Ben Gillam was outwitted through defiantly accepting an invitation to visit the French fort. Gillam visited his rivals to spy on their weakness, and openly taunted them at the banquet table about their helpless condition. When he tried to depart he was coolly told that he was a prisoner, and that, with the aid of any nine Frenchmen Ben chose to pick out from 'the helpless French,' Radisson purposed capturing the poacher's fort and ship. The young captain had fallen into a trap. Radisson had left French hostages at Gillam's fort for his safe return, but these had been instructed to place firearms at convenient places and to post themselves so that they could prevent the sudden closing of the gates. Such precautions proved unnecessary. Radisson walked into the New England poacher's fort and quietly took possession. A few days later Bridgar, who had learned too late that the fort on the Nelson was not French but English, marched his men up-stream to contrive a junction with young Gillam's forces. When the Hudson's Bay men knocked on the gate of the New Englanders' fort for admission, the sentinel opened without question. The gates clapped shut with a slamming of bolts, and the Englishmen found themselves quietly and bloodlessly captured by the intrepid Radisson. Meanwhile Groseilliers and his son, Jean Chouart, had been plying a thriving trade. To be sure, the ice jam of spring in the Hayes river had made Radisson's two cockle-shell craft look more like staved-in barrels than merchant ships. But in the spring, when the Assiniboines and Crees came riding down the river flood in vast brigades of birch canoes laden to the waterline with peltry, the Frenchmen had in store goods to barter with them and carried on a profitable trade. Radisson now had more prisoners than he could conveniently carry to Quebec. Rigging up the remnants of his rickety ships for a convoy, he placed in them the majority of the Hudson's Bay Company and New England crews and sent them south to Rupert and Moose. Taking possession of Ben Gillam's ship, the _Bachelor's Delight_, he loaded it with a cargo of precious furs, and set out for Quebec with Bridgar and young Gillam as prisoners. Jean Chouart and a dozen Frenchmen remained on the Hayes river to trade. Twenty miles out from port, Bridgar and young Gillam were caught conspiring to cut the throats of the Frenchmen, and henceforth both Englishmen were kept under lock and key in their cabins.