British North America, 1763-1867

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: the Alaskan coast, arrived at Nome City on 31st August 1906, and thence proceeded on his way to San Francisco and Europe. Thus was the faith of John Davis and Humphrey Gilbert, and their fellow-seamen of the Elizabethan age, vindicated three centuries after their deaths. The North-West Passage existed, and...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: the Alaskan coast, arrived at Nome City on 31st August 1906, and thence proceeded on his way to San Francisco and Europe. Thus was the faith of John Davis and Humphrey Gilbert, and their fellow-seamen of the Elizabethan age, vindicated three centuries after their deaths. The North-West Passage existed, and it was navigable. But our souls pursue shadows even while our bodies perish. So far as the practical purpose of finding a new and safe road to India was concerned, for which alone the older navigators had sought the passage, it had long proved useless. Its final discovery was of geographical interest; it was not a political or commercial fact. CHAPTER II THE HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY: 1668-1784 The later adventurers who spent their lives in the search for the North-West Passage sought glory rather than gold; the more solid prospects of material profit attracted a different but not less useful, and at times not less heroic class of men to the discovery of the north-western territories of the American continent. The first English pioneers who'entered the Hudson Bay had failed in their attempt to trade with the natives; and their successors in those waters appear to have given small attention to commercial matters. Other nations were less disinterested in the work of exploration; and some few years after the city of Quebec was founded, it became the centre of a lucrative French trade in the furs and skins of the wildanimals that roamed the vast prairies of the interior. The English now looked on disconsolately while their rivals prospered: some furs were, indeed, bought from the redskins by the New Englanders and shipped to Europe through Boston merchants, but the great bulk of the traffic remained in French hands. 1 Authorities.?George Bryce and Becklea Willson ha...