Soon after the Hudson’s Bay Company obtained its monopolistic charter, antagonism to it arose in England, and this hostility steadily developed, the legality of the charter being flatly challenged. One of the bitterest opponents of the company was Mr. Arthur Dobbs, a gentleman of means and scientific attainment, intensely interested in the subject of the northwest passage, who became embittered because he considered the Hudson’s Bay Company had not furthered the exploration projects as he thought they should have done. In 1744 he published a volume on the countries adjoining Hudson bay, in which he arraigned the company for keeping the country back. He declared that the company would not allow their servants to make any improvements at the posts except it be to plant turnip gardens. He proceeded:—“There might be comfortable settlements made in most places, and very tolerable, even in the worst and coldest parts of that continent, which are the northeast and northwest sides of the bay; but in the southern and western sides of the bay, there might be made as comfortable settlements as any in Sweden, Livonia or the south side of the Baltic, and farther into the country, southwest, the climate is as good as the southern part of Poland and north part of Germany and Holland.” AN EARLY PARLIAMENTARY INQUIRY. In 1748, ten years before the capitulation of Montreal to General Amherst, a motion was passed in the House of Commons “to enquire into the state and condition of the countries adjoining Hudson bay and the trade carried on there, and to consider how those countries may be settled and improved, and the trade and fisheries there extended and increased, and also to enquire into the rights the Company of Adventurers trading into Hudson’s bay pretend to have by charter to the property of lands and exclusive trade to those countries.” The result was an investigation, which produced a considerable amount of evidence throwing the first official light upon the natural resources of Canada’s great northland. Up to this time the territory about Hudson bay had been commonly supposed “to be a mere waste and howling wilderness, wherein half-famished beasts of prey wage eternal war with a sparse population of half-starved savages; where the drought is more than Saharan, the cold more than Arctic, and that woe would betide the mad and unfortunate individual who might be so far diverted from the path of prudence as to endeavour to settle in those parts.”[4] Evidence heard before the committee revealed the fact that intelligent men who have lived in the country several years considered that it possessed decided attractions as a field of settlement, and held that nothing but the policy of the fur-trading company kept settlement back.[5]