George was a stickler for appearances. His crew had gone ashore an hour or two before, to smarten themselves up and make their vessel shipshape, and now the equipage looked very splendid, with its faultless sweep of line, the gaudy decorations of its prow, its vermilion painted paddles and the lovely disciplined sweep of its motion across the water. In the prow stood the bearded half-breed guide, clad in leather, and sometimes the voyageurs burst into song as with a flourish of colour and panache little George Simpson, the Governor-in-Chief, bolt upright in a tall black hat and a sober suit, swept flamboyantly into Norway House.

For eight days, nine in the morning to five at night, Sir George conferred with his Chief Factors and Traders of the North, John Rowand, Donald Ross, Nicol Finlayson, John Edward Harriott, William Sinclair, Paul Fraser, William Mactavish, Edward M. Hopkins from West Ham and George Deschambeault the Canadian—for in those days a Briton was still a Briton, but a Canadian was probably French.

These were the rulers of the West, and patently paramount among them was Simpson, ‘the Little Emperor’, whose taste for swank and consequence gave to their gatherings such a sense of grand occasion. An illegitimate child of modest parents, Simpson had been raised in the manse by his grandfather, minister of the parish of Avoch on the Moray Firth. He went to work for his rich uncle Geddes, a sugar-broker in London, and twelve years later emerged abruptly into history, confident, ambitious and vain, as Governor-in-Chief of H.B.C.—just when the Company, by absorbing the Nor’-Westers, was reaching the climax of its opportunities.