Such were the high hopes with which Richmond Fort was founded. To-day it is a howling wilderness silent as death but for the rush of waters heard when white men first entered the bay. Partridge there were in plenty among the lonely evergreens, and game for trapping; but not the warmest overtures of Chief Factor Potts and Mr. Pollexfen and Mr. Isbister, who yearly came up from Albany, could win the friendship of the treacherous Eskimos. They would not hunt, and the white men dare not penetrate far enough inland to make their trapping pay. Potts kept his men whale fishing off Whale River, but in five years the loss to the Company had totaled more than £24,000. The crisis came in 1754. Day and night, the stealthy shadow of Eskimo spies moved through the evergreens of the gulf. In vain Potts gave the chiefs presents of gold-laced suits, beaver hats with plumes, and swords. “They _shaked_ my hands,” he records, “and hugged and embraced and smiled”; but the very next trapper, who went alone to the woods, or attempted to drive his dog train south to Whale River, would see Eskimos ambushed behind rocks and have his _cache_ rifled or find himself overpowered and plundered. One day in February, Mr. Pollexfen had gone out with his men from Whale River trapping. When they returned in the afternoon they found the cook boy had been kidnapped and the house robbed of every object that could be carried away—stores of ammunition, arms, traps, food, clothes, even the door hinges and iron nails of the structure.