The conquest of the great Northwest, Volume 1 (of 2): $b Being the story of the adventurers of England known as the Hudson's Bay Company. New pages in the history of the Canadian northwest and western statesLaut, Agnes C.
History
The conquest of the great Northwest, Volume 1 (of 2): $b Being the story of the adventurers of England known as the Hudson's Bay Company. New pages in the history of the Canadian northwest and western states
Laut, Agnes C.
Hudson Bay -- History; Hudson's Bay Company; Northwest, Canadian
Greenland was sighted in twenty days—a quick run in those times and
evidence that Munck was a swift sailor, who took all risks and pushed
ahead at any cost, for the Hudson’s Bay fur trade captains considered
seven weeks quick time from London to the Straits of Hudson Bay. A
current sweeps south from Greenland. Lashing his ships abreast, Munck
ran into the center of a great field of soft slob ice, that would keep
the big bergs off and protect the hulls from rough seas. Then lowering
all sails, he drifted with the ice drive. It came on to blow. Slob ice
held the ships safe, but sleet iced the rigging and deck till they were
like glass and life lines had to be stretched from side to side to give
hand hold, every wave-wash sending the sailors slithering over the icy
decks as if on skates. Icicles as long as a man’s arm would form on the
cross-trees in a single night. The ropes became like bolts—cracking
when they were bent, but when the heat of mid-day came, both ships were
in a drip of thaw.
What with the slow pace of the ice drift and the heaviness of the ships
from becoming ice-logged, it was the middle of July before they reached
the Straits. Eskimos swarmed down to the islands of Ungava Bay, but
seemed afraid to trade with Munck’s crew. It was on one of the islands
here that the Eskimo two centuries later massacred an entire crew of
Hudson’s Bay Company fur traders, who had been wrecked by the ice jam
and escaped across the floes to the island. It was, perhaps, as well
for Munck that the treacherous natives took themselves off, bounding
over the waves in skin boats, so light they could be carried by one
hand over the ice floes. The collision of the Atlantic tide with the
eastward flowing current of the Straits created such a furious sea
as Munck had never seen. It was no longer safe to keep _The Lamprey_
lashed to the frigate, for one wave wash caused by an overturning
iceberg lifted the little ship almost on the masts of _The Unicorn_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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