The ship sank to the bottom with all hands, including the chivalrous British captain. The loss of Hampshire, the only real ship of war among the three, broke the back of British resistance. Hudson’s Bay, in the timeless tradition of 18th-century warfare, fired off one more volley to defend its honor and then surrendered by striking her colors. Dering, taking cover in a sudden squall, fled up the Nelson River.

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Soon, mauled by the savage duel, Pelican herself slid beneath the frigid waters. However, d’Iberville and most of his crew made it safely to shore.Undaunted by his close escape from a watery grave, d’Iberville awaited the arrival of the rest of the French squadron before launching an assault on York Factory, the most important of the Hudson’s Bay trading posts. To distract the British cannoneers from the vulnerable fleet, d’Iberville mounted a bold feint that completely took the British garrison by surprise. Before the company men realized their predicament, French sailors had dragged heavy cannons from their ships to bombard York Factory. The factory’s defenders were now in a decidedly uncomfortable position. The resident factor, Henry Baley, quickly decided that discretion was the smarter half of valor-he surrendered.

With the capitulation of York Factory, d’Iberville had effectively swept from the map British control of Hudson’s Bay and opened to France the precious treasure of brown gold: la pelletrie, the fur trade. It would not be until the Peace of Utrecht ended the war in 1713, a full 16 years later, that the factors of the Hudson’s Bay Company would return to the desolate land.Toward the end of the 18th century, an even greater threat to the survival of the Hudson’s Bay Company loomed before it than French warships. The threat was all the more severe because it came from the company’s own English countrymen-the aggressive agents of the North West Fur Company.

The menace that was the North West Company began innocently enough, its origins in the bands of hardy French Canadian traders and trappers whose sires were the coureurs de bois, the ‘runners of the woods,’ who had opened up la pelletrie when France still held Canada. These modern coureurs de bois combined a freedom of initiative denied the servants of the bureaucratic Hudson’s Bay Company with a knack for supplying their Indian customers with goods unthought of by company men.The inroads these freewheeling trappers had on company revenues soon began to be substantial. Matthew Cocking was sent into the interior in 1773 to assess the effects of the competition of these free traders, who were based by and large in Montreal. To the shock of Hudson’s Bay’s governors, Cocking reported that York Factory’s yearly return had plummeted from an annual average of 30,000 beaver in the decade before 1766 to only 8,000 in 1773.

Rocked out of their complacency by this nerve-shattering news, Hudson’s Bay’s chieftains set out on a frantic period of expansion into unknown areas, fearful that the devil-maycare French Canadians would push them out of the fur trade entirely. It was a fear made all the more palpable when the competitors, who had started forming business partnerships about 1770, coalesced into the mighty North West Fur Company in 1779. Led by a Scot, Simon McTavish, the so-called Nor’Westers were determined to break forever the Hudson’s Bay monopoly on the Canadian fur trade.

To show their determination, the Nor’Westers matched Hudson’s Bay move for move, like players in a high- stakes poker game. In 1775, Samuel Hearne had established Cumberland House in the western Canadian province of Saskatchewan, thus bringing Hudson’s Bay Company into the heart of the continent. To counter this gambit, the Nor’Westers opened an inland command post, Fort William, on the shores of Lake Superior, in 1805.Two of the Nor’Wester explorer-traders, David Thompson and Alexander Mackenzie, would do more to map the face of modern-day Canada than any other men in history. Indeed, it was the very free-spirited atmosphere of the Nor’West Company that enabled these men to become such prodigious travelers.

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