Iberville was, above all else, a sailor.The easiest route to Hudson Bay was by way of the sea.More than once after his first experience he led to the Bay a naval expedition.His exploits are still remembered with pride in French naval annals.In 1697 he sailed the Pelican through the ice-floes of Hudson Straits.He was attacked by three English merchantmen, with one hundred and twenty guns against his forty-four.One of the English ships escaped, one Iberville sank with all on board, one he captured.
That autumn the hardy corsair was in France with a great booty from the furs which the English had laboriously gathered.
The triumph of the French on Hudson Bay was short-lived.Their exploits, though brilliant and daring, were more of the nature of raids than attempts to settle and explore.They did no more than the English to ascend the Nelson or other rivers to find what lay beyond; and in 1718, by the Treaty of Utrecht, as we have already seen, they gave up all claim to Hudson Bay and yielded that region to the English.
Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, Sieur de la Verendrye, was a member of the Canadian noblesse, a son of the Governor of Three Rivers on the St.Lawrence.He was born in 1685 and had taken part in the border warfare of the days of Queen Anne.He was a member of the raiding party led against New England by Hertel de Rouville in 1704 and may have been one of those who burst in on the little town of Deerfield, Massachusetts, and either butchered or carried off as prisoners most of the inhabitants.Shortly afterwards we find him a participant in warfare of a less ignoble type.In 1706he went to France and became an ensign in a regiment of grenadiers.Those were the days when Marlborough was hammering and destroying the armies of Louis XIV.La Verendrye, took part in the last of the series of great battles, the bloody conflict at Malplaquet in 1709.He received a bullet wound through the body, was left for dead on the field, fell into the hands of the enemy, and for fifteen months was a captive.On his release he was too poor to maintain himself as an officer in France and soon returned to Canada, where he served as an officer in a colonial regiment until the peace of 1713.Then the ambitious young man, recently married, with a growing family and slight resources, had to work out a career suited to his genius.
His genius was that of an explorer; his task, which fully occupied his alert mind, was that of finding the long dreamed of passage to the Western Sea.The venture certainly offered fascinations.Noyon, a fellow-townsman of La Verendrye at Three Rivers, had brought back from the distant Lake of the Woods, in 1716, a glowing account, told to him by the natives, of walled cities, of ships and cannon, and of white-bearded men who lived farther west.In 1720 the Jesuit Charlevoix, already familiar with Canada, came out from France, went to the Mississippi country, and reported that an attempt to find the path to the Western Sea might be made either by way of the Missouri or farther north through the country of the Sioux west of Lake Superior.Both routes involved going among warlike native tribes engaged in incessant and bloody struggles with each other and not unlikely to turn on the white intruder.Memorial after memorial to the French court for assistance resulted at last in serious effort, but effort handicapped because the court thought that a monopoly of the fur trade was the only inducement required to promote the work of discovery.
La Verendrye was more eager to reach the Western Sea than he was to trade.To outward seeming, however, he became just a fur trader and a successful one.We find him, in 1726, at the trading-post of Nipigon, not far from the lake of that name, near the north shore of Lake Superior.From this point it was not very difficult to reach the shore of one great sea, Hudson Bay, but that was not the Western Sea which fired his imagination.
Incessantly he questioned the savages with whom he traded about what lay in the unknown West.His zeal was kindled anew by the talk of an Indian named Ochagach.This man said that he himself had been on a great lake lying west of Lake Superior, that out of it flowed a river westward, that he had paddled down this river until he came to water which, as La Verendrye understood, rose and fell like the tide.Farther, to the actual mouth of the river, the savage had not gone, for fear of enemies, but he had been told that it emptied into a great body of salt water upon the shores of which lived many people.We may be sure that La Verendrye read into the words of the savage the meaning which he himself desired and that in reality the Indian was describing only the waters which flow into Lake Winnipeg.
La Verendrye was all eagerness.Soon we find him back at Quebec stirring by his own enthusiasm the zeal of the Marquis de Beauharnois, the Governor of Canada, and begging for help to pay and equip a hundred men for the great enterprise in the West.The Governor did what he could but was unable to move the French court to give money.The sole help offered was a monopoly of the fur trade in the region to be explored, a doubtful gift, since it angered all the traders excluded from the monopoly.La Verendrye, however, was able, by promising to hand over most of the profits, to persuade merchants in Montreal to equip him with the necessary men and merchandise.
