CHAPTER XVI
1719-1740
OLD CAPTAIN KNIGHT BESET BY GOLD FEVER, HEARS THE CALL OF THE NORTH—THE STRAITS AND BAY—THE FIRST HARVEST OF THE SEA AT DEAD MAN’S ISLAND—CASTAWAYS FOR THREE YEARS—THE COMPANY BESET BY GOLD FEVER INCREASES ITS STOCK—PAYS TEN PER CENT. ON TWICE-TREBLED CAPITAL—COMING OF SPIES AGAIN
Fromthe time of the first voyage up to Churchill River, in 1686, the fur traders had noticed tribes of Indians from the far North, who wore ornaments of almost pure copper. Chunks of metal, that melted down to lead with a percentage of silver, were brought down to the fur post at Slude River in Labrador on the east side of the bay. Vague tales were told by the wandering Eskimo and Chippewyans at Churchill of a vast copper mine somewhere on that river now known as Coppermine, and of a metal for which the Indians had no name but which white man’s avidity quickly recognized as gold dust coming from the far northern realms of icebergand frost known as Baffin’s Land. How true some of these legends were has been proved by the great cobalt mines of modern Ontario and placers of Alaska. But where lies the hidden treasure trove from which the Indians brought down copper to Churchill, silver to Slude River, and gold dust—if gold it was—from the snowy realm of the Eskimo in the North? Those treasure stores have not yet been uncovered, though science has declared that vast deposits of copper may be found west of Chesterfield Inlet, and placers may at any time be uncovered in Baffin’s Land.
The Hudson’s Bay charter had been granted in the first place for “the discovery of a passage to the South Sea.” At this time, there was great agitation in Russia for the discovery of the Straits of Anian, that were supposed to lead through America from Asia to Europe. Vitus Bering’s expedition to find these straits resulted in Russia’s discovery of Alaska.
The English Adventurers now kept agents in Russia. They were aware of the projects in the air at the Russian Court. Why not combine the search for the passage to the South Sea with the search for the hidden mines of Indian legends? Besides—the Company had another project in the air. Richard Norton, the apprentice boy, had gone overland north from Churchill almost as far as Chesterfield Inlet.Chesterfield Inlet seemed to promise the passage to the South Sea; but what was more to the point—the waters in this part of the bay offered great opportunities for whale fisheries. With the threefold commission of discovering mines, the passage to the South Sea, and a whale fishery, old Captain Knight sailed from Gravesend on June 3, 1719, “so God send the good ships a successful Discovery and to return in safety—your loving friends”—ran the words of the commission.
Four ships there were in the fleet that sailed this year:The Mary, frigate, under Captain Belcher, with Mike Grimmington, Jr., now chief mate, a crew of eighteen and a passenger list of new servants for York and Churchill, among them Henry Kelsey, to be governor during Knight’s absence from Churchill; the frigateHudson’s Bayunder Captain Ward, with twenty-three passengers for the south end of the bay; and the two ships for Knight’s venture:The Discovery, Captain Vaughan;The Albany, Captain Bailey, with fifty men, all told, bound for the unknown North, the three men, Benjamin Fuller, David Newman and John Awdry going as lieutenants to Captain Knight. Henry Kelsey had left his wife in London. Each of the captains had given bonds of £2,000 to obey Knight in all things.
Knight himself is now eighty years of age—an old war horse limbering up to battle at the smell of powder smoke—his ships loaded with iron-hooped treasure casks to carry back the gold dust. The complete frames of houses are carried to build a post in the North, and among his fifty men are iron forgers, armorers, whalers from Dundee, and a surgeon paid the unusual salary of £50 a year on account of the extraordinary dangers of this voyage. Bailey was probably the son of that Bayly, who was first governor for the Adventurers on the bay. A seasoned veteran, he had passed through the famous siege of Nelson in ’97. When Knight had left Albany to come to England, Fullerton was deputy and Bailey next in command. There was peace with France, but that had not prevented a score of French raiders coming overland to ambush the English. Bailey got wind of the raiders hiding in the woods round Albany and shutting gates, bided his time. Word was sent to the mate of his ship lying off shore, at the sound of a cannon shot to rush to the rescue. At midnight a thunderous hammering on the front gates summoned the English to surrender. Bailey gingerly opened the wicket at the side of the gate and asked what was wanted.
“Entrance,” yelled the raiders, confident that they had taken the English by surprise.
Bailey answered that the Governor was asleep, but he would go and fetch the keys. The raiders rallied to the gate. Bailey put the match lighters to the six-pounders inside and let fly simultaneous charges across the platform where the raiders crowded against the gate. There was instant slaughter, a wild yell, and a rush for cover in the woods, but the cannon shot had brought the master of Bailey’s sloop running ashore. Raiders and sailors dashed into each other’s faces, with the result that the crew were annihilated in the dark. For some days the raiders hung about the outskirts of the woods, burying the dead, waiting for the wounded to heal, and hunting for food. A solitary Frenchman was observed parading the esplanade in front of the fort. Fullerton came out and demanded what he wanted. The fellow made no answer but continued his solitary march up and down under the English guns. Fullerton offered to accept him as a hostage for the others’ good conduct, but the man was mute as stone. The English governor bade him be off, or he would be shot. The strange raider continued his odd tramp up and down till a shot from the fort window killed him instantly. The only explanation of the incident was that the man must have been crazed by the hardship of the raid and by the horrors of the midnight slaughter.
Bailey, then, was the man chosen as the captain ofThe Albanyand Knight’s right-hand man.
The ships were to keep together till they reached the entrance of the straits, the two merchantmen under Ward and Belcher then to go forward to the fur posts, Knight’s two ships straight west for Chesterfield Inlet, where he was to winter. Two guineas each, the Adventurers gave the crews of each ship that afternoon on June 3, at Gravesend, to drink “God-speed, a prosperous discovery, a faire wind, and a good sail.”
As a railway is now being actually built after being projected on paper for more than twenty-five years—from the western prairie to a seaport on Hudson Bay, which has for its object the diversion of Western traffic to Europe from New York to some harbor on Hudson Bay, it is necessary to give in detail what the archives of the Hudson’s Bay Company reveal about this route. Hudson Strait opens from the Atlantic between Resolution Island on the north and the Button Islands on the south. From point to point, this end of the strait is forty-five miles wide. At the other end, the west side, between Digges’ Island and Nottingham Island, is a distance of thirty-five miles. From east to west, the straits are four hundred and fifty miles long—wider at the east where the southside is known as Ungava Bay, contracting at the west, to the Upper Narrows. The south side of the strait is Labrador; the north, Baffin’s Land. Both sides are lofty, rocky, cavernous shores lashed by a tide that rises in places as high as thirty-five feet and runs in calm weather ten miles an hour. Pink granite islands dot the north shore in groups that afford harborage, but all shores present an adamant front, edges sharp as a knife or else rounded hard to have withstood and cut the tremendous ice jam of a floating world suddenly contracted to forty miles, which Davis Strait pours down at the east end and Fox Channel at the west.
Seven hundred feet is considered a good-sized hill; one thousand feet, a mountain. Both the north and the south sides of the straits rise two thousand feet in places. Through these rock walls ice has poured and torn and ripped a way since the ice age preceding history, cutting a great channel to the Atlantic. Here, the iron walls suddenly break to secluded silent valleys moss-padded, snow-edged, lonely as the day Earth first saw light. Down these valleys pour the clear streams of the eternal snows, burnished as silver against the green, setting the silence echoing with the tinkle of cataracts over some rock wall, or filling the air with the voice of many waters at noon-tide thaw. One old navigator—Coates—describes thebeat of the angry tide at the rock base and the silver voice of the mountain brooks, like the treble and bass of some great cathedral organ sounding its diapason to the glory of God in this peopleless wilderness.
Perhaps the kyacks of some solitary Eskimo, lashed abreast twos and threes to prevent capsizing, may shoot out from some of these bog-covered valleys like seabirds; but it is only when the Eskimos happen to be hunting here, or the ships of the whalers and fur traders are passing up and down—that there is any sign of human habitation on the straits.
Walrus wallow on the pink granite islands in huge herds. Polar bears flounder from icepan to icepan. The arctic hare, white as snow but for the great bulging black eye, bounds over the bowlders. Snow buntings, whistling swans, snow geese, ducks in myriads—flacker and clacker and hold solemn conclave on the adjoining rocks, as though this were their realm from the beginning and for all time.
Of a tremendous depth are the waters of the straits. Not for nothing has the ice world been grinding through this narrow channel for billions of years. No fear of shoals to the mariner. Fear is of another sort. When the ice is running in a whirlpool and the incoming tide meets the ice jam and the waters mount thirty-five feet high and a wind roars between the high shores like a bellows—then itis that the straits roll and pitch and funnel their waters into black troughs where the ships go down. “Undertow,” the old Hudson’s Bay captains called the suck of the tide against the ice-wall; and that black hole where the lumpy billows seemed to part like a passage between wall of ice and wall of water was what the mariners feared. The other great danger was just a plain crush, getting nipped between two icepans rearing and plunging like fighting stallions, with the ice blocks going off like pistol shots or smashed glass. No child’s play is such navigating either for the old sailing vessels of the fur traders or the modern ice-breakers propelled by steam! Yet, the old sailing vessels and the whaling fleets have navigated these straits for two hundred years.
Westward of the straits, the shores dropped to low, sandy reaches at Mansfield Island. Another five hundred miles across the bay brought the ships to Churchill and York (Nelson).
Here, then, came Captain Knight’s fleet. And the terrific dangers of his venture met him—as it were—on the spot. The records do not give the exact point of the disaster, but one may guess without stretching imagination that it was in the Upper Narrows where thirty-five feet of lashing tide meet a churning wall of ice.
The ships were embayed, sails lowered, ruddersunshipped, and anchors put out for the night. Night did not mean dark. It meant the sunlight aslant the ice fields and pools in hues of fire that tinted the green waves and set rainbows playing in the spray. Gulls wheeled and screamed overhead. Cascades tinkled over the ice walls. There was the deep stillness of twilight calm, then the quiver of the ship’s timbers forewarning the rising tide, then the long, low undertone of the ocean depths gathering might to hurl against the iron forces of the ice. The crews had been rambling over the ice but were now recalled to be on the watch as the tide rose. Some were at the windlass ready to heave anchors up at first opening of clear water; others ready to lower boats and tow from dangers; others again preparing blasts of powder to blow up the ice if the tide threatened to close the floes in a squeeze. Captain Ward’s men must have been out on the ice, for it happened in the twinkling of an eye as such wrecks always happened, and not a man was lost. Two icepans reared up, smashed together, crushed the frigateHudson’s Bay, like an eggshell and she sank a water-logged wreck before their eyes. Ward’s crew were at once taken on board by Belcher, and when the ice loosened, carried on down to York and Albany. There was a lawsuit against the Company for the wages of these men wrecked outward boundand kept in idleness on the bay for thirteen months. The matter was compromised by the Company paying ten months’ wages instead of thirteen.
Captain Knight waited only long enough at Churchill to leave the fort provisions. Then he set out on his quest to the north. This could scarcely be described as foolhardy, for his ships carried the frames for houses to winter in the North. From this point on, the story must be pieced together of fragments. From the time Captain Knight left Churchill, in 1719, his journal ceases. No line more came from the game old pathfinder to the Company. The year 1719 passed, 1720, 1721, still no word of him. Surely, he must have passed through the Straits of Anian to the South Sea and would presently come home from Asia laden with spices and gold dust for the Company. But why didn’t he send back one of the little whaling boats to Churchill with word of his progress; or why didn’t some of the men come down from the whaling station he was to establish at Chesterfield Inlet? Henry Kelsey takes a cruise on the sloopProsperousfrom York, in 1719, but finds no trace of him. Hancock has been cruising the whaling seas onThe Successthat same summer, but he learns nothing of Knight. The whole summer of 1721, while whaling, Kelsey is on the lookout forthe peaked sails of Knight’s ships; but he sees never a sail. Napper is sent out again on the sloopSuccess, but he runs amuck of a reef four days from Nelson River and loses his ship and almost his life.
Three full years were long enough for Knight to have circumnavigated the globe. By 1721, the Company was so thoroughly alarmed that it boughtThe Whalebone, sloop—John Scroggs, master—and sent it from Gravesend on the 31st of May to search for Knight. Two years Scroggs searched the northwest coast of the bay, but the northwest coast of the bay is one thousand miles in and out, and Scroggs missed the hidden hole-in-the-wall that might have given up the secret of the sea. Norton traveling inland with the Indians hears disquieting stories, and some whalers chancing North, in 1726, discover a new harbor at the bottom of which lie cannon, anchors, bits of iron, but it is not till fifty years later that the story is learned in detail.
Here it is:
Knight steered for that western arm of the sea known as Chesterfield Inlet. It was here that Norton had heard legends of copper mines and seen evidences of tide water. Just south of Chesterfield Inlet is a group of white quartz islands the largest five by twenty miles, known as Marble Island, from the fact that it is bare of growth as a gravestone.Bedford whalers of modern days have called it by another name—Dead Man’s Island.
At the extreme east is a hole-like cavity in the rock wall where Eskimos were wont to shoot in with their bladder boats and hide from the fury of the northeast gale. One night as the autumn storms raged, the Indians were amazed to see two huge shadows emerge from the lashing hurricane like floating houses—driving straight as an arrow for the mark to certain destruction between an angry sea and the rock wall. If there were cries for help, they were drowned by the shrieks of the hurricane. In the morning, when the storm had abated, the Indians saw that the shadows had been whitemen’s ships. The large one had struck on the reefs and sunk. The other was a mass of wave-beaten wreckage on the shore, but the white men were toiling like demons, saving the timbers. Presently, the whites began to erect a framework—their winter house. To the wondering Eskimos, the thing rose like magic. The Indians grasped their kyacks and fled in terror.
It need scarcely be told—these were Knight’s treasure-seekers, wrecked without saving a pound of provisions on an island bare as a billiard ball twenty miles from the mainland. How did the crews pass that winter? Their only food must have been such wild cranberries as they could gather under thedrifting snows, arctic hares, snowbirds, perhaps the carcass of an occasional dead porpoise or whale. When the Indians came back in the summer of 1720, there were very few whitemen left, but there was a great number of graves—graves scooped out of drift sand with bowlders for a tombstone. The survivors seemed to be starving. They fell like wild beasts on the raw seal meat and whale oil that the Eskimos gave them. They seemed to be trying to make a boat out of the driftwood that had been left of that winter’s fuel. The next time the Eskimos visited the castaways, there were only two men alive. These were demented with despair, passing the time weeping and going to the highest rock on the island to watch for a sail at sea. Their clothes had been worn to tatters. They were clad in the skins of the chase and looked like madmen. From the Indians’ account, it was now two years from the time of the wreck. What ammunition had been saved from the ships, must have been almost exhausted. How these two men kept life in their bodies for two winters in the most bitterly cold, exposed part of Hudson Bay, huddling in their snow-buried hut round fires of moss and driftwood, with the howling north wind chanting the death song of the winding sheet, and the scream of the hungry were-wolf borne to their ears in the storm—can better be imagined than described.
Why did not they try to escape? Possibly, because they were weakened by famine and scurvy. Surely Bering’s Russians managed better when storm cast them on a barren island while they were searching this same mythical passage. They drifted home on the wreckage. Why could not these men have tried to escape in the same way? In the first place, they did not know they were only twelve miles from the main coast. Cast on Marble Island in the storm and the dark, they had no idea where they were, except that it was in the North and in a harbor facing east. Of the two last survivors, one seemed to be the armorer, or else that surgeon who was to receive £50 for the extraordinary dangers of this voyage, for he was constantly working with metal instruments to rivet the planks of his raft together. But he was destined to perish as his comrades. When his companion died, the man tried to scoop out a grave in the sand. It was too much for his strength. He fell as he toiled over the grave and died among the Eskimo tents. So perished Captain Knight and his treasure-seekers, including the veteran Bailey—as Hudson had perished before them—taken as toll of man’s progress by the insatiable sea. Not a secret has been wrested from the Unknown, not a milepost won for civilization from savagery, but some life has paid for the secret to go down in despairand defeat; but some bleaching skeleton of a nameless failure marks where the mile forward was won. The lintel of every doorway to advancement is ever marked with some blood sacrifice.
Whalers in 1726, saw the cannon and anchors lying at the bottom of the harbor, also casks with iron hoops—that were to bring back the gold dust. Hearne, in 1769, could count where the graves had been scraped up by the wolves, and he gathered up the skeletons along the beach to bury them in a common grave. Latterly, oddly enough, that island was the rendezvous of Northern whalers—where they came from the far North to bury their dead and set up crosses for those who lie in the sea without a grave. It was known as Dead Man’s Island.
After giving an account of three wrecks in four years, I hope it may not seem inconsistent to say that I believe the next century will see a Hudson’s Bay route to Europe. What—you say—after telling of three wrecks in four years? Yes—what Atlantic port does not have six wrecks in ten years? New York and Montreal have more. If the Hudson’s Bay route is not fit for navigation, the country must make it fit for navigation. Of telegraphs, shelters, light-houses, there is not now one. Canals have been dug for less cause than the Upper Narrows of HudsonStraits. If Peter the Great had waited till St. Petersburg was a fit site for a city, there would have been no St. Petersburg. He made it fit. The same problem confronts northwest America to-day. It is absurd that a population of millions has no seaport nearer than two thousand miles. Churchill or York would be seaports in the middle of the continent. Of course, there would be wrecks and difficulties.The wrecks are part of the toll we pay for harnessing the sea. The difficulties are what make nations great.One day was the delay allowed the fur ships for the straits. Who has not waited longer than one day to enter New York harbor or Montreal?
Meanwhile, moneybags at home were counting their shekels. A wild craze of speculation was sweeping over England. It was a fever of getting-something-for-nothing, floating wild schemes of paper capital to be sold to the public for pounds, shillings and pence. In modern language it would be called “wild-catting.” The staid “old Worthies”—as the Adventurers were contemptuously designated—were caught by the craze. It was decided on August 19, 1720, to increase the capital of the Company from £31,500 to £378,000 to be paid for in subscriptions of 10 per cent. installments. Before the scheme had matured, the bubble of speculation had collapsed.Money could neither be borrowed nor begged. The plan to enlarge the stock was dropped as it stood—with subscriptions to the amount of £103,950 paid in—which practically meant that the former capital of £31,500 had been trebled and an additional 10 per cent. levied.
On this twice-trebled capital of £103,950, dividends of 5 per cent. were paid in 1721; of 8 per cent. in 1722; of 12 per cent. in 1723 and ’24; of 10 per cent. from 1725 to 1737, when the dividends fell to 8 per cent. and went up again to 10 per cent. in 1739. From 1723, instead of leaving the money idle in the strong box, it was invested by the Company in bonds that bore interest till their ships came home. From 1738, the Bank of England regularly advanced money for the Company’s operations. Sir Bibye Lake was governor from the time he received such good terms in the French treaty. The governor’s salary is now £200, the deputy’s £150, the committeemen £100 each.
It was in February, 1724, that a warehouse was leased in Lime Street at £12 a year, the present home of the Company.
In four years, the Company had lost four vessels. These were replaced by four bigger frigates, and there come into the service the names of captains famous on Hudson Bay—Belcher, and Goston, andSpurell, and Kennedy, and Christopher Middleton, and Coates, and Isbister, with officers of the names of Inkster, and Kipling, and Maclish, and MacKenzie, and Gunn, and Clement. Twice in ten years, Captain Coates is wrecked in the straits, on the 26th of June, 1727, outward bound with all cargo and again on the frigateHudson’s Bayin 1736, when “we sank,” relates Coates, “less than ten minutes after we were caught by the ice.”
From being an apprentice boy traveling inland to the Indians, Richard Norton has become governor of Churchill, with an Indian wife and half-Indian sons sent to England for education. Norton receives orders, in 1736, once more to explore Chesterfield Inlet where Knight had perished. Napper onThe Churchill, sloop, and Robert Crow onThe Musquashcarry him up in the summer of 1737. Napper dies of natural causes on the voyage, but Chesterfield Inlet is found to be a closed arm of the sea, not a passage to the Pacific; and widow Napper is voted fifty guineas from the Company. Kelsey dies in 1729, and widow Kelsey, too, is voted a bounty of ten guineas, her boy to be taken as apprentice.
In 1736, Captain Middleton draws plans for the building of a fine new post at Moose and of a stone fort at Eskimo Point, Churchill, which shall be the strongest fort in America. The walls are to be sixteenfeet high of solid stone with a depth of twenty-four feet solid masonry at base. On the point opposite Eskimo Cape, at Cape Merry, named after the deputy governor, are to be blockhouses ten feet high with six great guns mounted where watch is to be kept night and day.
Moose will send up the supply of timber for Churchill, and the Company sends from London sixty-eight builders, among whom is one Joseph Robson, at £25 a year, who afterward writes furious attacks on the Company. Barely is Moose completed when it is burned to the ground, through the carelessness of the cook spilling coals from his bake oven.
Two things, perhaps, stirred the Company up to this unwonted activity. Spies were coming overland from St. Lawrence—French explorers working their way westward, led by La Vérendrye. “We warn you,” the Company wrote to each of its factors at this time, “meet these spies very civily but do not offer to detain them and on no account suffer such to come within the gates nor let the servants converse with them, and use all legal methods to make them depart and be on your guard not to tell the company’s secrets.”
Then in 1740, came a bolt from the blue. Captain Christopher Middleton, their trusted officer, publicly resigned from the service to go into theKing’s navy for the discovery of a Northwest Passage through Hudson Bay.
Notes on Chapter XVI.—Of Baffin’s Land, Dr. Bell, who personally explored Hudson Bay in 1885 for the Dominion Government, says: “These ancient grounds probably contain rich placer gold in the valleys of the streams.” The mica mines of Baffin’s Land were being mined in 1906.The name of the captain, who perished with Knight, is our friend Bailey of the Iberville siege; not Barlow, as all modern histories copying from Hearne and 1749 Parl. Report give. The minutes of the H. B. C. show that Barlow is a misprint for Berley, and Berley for Bailey, which name is given repeatedly in the minutes in connection with this voyage.The account of Bering’s efforts to find the Straits of Anian and of his similar fate will be found in “Vikings of the Pacific.”All the printed accounts of Knight’s disaster say he wintered at Churchill in 1719-20. This is wrong, as shown by the unprinted records of H. B. C. He sailed at once for the North. All printed accounts—except Hearne’s—give the place of disaster as the west end of Marble Island. This is a mistake. It was at the east end as given in the French edition of Hearne. Hearne it is, who gives the only account of Bailey’s defense of Albany in 1704, only Hearne calls Bailey, Barlow, which the records show to be wrong.An almost Parallel wreck to that of Knight’s took place at Gull Island off Newfoundland twenty-five years ago. A whole shipload of castaways perished on a barren island in sight of their own harbor lights, only in the case of Gull Island, the castaways did not survive longer than a few weeks. They lived under a piece of canvas and subsisted on snow-water.It was not till 1731 that Knight’s Journals as left at Churchill were sent home to London. They cease at 1719.Richard Norton first went North by land in 1718. His next trip was after Knight’s death; his next, by boat as told in this chapter.In 1723, Samuel Hopkins was sent home in irons from Albany for three times absconding over the walls to the woods without Governor Myatt’s leave. Examined by the committee, he would give no excuse and was publicly dismissed with loss ofwages. Examined later privately, he was re-engaged with honor—which goes to prove that Myatt may have been one of those governors, who ruled his men with the thick end of an oar.At this period, servants for the first time were allowed to go to the woods to trap and were given one half the proceeds of their hunt.
Notes on Chapter XVI.—Of Baffin’s Land, Dr. Bell, who personally explored Hudson Bay in 1885 for the Dominion Government, says: “These ancient grounds probably contain rich placer gold in the valleys of the streams.” The mica mines of Baffin’s Land were being mined in 1906.
The name of the captain, who perished with Knight, is our friend Bailey of the Iberville siege; not Barlow, as all modern histories copying from Hearne and 1749 Parl. Report give. The minutes of the H. B. C. show that Barlow is a misprint for Berley, and Berley for Bailey, which name is given repeatedly in the minutes in connection with this voyage.
The account of Bering’s efforts to find the Straits of Anian and of his similar fate will be found in “Vikings of the Pacific.”
All the printed accounts of Knight’s disaster say he wintered at Churchill in 1719-20. This is wrong, as shown by the unprinted records of H. B. C. He sailed at once for the North. All printed accounts—except Hearne’s—give the place of disaster as the west end of Marble Island. This is a mistake. It was at the east end as given in the French edition of Hearne. Hearne it is, who gives the only account of Bailey’s defense of Albany in 1704, only Hearne calls Bailey, Barlow, which the records show to be wrong.
An almost Parallel wreck to that of Knight’s took place at Gull Island off Newfoundland twenty-five years ago. A whole shipload of castaways perished on a barren island in sight of their own harbor lights, only in the case of Gull Island, the castaways did not survive longer than a few weeks. They lived under a piece of canvas and subsisted on snow-water.
It was not till 1731 that Knight’s Journals as left at Churchill were sent home to London. They cease at 1719.
Richard Norton first went North by land in 1718. His next trip was after Knight’s death; his next, by boat as told in this chapter.
In 1723, Samuel Hopkins was sent home in irons from Albany for three times absconding over the walls to the woods without Governor Myatt’s leave. Examined by the committee, he would give no excuse and was publicly dismissed with loss ofwages. Examined later privately, he was re-engaged with honor—which goes to prove that Myatt may have been one of those governors, who ruled his men with the thick end of an oar.
At this period, servants for the first time were allowed to go to the woods to trap and were given one half the proceeds of their hunt.