In spite of increased wages and peace, the Adventurers have great difficulty procuring servants. The war has made known the real perils of the service. Mr. Ramsay is employed in 1707 and Captain John Merry in 1712 to go to the Orkneys for servants—fourteen able-bodied seamen in the former year, forty in the latter, and for the first time there come into the history of the Northwest the names of those Orkney families, whose lives are really the record of the great domain to which they gave their strength—the Belchers and Gunns, and the Carruthers, and the Bannisters, and the Isbisters and the Baileys, generation after generation, and the Mackenzies, and the Clarkes and the Gwynnes’s. Some came as clerks, some as gunners, some as bush-lopers. The lowest wage was 12s a month with a gratuity of £2 on signing the contract. But this did not suffice to bring recruits fast enough for the expanding work of the Company, and there comes jauntily on the scene, in 1711, Mr. Andrew Vallentine of matrimonial fame with secret contracts to supply the Company with apprentices if the Company will supply the dowries for the brides of the said apprentices. As told in a former chapter, “_all proposals to be locked up in ye Iron Chest in a Booke Aparte_.” Dr. Sacheverell, the famous divine, performed the marriage ceremonies; and from an item surreptitiously smuggled into the general minutes of the Company’s records instead of “the Booke Aparte,” I judge that the marriage portions were on a scale averaging some £70 and £100 each. A Miss Evance is named as one of the brides, so that the affair was no common listing of women for the marriage shambles such as Virginia and Quebec witnessed, but a contract in which even a relative of the Company’s governor was not ashamed to enter. Business flourished—as told elsewhere. The marriage office had to have additional apartments in “the Buttery” until about 1735, when lawsuits and the death of Mr. Vallentine caused a summary shutting down of the enterprise. It had accomplished its aim—brought recruits to the Company. By 1717 Kelsey, the aforetime apprentice, had become governor of Churchill at £200 a year. One William Stewart and another apprentice, Richard Norton, were sent inland from Churchill to explore and make peace between the tribes. How far north they proceeded is not known—not farther than Chesterfield Inlet, where the water ran with a tide like the sea, and the Indians by signs told legends of vast mines. Kelsey had heard similar tales of mines over on the Labrador coast. Thomas Macklish, who had gone up Nelson River beyond Ben Gillam’s Island, heard similar tales. Each of these explorers, the Company rewarded with gratuities ranging from £20 to £100. There were legends, too, at Moose and Rupert of great silver mines toward Temiscamingue—the field of the modern cobalt beds.