“Sometimes,” he says, “in favorable seasons, we have entred the streights sooner.” Once he got in by June 26, “and got up with great labour about 60 degrees, but there we found such banks and walls of ice from side to side that we did little or nothing untill the 20th July.” And “as it is very hazardous to enter the streights before the beginning of July, for ice, so it is dangerous to be in that bay after the middle of September; the gales of wind and snow setts in for a continuence, with very short calm intervals; the severe frost are such that you cannot work a ship;” there are “violent piercing winds, which no creature can face for a continuence.” Even on shore, at the forts, “those terrible snowdrifts and dark condensed foggs are hardly to be guarded against.” “So apprehensive are our people of being caught out in those frightful drifts that they never suffer a stranger to go a bow shott from the palisades without a person of experience with them.” When steamers took the place of sailing ships, the length and the risk of the voyage were greatly reduced, but nothing could abolish the “dark condensed foggs” and “immense bodys of ice” in Hudson Straits. Far less dangerous and disagreeable was the inland water route by which the North-west Company sent its furs down to Montreal—the route opened up by the old French explorers; but no risk could be much worse than a sudden storm when the traders came out on the lakes in their boats and canoes. There were plenty of other hardships too, on that long voyage; yet there were plenty of hardy French voyageurs to undertake and even enjoy the adventure. Others made the adventure too, on occasion. Sir George Simpson, the young Scot who was made Governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company on its union with the North-west Company in 1821, made the long trip from Montreal to Manitoba about forty times. He travelled in state, with a Highland piper to rouse the echoes and excite the wondering awe of the natives when he was nearing an outpost. A lively picture of the West is given us by Paul Kane, who undertook that journey in 1846, not as a trader but as an artist. Paul Kane set out, as he tells us, “with no companions but my portfolio and box of paints, my gun and a stock of ammunition,” to make pictures of Indian life and “the scenery of an almost unknown country.” Such a journey as it was! Leaving Toronto on the 9th of May, he reached “Fort Vancouver,” ninety miles from the mouth of the Columbia River—now in the States, but then “the largest port in the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Dominions”—only on the 8th of December.