CHAPTER XV
1699-1720
THE FIRST ATTEMPT OF THE ADVENTURERS TO EXPLORE—HENRY KELSEY PENETRATES AS FAR AS THE VALLEY OF THE SASKATCHEWAN—SANFORD AND ARRINGTON, KNOWN AS “RED CAP,” FOUND HENLEY HOUSE INLAND FROM ALBANY—BESET FROM WITHOUT, THE COMPANY IS ALSO BESET FROM WITHIN—PETITIONS AGAINST THE CHARTER—INCREASE OF CAPITAL—RESTORATION OF THE BAY FROM FRANCE
ThePeace of Ryswick in 1697, which decreed that war should cease on Hudson Bay, and that France and England should each retain what they chanced to possess at the time of the treaty—left the Adventurers of England with only one fort, Albany, under doughty old Governor Knight, and one outpost, New Severn, which refugees driven to the woods had built out of necessity.
Back in ’85 when Robert Sanford had been ordered to explore inland, he had reported such voyages impracticable. The only way to obtain inland trade, he declared, was to give presents to the Indianchiefs and attract the tribes down to the bay. Now that the French had swept the English from the bay, Sanford was driven to the very thing he had said could not be done—penetrating inland to intercept the Indian fleets of canoes before they came down to the French. With one Arrington, known as Red Cap on the bay, and a man, John Vincent, Sanford year after year went upstream from Albany through Keewatin toward what is now Manitoba. By 1700, Henley House had been built one hundred and fifty miles inland from Albany. The French war was proving a blessing in disguise. It had awakened the sleeping English gentlemen of the bay and was scattering them far and wide. The very year the French came overland, 1686, Captain Abraham had sailed north from Nelson to Churchill—“a faire wide river,” he describes it, naming it after the great Marlborough; and now with only Albany as the radiating point, commanded by old Governor Knight, sloops under the apprentice boy, young Henry Kelsey, under Mike Grimmington and Smithsend, sailed across to the east side of the bay, known as East Main (now known as Ungava and Labrador) and yearly traded so successfully with the wandering Eskimo and Montagnais there that in spite of the French holding the bay, cargoes of 30,000 and 40,000 beaver pelts were sent home to England.
But the honors of exploration at this period belong to the ragamuffin, apprentice lad, Henry Kelsey. He had come straight to Nelson before the French occupation from the harum-scarum life of a London street arab. At the fur posts, discipline was absolutely strict. Only the governor and chief trader were allowed to converse with the Indians. No man could leave the fort to hunt without special parole. Every subordinate was sworn to unquestioning obedience to the officer above him. Servants were not supposed to speak unless spoken to. Written rules and regulations were stuck round the fort walls thick as advertisements put up by a modern bill poster, and the slightest infraction of these martinet rules was visited by guardroom duty, or a sound drubbing at the hands of the chief factor, or public court-martial followed by the lash. It was all a part of the cocked hat and red coat and gold lace and silk ruffles with which these little kings of the wilderness sought to invest themselves with the pomp of authority. It is to the everlasting credit of the Company’s governors that a system of such absolute despotism was seldom abused. Perhaps, too, the loneliness of the life—a handful of whites cooped up amid all the perils of savagery—made each man realize the responsibility of being his brother’s keeper.
Henry Kelsey, the apprentice boy, fresh from thestreets of London, promptly ran amuck of the strict rules at Nelson. He went in and out of the fort without leave, and when gates were locked, he climbed the walls. In spite of rules to the contrary, he talked with the Indians and hunted with them, and when Captain Geyer switched him soundly for disobedience, he broke bars, jumped the walls, and ran away with a party of Assiniboines. About this time, came the French to the bay. The Company was moving heaven and earth to induce servants to go inland for trade when an Indian runner brought a message on birch bark from Kelsey. He had been up Hayes River with the Indians and now offered to conduct an exploration on condition of pardon. Geyer not only pardoned the young renegade but welcomed him back to the fort bag and baggage, Indian wife and all the trumpery of an Indian family. The great Company issued Kelsey a formal commission for discovery, and the next year on July 15, 1691, as the Assiniboines departed from Deering’s Point where they camped to trade at Nelson, Kelsey launched out in a canoe with them.
Radisson and young Chouart had been up this river some distance; but as far as known, Kelsey was the first white man to follow Hayes River westward as far as the prairies. The weather was exceedingly dry, game scarce, grass high and brittle,the tracks hard to follow whether of man or beast. Within a week, the Indians had gone up one hundred and seventy miles toward what are now known as Manitoba and Saskatchewan, but only two moose and one partridge had been killed, and provisions were exhausted. Leaving the Indians, Kelsey pushed forward across country following the trail of an encampment to the fore. At the end of a thirty mile tramp through brushwood of poplars and scrub birch, he came to three leather tepees. No one was in them. Men and women were afield hunting. Ravenous with hunger, Kelsey ransacked provision bags. He found nothing but dried grass and was fain to stay his hunger with berries. At night the hunters came in with ten swans and a moose. Here, Kelsey remained with them hunting till his party came up, when all advanced together another one hundred and thirty miles to the Assiniboine camping place. There were only twenty-six tents of Assiniboines. In a fray, the main party of Assiniboine hunters had slain three Cree women, and had now fled south, away from Cree territory. By the middle of August, Kelsey and his hunters were on the buffalo plains. All day, the men hunted. At night, the women went out to bring in and dress the meat. Once, exhausted, Kelsey fell sound asleep on the trail. When he awakened, there was not eventhe dust of the hunt to guide him back to camp. From horizon to horizon was not a living soul; only the billowing prairie, grass neck high, with the lonely call of birds circling overhead. By following the crumpled grass and watching the sky for the reflection of the camp fires at night, Kelsey found his way back to the Assiniboines. Another time, camp fire had been made of dry moss. Kelsey was awakened to find the grass round him on fire and the stock of his musket blazing. With his jackknife he made a rude gunstock for the rest of the trip. Hunting with an Indian one day, the two came unexpectedly on a couple of grizzly bears. The surprise was mutual. The bears knew no fear of firearms and were disposed to parley, but the hunters didn’t wait. The Indian dashed for a tree; Kelsey for hiding in a bunch of willows, firing as he ran. The bears mistook the direction of the shot and had pursued the Indian. Kelsey’s charge had wounded one bear, and with a second shot, he now disabled the other, firing full in its face. The double victory over the beast of prey most feared by the Indians gained him the name of Little Giant—Miss-top-ashish.
From Kelsey’s journal, it is impossible to follow the exact course of his wanderings. Enemies, who tried to prove that the English Company deserved no credit for exploration, declared that he did not gofarther than five hundred miles from the bay, seventy-one by canoe, three hundred through woods overland, forty-six across a plain, then eighty-one more to the buffalo country. From his own journal, the distance totals up six hundred miles; but he does not mention any large river except the Hayes, or large lake; so that after striking westward he must have been north of Lake Winnipeg and the Saskatchewan, but not so far north and west as Athabasca. This would place his wanderings in the modern province of Saskatchewan.
It was the 24th of August before he joined Washa, chief of the Assiniboines, and took up lodgings amid the eighty tents of the tribe. Solemnly, the peace pipe was smoked and, on the 12th of September, Kelsey presented the Assiniboine chief with the present of a lace coat, a cap, a sash, guns, knives, powder and shot, telling the Indians these were tokens of what the white men would do if the Indians proved good hunters; but on no account must the tribes war on one another, or the white man would give the enemy guns, which would exterminate all fighters. Washa promised to bring his hunt down to the bay, which tribal wars prevented for some years. Hudson’s Bay traders, who followed up Kelsey’s exploration—aimed for the region now known as Cumberland House, variously called Poskoyac and Basquia—westwardof Lake Winnipeg, so there is little doubt it was in this land that the Hudson’s Bay boy first hunted and camped. With Kelsey, the result was instant promotion. His wife went home to England, where she was regularly paid his salary, and he rose to a position second only to the venerable old Governor Knight, commander of the entire bay.
Meanwhile, the French were having their own troubles in the captured forts. War had broken out again, and was going against France in Marlborough’s victories. The French might hold the bay, but not a pound of provisions could be sent across seas on account of English privateers. The French garrisons of Hudson Bay were starving. Indians, who brought down pelts from the Pays d’en Haut or upcountry—could obtain no goods in barter and having grown dependent on the whiteman’s firearms, were in turn reduced to straits.
Lagrange, a gay court adventurer, had come out in 1704 to Nelson, which the French called Bourbon, with a troop of pleasure-seeking men and women for a year’s hunting. For one year, the drab monotony of post life was enlivened by a miniature Paris. Wines from the royal cellars flowed like water. The reckless songs of court gallants rang among the rafters, and the slippered feet of more reckless court beauties tripped the light dance overthe rough-timbered floors of the fur post. It was a wild age, and a wild court from which they came to this wilderness—reckless women and reckless men, whose God was Pleasure. Who knows what court intrigue was being hidden and acted out at Port Nelson? Poor butterflies, that had scorched their wings and lost their youth, came here to masquerade! Soldiers of fortune, who had gambled their patrimony in the royal court and stirred up scandal, rusticating in a little log fort in the wilderness! The theme is more romantic than the novelist could conceive.
But war broke out, and Lagrange’s gay troop scattered like leaves before the wind. Iberville was dead in Havana. La Fôrest of the Quebec Fur Company had gone back to the St. Lawrence. Jeremie, the interpreter, had gone to France on leave, in 1707, and now in 1708, when the French garrisons were starving and the high seas scoured by privateers—Jeremie came back as governor, under the king. He at once dispatched men to hunt. Nine bushrangers had camped one night near a tent of Crees. The Indians were hungry, sullen, resentful to the whitemen who failed to trade guns and powder as the English had traded. At the fort, they had been turned away with their furs on their hands. It is the characteristic of the French trader that he frequently descends to the level of the Indian.Jeremie’s nine men were, perhaps, slightly intoxicated after their supper of fresh game and strong brandy. Two Indian women came to the camp and invited two Frenchmen to the Indian tents. The fellows tumbled into the trap like the proverbial country jack with the thimblerigger. No sooner had they reached the Indian tepees than they were brained. Seizing the pistols and knives of the dead men, the Indians crept through the thicket to the fire of the bush-rovers. With unearthly yells they fell on the remaining seven and cut them to pieces. One wounded man alone escaped by feigning the rigor of death, while they stripped him naked, and creeping off into hiding of the bushes while the savages devoured the dead. Waiting till they had gone, the wounded man crawled painfully back by night—a distance of thirty miles—to Jeremie, at an outpost. Jeremie quickly withdrew the garrison from the outpost, retreated within the double palisades of Nelson (Bourbon) shot all bolts, unplugged his cannon and awaited siege; but Indians do not attack in the open. Jeremie held the fort till events in Europe relieved him of his charge.
In spite of French victories, as long as Mike Grimmington and Nick Smithsend were bringing home cargoes of thirty thousand beaver a year, the EnglishAdventurers prospered. In fact, within twenty years of their charter’s grant, they had prospered so exceedingly that they no longer had the face to declare such enormous dividends, and on September 3, 1690, it was unanimously decided to treble their original stock from £10,500 to £31,500. The reasons given for this action were: that there were furs of more value than the original capital of the Company now in the Company’s warehouses; that the year’s cargo was of more value than the original capital of the Company; that the returns in beaver from Nelson and Severn alone this year exceeded £20,000; that the forts and armaments were of great value, and that the Company had reasons to expect £100,000 reparation from the French.
Immediately after the decision, a dividend of 25 per cent. was declared on the trebled stock.
Such prosperity excited envy. The fur buyers and pelt workers and skin merchants of London were up in arms. People began to question whether a royal house, which had been deposed from the English throne, had any right to deed away in perpetuity public domain of such vast wealth to court favorites. Besides, court favorites had scattered with the ruined Stuart House. Newcomers were the holders of the Hudson’s Bay Company stock. What right had these newcomers to the privileges of such monopoly?Especially, what was the meaning of such dividends, when the Company regularly borrowed all the money needed for working operations? As late as 1685, the Company had borrowed £2,000 at 6 per cent. from its own shareholders, and after French disasters began to injure its credit in the London market, it regularly sent agents to borrow money in Amsterdam.
The Company foresaw that the downfall of the Stuarts might affect its monopoly and in 1697 had applied for the confirmation of its charter by Parliament. Against this plea, London fur buyers filed a counter petition: (1) It was too arbitrary a charter to be granted to private individuals. (2) It was of no advantage to the public but a mere stockjobbing concern, £100 worth of stock selling as high as £300, £30 as high as £200. (3) Beaver purchased in Hudson Bay for 6d sold in London for 6s. (4) Monopoly drove the Indians to trade with the French. (5) The charter covered too much territory.
To which the Company made answer that not £1,000 of stock had changed hands in the last year, which was doubtless true; for ’97 was the year of the great defeat. The climate would always prevent settlement in Hudson Bay, and most important of all—England would have lost all that region but for the Hudson’s Bay Company. In its mood at the time, that was a telling argument with the English Parliament.Negotiations were in progress with France for a permanent treaty of peace. If the Hudson’s Bay Company were dissolved, to whom would all the region revert but to those already in possession—the French? And if the impending war broke out, who would defend the bay from the French but the Company?
By act of Parliament, the charter of the English Adventurers was confirmed for a period of seven years. And more—when an act was passed in 1708 to encourage trade to America, a proviso was inserted that the territory of the Company should not be included in the freedom of trade.
From the time France was beaten in the continental wars, the English Adventurers never ceased to press their claims against France for the restoration of all posts on Hudson Bay and the payment of damages varying in amount from £200,000 to £100,504. Memorials were presented to King William, memorials to Queen Anne. Sir Stephen Evance, the goldsmith, who had become a heavy shareholder through taking stock in payment for his ships chartered to the bay—had succeeded Marlborough as governor in 1692, but the great general was still a friend at Court, and when Evance retired in 1696, Sir William Trumbull, Secretary of State, became governor. Old Governor Knight came from Albanyon the bay, in 1700, to go to France with Sir Bibye Lake and Marlborough to press the claims of the English fur traders against France. For the double claims of restoration and damages, France offered to trade all the posts on the south shore for all the posts on the west shore. The offer was but a parley for better terms. Both English and French fur traders knew that the best furs came from the west posts. Negotiations dragged on to 1710. It was subterraneously conveyed to the English fur traders that France would yield on one point, but not on both: they could have back the bay but not the indemnity; or the indemnity but not the bay. The English fur traders subterraneously conveyed to the commissioners in Holland, that they would accept the restoration of the bay and write off the indemnity bill of £100,000 as bad debts. Such was the Peace of Utrecht, 1713, as it affected the fate of the Hudson’s Bay Company.
One point was left unsettled by the treaty. Where was the boundary between bushrangers of New France working north from the St. Lawrence, and the voyageurs of the Hudson’s Bay Company, working south from James Bay? A dozen different propositions were made, but none accepted. The dispute came as a heritage to modern days when Quebec and Ontario wrangled out their boundaries,and Ontario and Manitoba competed for Keewatin, and finally the new province of Saskatchewan disputed Manitoba for a slice giving access to a seaport on Hudson Bay.
The settlement came just in time to save the Company from bankruptcy. The Adventurers had no money to pay their captains. Grimmington and Smithsend accepted pay of £200 apiece in bonds. Yet this same Company so often accused of avarice and tyranny to servants borrowed money to pay £20 each to the seamen surviving the terrible disasters of ’97, and donated a special gratuity to Captain Bailey for bringing the books of Nelson safely home. Sir Stephen Evance became governor again in 1700 and transferred £600 of his own stock to Captain Knight as wages for holding Albany. Captains would now accept engagements only on condition of being ransomed if captured, at the Company’s expense; and no ship would leave port without a convoy of frigates.
June 2, 1702, the secretary is ordered to pay the cost of making a scarlet coat with lace, forNepanah-tay, the Indian chief, come home with Captain Grimmington.
November 5, 1703, Captain Knight is ordered to take care of the little Indian girl brought home by Captain Grimmington. It is ordered at the sametime that tradesmen’s bills shall be paid “as long as the money lasts,” but that seamen’s wages be paid up to date. Orders are also issued for the gunsmith “to stamp no barrell nor locks with ye compy’s marker that are not in every way good and perfect.”
Henry Kelsey is now employed at £100 per annum either “to go up country”—meaning inland—or across to East Main (Labrador). When Mike Grimmington is not on the bay in his frigate, he is sent to Russia with beaver, bringing back cargoes of leather. Fullerton takes Knight’s place at Albany, with a scale of wages running from £10 to £16 a year for apprentices with a gratuity of 20s a month if they prove worthy; and to Fullerton and the captains of the vessels are sent twenty-three hogsheads of liquor to keep up their courage against the French in 1710. Outward bound the same year, Mike Grimmington, the veteran of a hundred raids, falls desperately ill. Like the Vikings of the North, he will not turn back. If vanquished, he will be vanquished with face to foe. So he meets his Last Foe at sea, and is vanquished of Death on June 15—within a few weeks of Radisson’s death—and is buried at Harwich. Learning the news by coureur, the Governing Committee promptly vote his widow, Anne, a gift of £100 and appoints the son, Mike Grimmington, Jr., an apprentice. Sir Bibye Lake, who had helpedto secure the favorable terms of the peace treaty, is voted governor in 1713.
In no year at this period did the sales of furs exceed £100,000 but big cargoes are beginning to come in again, and the Company is able to declare a dividend of 10 per cent. in 1718. Before the French war, the forts had been nothing but a cluster of cabins palisaded. Now the Adventurers determine to strengthen their posts. For the time, Rupert and Severn are abandoned, but stone bastions are built in 1718 at Moose and Albany and Nelson (now known as York) and Churchill. Inland from Albany, Henley House is garrisoned against the French overlanders. At East Main on Slude River a fort is knocked together of driftwood and bowlder and lime.
In spite of increased wages and peace, the Adventurers have great difficulty procuring servants. The war has made known the real perils of the service. Mr. Ramsay is employed in 1707 and Captain John Merry in 1712 to go to the Orkneys for servants—fourteen able-bodied seamen in the former year, forty in the latter, and for the first time there come into the history of the Northwest the names of those Orkney families, whose lives are really the record of the great domain to which they gave their strength—the Belchers and Gunns, and the Carruthers, and the Bannisters, and the Isbisters and the Baileys,generation after generation, and the Mackenzies, and the Clarkes and the Gwynnes’s. Some came as clerks, some as gunners, some as bush-lopers. The lowest wage was 12s a month with a gratuity of £2 on signing the contract. But this did not suffice to bring recruits fast enough for the expanding work of the Company, and there comes jauntily on the scene, in 1711, Mr. Andrew Vallentine of matrimonial fame with secret contracts to supply the Company with apprentices if the Company will supply the dowries for the brides of the said apprentices. As told in a former chapter, “all proposals to be locked up in ye Iron Chest in a Booke Aparte.” Dr. Sacheverell, the famous divine, performed the marriage ceremonies; and from an item surreptitiously smuggled into the general minutes of the Company’s records instead of “the Booke Aparte,” I judge that the marriage portions were on a scale averaging some £70 and £100 each. A Miss Evance is named as one of the brides, so that the affair was no common listing of women for the marriage shambles such as Virginia and Quebec witnessed, but a contract in which even a relative of the Company’s governor was not ashamed to enter. Business flourished—as told elsewhere. The marriage office had to have additional apartments in “the Buttery” until about 1735, when lawsuits and the death of Mr. Vallentinecaused a summary shutting down of the enterprise. It had accomplished its aim—brought recruits to the Company.
By 1717 Kelsey, the aforetime apprentice, had become governor of Churchill at £200 a year. One William Stewart and another apprentice, Richard Norton, were sent inland from Churchill to explore and make peace between the tribes. How far north they proceeded is not known—not farther than Chesterfield Inlet, where the water ran with a tide like the sea, and the Indians by signs told legends of vast mines. Kelsey had heard similar tales of mines over on the Labrador coast. Thomas Macklish, who had gone up Nelson River beyond Ben Gillam’s Island, heard similar tales. Each of these explorers, the Company rewarded with gratuities ranging from £20 to £100. There were legends, too, at Moose and Rupert of great silver mines toward Temiscamingue—the field of the modern cobalt beds.
The Company determined to inaugurate a policy of search for mineral wealth and exploration for a passage to the South Sea. Old Captain Knight—now in his eighties—had gone back to the bay to receive the posts from the French under Jeremie. He had returned to England and was, in 1718, ordered on a voyage of exploration. He demanded stiff terms for the arduous task. His salary was to be£400 per annum. He was to have one-tenth profit of all minerals discovered and all new trade established, which was not in furs, such as whale hunting and fishing. He was to be allowed to accept such presents from the evacuating French as he saw fit, and was not to be compelled to winter on the bay. The contract was for four years with the proviso in case of Knight’s death, Henry Kelsey was to be governor of all the bay. With a Greenland schooner and a yawl for inland waters, Knight set sail on the frigates bound from England, hopes high as gold miners stampeding to a new field.
Notes on Chapter XV.—The Sandford first sent inland from Albany was a relative of Captain Gillam and was at one time put on the lists for dismissal owing to Ben Gillam’s poaching.Robsoncasts doubt on Kelsey having gone inland from Nelson, but Robson was writing in a mood of spite toward his former employers. The reasons given for his doubt are two-fold: (1) Kelsey could not have gone five hundred miles in sixty days; (2) in the dry season of July, Kelsey could not have followed any Indian trail. Both objections are absurd. Forty miles a day is not a high average for a good woodsman or canoe-man. As to following a trail in July, the very fact that the grass was so brittle, made it easy to follow recent tracks. Night camp fire and the general direction of the land would be guides enough for a good pathfinder, let alone the crumpled grasses left behind a horde of wandering Indians.Kelsey’s Journal is to be found in the Parliamentary Report of 1749. At the time, it was handed over to Parliament, it was taken from Hudson’s Bay House, and is no longer in the records of the Company. The exact itinerary of the journey, I do not attempt to give. Each reader, especially in the West, can guess at it for himself.It is about this time that Port Nelson became known as York, in honor of the Duke of York, former governor. Heretofore,dispatches were headed “Nelson.” Now, they are addressed to “York.”The account of French occupation is to be found in French Marine Archives and in theRelation of Jeremie, Bernard’s Voyages.Governor Knight paid £277 to the French for provisions left at Nelson. It was the cargo of furs he sent home in 1714 that enabled the Company to pay its long-standing debts and declare a dividend by 1718.As York may soon be Manitoba’s seaport, it is worth noting that in 1715 Captain Davies spent the entire summer beating about and failed to enter Hayes River for the ice. For this failure, he was severely reprimanded by the Company.In 1695 the lease was signed for thirty-five years for the premises on Fenchurch Street, occupied till the Company moved to present quarters in Lime Street.The first map of the bay drawn for the Company was executed in 1684, by John Thornton, for which he was paid £4.It was in 1686 that the famous Jan Péré, the spy, was discharged from prison and escaped to France.All trace of young Chouart is lost after 1689, when he came to London from Nelson.
Notes on Chapter XV.—The Sandford first sent inland from Albany was a relative of Captain Gillam and was at one time put on the lists for dismissal owing to Ben Gillam’s poaching.
Robsoncasts doubt on Kelsey having gone inland from Nelson, but Robson was writing in a mood of spite toward his former employers. The reasons given for his doubt are two-fold: (1) Kelsey could not have gone five hundred miles in sixty days; (2) in the dry season of July, Kelsey could not have followed any Indian trail. Both objections are absurd. Forty miles a day is not a high average for a good woodsman or canoe-man. As to following a trail in July, the very fact that the grass was so brittle, made it easy to follow recent tracks. Night camp fire and the general direction of the land would be guides enough for a good pathfinder, let alone the crumpled grasses left behind a horde of wandering Indians.
Kelsey’s Journal is to be found in the Parliamentary Report of 1749. At the time, it was handed over to Parliament, it was taken from Hudson’s Bay House, and is no longer in the records of the Company. The exact itinerary of the journey, I do not attempt to give. Each reader, especially in the West, can guess at it for himself.
It is about this time that Port Nelson became known as York, in honor of the Duke of York, former governor. Heretofore,dispatches were headed “Nelson.” Now, they are addressed to “York.”
The account of French occupation is to be found in French Marine Archives and in theRelation of Jeremie, Bernard’s Voyages.
Governor Knight paid £277 to the French for provisions left at Nelson. It was the cargo of furs he sent home in 1714 that enabled the Company to pay its long-standing debts and declare a dividend by 1718.
As York may soon be Manitoba’s seaport, it is worth noting that in 1715 Captain Davies spent the entire summer beating about and failed to enter Hayes River for the ice. For this failure, he was severely reprimanded by the Company.
In 1695 the lease was signed for thirty-five years for the premises on Fenchurch Street, occupied till the Company moved to present quarters in Lime Street.
The first map of the bay drawn for the Company was executed in 1684, by John Thornton, for which he was paid £4.
It was in 1686 that the famous Jan Péré, the spy, was discharged from prison and escaped to France.
All trace of young Chouart is lost after 1689, when he came to London from Nelson.