In four years, the Company had lost four vessels. These were replaced by four bigger frigates, and there come into the service the names of captains famous on Hudson Bay—Belcher, and Goston, and Spurell, and Kennedy, and Christopher Middleton, and Coates, and Isbister, with officers of the names of Inkster, and Kipling, and Maclish, and MacKenzie, and Gunn, and Clement. Twice in ten years, Captain Coates is wrecked in the straits, on the 26th of June, 1727, outward bound with all cargo and again on the frigate _Hudson’s Bay_ in 1736, when “_we sank_,” relates Coates, “_less than ten minutes after we were caught by the ice_.” From being an apprentice boy traveling inland to the Indians, Richard Norton has become governor of Churchill, with an Indian wife and half-Indian sons sent to England for education. Norton receives orders, in 1736, once more to explore Chesterfield Inlet where Knight had perished. Napper on _The Churchill_, sloop, and Robert Crow on _The Musquash_ carry him up in the summer of 1737. Napper dies of natural causes on the voyage, but Chesterfield Inlet is found to be a closed arm of the sea, not a passage to the Pacific; and widow Napper is voted fifty guineas from the Company. Kelsey dies in 1729, and widow Kelsey, too, is voted a bounty of ten guineas, her boy to be taken as apprentice. In 1736, Captain Middleton draws plans for the building of a fine new post at Moose and of a stone fort at Eskimo Point, Churchill, which shall be the strongest fort in America. The walls are to be sixteen feet high of solid stone with a depth of twenty-four feet solid masonry at base. On the point opposite Eskimo Cape, at Cape Merry, named after the deputy governor, are to be blockhouses ten feet high with six great guns mounted where watch is to be kept night and day. Moose will send up the supply of timber for Churchill, and the Company sends from London sixty-eight builders, among whom is one Joseph Robson, at £25 a year, who afterward writes furious attacks on the Company. Barely is Moose completed when it is burned to the ground, through the carelessness of the cook spilling coals from his bake oven. Two things, perhaps, stirred the Company up to this unwonted activity. Spies were coming overland from St. Lawrence—French explorers working their way westward, led by La Vérendrye. “_We warn you_,” the Company wrote to each of its factors at this time, “_meet these spies very civily but do not offer to detain them and on no account suffer such to come within the gates nor let the servants converse with them, and use all legal methods to make them depart and be on your guard not to tell the company’s secrets_.” Then in 1740, came a bolt from the blue. Captain Christopher Middleton, their trusted officer, publicly resigned from the service to go into the King’s navy for the discovery of a Northwest Passage through Hudson Bay.