If the Company had only had the Indians to reckon with, it might have gone on gathering the furry harvest of the West with imperial ease. But, as we have seen, there were other white men in America who had no notion of submitting to such a monopoly. The King of France claimed as his own the territory that King Charles had given away. Several times before the close of the seventeenth century the French raided the Bay and captured or destroyed the English forts, coming overland from Canada and also sailing round through Hudson Straits. In 1697, France and England being at war, five ships swooped down upon Fort York, at the mouth of Nelson River, and captured the place after defeating three English vessels. A peace treaty, signed that same year, left England with only one little foot-hold on Hudson Bay, at Fort Albany. It was sixteen years before another treaty, at the end of another war, restored the whole of the north land to the English King and Company. There was no end, even then, to the furious competition of the French fur-buyers. If it had been only the official French Company, that would have been bad enough; but swarms of independent French traders were bidding against both the French Company and the English. These men were outlaws. Flogging, and branding with red-hot irons, were the mildest of the penalties decreed against the “free traders” by their own French Government. Yet the temptation of fortunes to be made by fur proved stronger than all the risks. Hundreds of young men took to the woods, and spent their lives roaming from one Indian camp to another, living as the Indians lived, and buying up in advance the skins which should have gone down to the Company at Quebec. At one time, when the whole population of the French colony was only about 10,000, as many as 800 men were away in the forest, defying the King and his officers. These “coureurs de bois,” or forest-runners, were protected not only by the forest hiding them, but often by the very officials who were supposed to be hunting them down. Many officials were quite ready to take big bribes from the outlaws. The Governor himself went in for unlawful trading on a large scale, in secret partnership with outlaws who smuggled the beaver-skins over to the English colonists in the south. * * * * * In the summer of 1731, a French army captain named Pierre de la Vérendrye—Canadian born, he was—set out from Montreal for the West. Like most of the earlier explorers, French or English, he was keen to discover an outlet to the Western Ocean. The Governor gave his full consent—but he would give nothing more. Some of the merchants were then persuaded to “stake” the expedition, supplying Vérendrye with goods to trade for furs in all the unknown lands he was to discover. The captain took with him his three sons, the youngest only sixteen, and a nephew as second in command, besides a dozen soldiers and a band of Indians.