From this time forward the Company sent its officers back into the country that Hearne had explored, and other parts of the interior, where they built trading forts on the shores of many a river and lake. Fort Cumberland was the first of them, on the lower Saskatchewan. The trade picked up, but if the Company thought it would now be allowed to have things all its own way it was much mistaken. The revolutionary war broke out between the British colonists down east and the Mother Country. The King of France, though he ruled his own people with tyranny and hated the idea of popular freedom, hated England more, and he was delighted to help anyone who would injure her. So, while his soldiers were sent over to help the American colonists on land, his sailors raided Hudson Bay, where they captured, looted and destroyed the English Company’s forts. Hearne was by this time in command of Fort Prince of Wales, but his handful of clerks and traders could do nothing against three ships of war. The next year, 1783, ended the war between the nations; but the trade war between the Company and the other fur traders went on more bitterly than ever. A rival “North West Company” was formed by Scottish merchants down in Canada, who engaged many of the French “voyageurs” and “coureurs de bois,” and their half-Indian sons, and sent them out skirmishing for trade and building forts among the tribes of the far west. The old Company met the competition by building more forts and organizing on its own account more bands of hardy Frenchmen and “Métis”—the name given to men of mingled French and Indian blood. * * * * * The names of three great western rivers, the Mackenzie, the Thompson and the Fraser, still remind us that some of the North West Company’s men were famous explorers as well as traders. Alexander Mackenzie, a young Scot from the Hebrides, was the officer in charge of Fort Chipewyan, on Lake Athabasca. With the old dream of the North-west Passage in his mind, he set off on the 2nd of June, 1789, to descend a river flowing from the lake towards the north. His little flotilla of canoes presently came out on another lake, the Great Slave. Following its shores to the West, Mackenzie found the water at last pouring out to form another river. This he followed day after day, starting at three or four every morning, till the stream widened out into a bay of many islands, where the tide rose and fell and whales were playing. It was only the 14th of July, but the homeward journey would be against the current, and the freeze-up would come early. Mackenzie swiftly turned his back on the Arctic Sea, and reached his fort on the 12th of September. His tremendous dash had carried him nearly 3,000 miles in 102 days.