La Perouse’s raid on Churchill and York was the least of the misfortunes that now beset the English Adventurers. Within a year from the French victory, the English prisoners had been ransomed from France and the dismantled forts were rebuilt. It was a subtler foe that menaced the Hudson’s Bay Company. Down at Abbittibbi, halfway to Quebec—in at Henley House and Martin’s Falls and Osnaburg House on the way from Albany to the modern Manitoba—up the Saskatchewan, where Cocking and Batts and Walker held the forts for trade—between Churchill and Athabasca, where Longmore and Ross had been sent on Hearne’s trail—yes, even at the entrance to the Rockies, where Mr. Howse and the astronomer Turner had found a pass leading from the headwaters of the Saskatchewan, constantly there emerged from the woods, or swept gayly up in light birch canoes, strange hunters, wildwood rovers, free-lances, men with packs on their backs, who knocked nonchalantly at the gates of the English posts for a night’s lodging and were eagerly admitted because it was safer to have a rival trader under your eye than out among the Indians creating bedlam by the free distribution of rum. “Pedlars,” the English called these newcomers, who overran the sacred territory of the Hudson’s Bay Company as though royal charters were a joke and trading monopolies as extinct as the dodo. It was all very well to talk of the rights of your charter, but what became of your rights if interlopers stole them while you talked about them? And what was the use of sending men to drum up trade and bring Indians down to the bay with their furs, if pedlars caught the Indians halfway down at portage, carrying place and hunting rendezvous, and in spite of the fact that those Indians owed the English for half-a-dozen years’ outfit—rifled away the best of the furs, sometimes by the free distribution of rum, sometimes by such seditious talk as that “the English had no rights in this country anyway and the Indians were fools to become slaves to the Hudson’s Bay Company?”