Hudson Bay

CHAPTER ONE.

APPOINTMENT TO THE SERVICE OF THE HUDSON BAY COMPANY--THE "PRINCE
RUPERT"--THE ANNUAL DINNER OF THE "H.B.C."--FELLOW-VOYAGERS--THREATENING
WEATHER--A SQUALL--ISLAND OF LEWIS.

Reader,--I take for granted that you are tolerably well acquainted with
the different modes of life and travelling peculiar to European nations.
I also presume that you know something of the inhabitants of the East;
and, it may be, a good deal of the Americans in general. But I
suspect--at least I would fain hope--that you have only a vague and
indefinite knowledge of life in those wild, uncivilised regions of the
northern continent of America that surround the shores of Hudson Bay. I
would fain hope this, I say, that I may have the satisfaction of giving
you information on the subject, and of showing you that there is a body
of civilised men who move, and breathe (pretty cool air, by the way!),
and spend their lives in a quarter of the globe as totally different, in
most respects, from the part you inhabit, as a beaver, roaming among the
ponds and marshes of his native home, is from that sagacious animal when
converted into a fashionable hat.

About the middle of May eighteen hundred and forty-one, I was thrown
into a state of ecstatic joy by the arrival of a letter appointing me to
the enviable situation of apprentice clerk in the service of the
Honourable Hudson Bay Company. To describe the immense extent to which
I expanded, both mentally and bodily, upon the receipt of this letter,
is impossible; it is sufficient to know that from that moment I fancied
myself a complete man of business, and treated my old companions with
the condescending suavity of one who knows that he is talking to his
inferiors.