Selkirk goes back to Scotland. By 1810, he controls £40,000 out of the £105,000 capital of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Another £20,000 is owned by minors, with no vote. Practically, Selkirk and his relatives, the Colvilles, own the Company. Sir Alexander’s anger knows no bounds. It is common gossip on what we would to-day call “Change” that Selkirk has bought control, not for the sake of the fur trade, but for a colony. Sir Alexander quarrels violently with my Lord Selkirk, whom he regards as an enthusiast gone mad. MacKenzie turns over to MacGillivray, what Hudson’s Bay stock he owns and again urges the Nor’Westers to buy on the open market against Selkirk. Not so does the canny Simon MacGillivray lose his head! To the Hudson’s Bay Company he writes proposing a division of territory. If the Hudson’s Bay will keep entirely to the bay and the rivers running into the bay, the Nor’Westers will keep exclusively to the inland country and the Athabasca, which is pretty much like playing Hamlet with Hamlet left out, for the best furs are from the inland country and the Athabasca. Among his own partners, MacGillivray throws off all masks. “_This colony of his will cause much expense to us_,” he writes from London on April 9, 1812, to the wintering partners, “_before Selkirk is driven to abandon the project; yet he must be driven to abandon it, for his success would strike at the very existence of our trade_.” While the lords of finance are fighting for its stock, the old Company is floundering through a slough of distraction not far from bankruptcy. The Bank of England advances £50,000 credit, but the Company can barely pay interest on the advance. Two hundred and fifty servants came home in 1810, and not a recruit can be hired in the Orkneys, so terrible are the tales now current of brutality in the fur country. Corrigal and Russell and McNab came home from Albany with news of the McDonell clan’s murderous assaults and of Mowat’s forcible abduction to Montreal. All these are voted a bounty of £50 each from the Company. Joseph Howse sends home word of his wild wanderings in the Rockies on the trail of David Thompson, and the Company gives him a present of £150 “as encouragement” to hold the regions west of the Rockies. Governor Auld reports that the Canadians have stopped _all trade_ west of Churchill. Governor Cook reports the same of York. Governor Thomas reports worse than loss from Albany--his men are daily murdered. They go into the woods and never return. On Selkirk’s advice, the Company calls for Colin Robertson, the dismissed Northwest clerk. For three years Robertson remains in London and Liverpool, advisor to the Company. “If you cannot hire Orkneymen, get Frenchmen from Quebec as the Nor’Westers do,” he advises. “Fight fire with fire! Your Orkneymen are too shy, shy of breaking the law in a lawless land, shy of getting their own heads broken! Hire French bullies! I can get you three hundred of them!”