To Port Nelson, then, came Governor Bridgar on _The Prince Rupert_ with Captain Gillam, in August, of 1682. Mike Grimmington is now second mate. Gillam must have been to Port Nelson before on trading ventures, but Governor Bridgar’s commission was to establish that fort which for two centuries was to be the battleground of Northern traders and may yet be the great port of Northern commerce. The whole region was called Nelson after Admiral Button’s mate, but it was to become better known as Fort Bourbon, when possessed by the French; as York, when it repassed to the English. Shifting shoals of sand-drift barred the sea from the main coast for ten miles north and south, but across the shoals were gaps visible at low tide, through which the current broke with the swiftness of a river. Gillam ordered small boats out to sound and stake the ship’s course by flags erected in the sand at half tide. Between these flags, _The Prince Rupert_ slowly moved inland. Inside the sand-bar, the coast was seen to be broken by the mouths of two great rivers—either one a miniature St. Lawrence, on the north the Nelson, on the south the Hayes. It was on the Hayes to the south that the Adventurers finally built their fur post, but Bridgar and Gillam now pushed _The Prince Rupert’s_ carved prow slowly up the northern river, the Nelson. The stream was wide with a tremendous current and low, swampy, wooded banks. Each night sails were reefed and men sent ashore to seek a good site or sign of Indians. Night after night during the whole month of September, John Calvert, Robert Braddon, Richard Phineas, Robert Sally and Thomas Candy punted in and out of the coves along the Nelson, lighting bonfires, firing muskets, spying the shore for footstep of native. On the ship, Bridgar ordered the cannon fired as signals to distant Indians and for the first time in history the roar of heavy guns rolled across the swamps. Winter began to close in early. Ice was forming. Nipping frosts had painted the swamp woods in colors of fire. One afternoon toward October when _The Prince Rupert_ was some seventeen miles from the sand-bar, gliding noiselessly with full-blown sails before a gentle wind, the smoke of an Indian signal shot skyward from the south shore.