Back in ’85 when Robert Sanford had been ordered to explore inland, he had reported such voyages impracticable. The only way to obtain inland trade, he declared, was to give presents to the Indian chiefs and attract the tribes down to the bay. Now that the French had swept the English from the bay, Sanford was driven to the very thing he had said could not be done—penetrating inland to intercept the Indian fleets of canoes before they came down to the French. With one Arrington, known as Red Cap on the bay, and a man, John Vincent, Sanford year after year went upstream from Albany through Keewatin toward what is now Manitoba. By 1700, Henley House had been built one hundred and fifty miles inland from Albany. The French war was proving a blessing in disguise. It had awakened the sleeping English gentlemen of the bay and was scattering them far and wide. The very year the French came overland, 1686, Captain Abraham had sailed north from Nelson to Churchill—“a faire wide river,” he describes it, naming it after the great Marlborough; and now with only Albany as the radiating point, commanded by old Governor Knight, sloops under the apprentice boy, young Henry Kelsey, under Mike Grimmington and Smithsend, sailed across to the east side of the bay, known as East Main (now known as Ungava and Labrador) and yearly traded so successfully with the wandering Eskimo and Montagnais there that in spite of the French holding the bay, cargoes of 30,000 and 40,000 beaver pelts were sent home to England. But the honors of exploration at this period belong to the ragamuffin, apprentice lad, Henry Kelsey. He had come straight to Nelson before the French occupation from the harum-scarum life of a London street arab. At the fur posts, discipline was absolutely strict. Only the governor and chief trader were allowed to converse with the Indians. No man could leave the fort to hunt without special parole. Every subordinate was sworn to unquestioning obedience to the officer above him. Servants were not supposed to speak unless spoken to. Written rules and regulations were stuck round the fort walls thick as advertisements put up by a modern bill poster, and the slightest infraction of these martinet rules was visited by guardroom duty, or a sound drubbing at the hands of the chief factor, or public court-martial followed by the lash. It was all a part of the cocked hat and red coat and gold lace and silk ruffles with which these little kings of the wilderness sought to invest themselves with the pomp of authority. It is to the everlasting credit of the Company’s governors that a system of such absolute despotism was seldom abused. Perhaps, too, the loneliness of the life—a handful of whites cooped up amid all the perils of savagery—made each man realize the responsibility of being his brother’s keeper.