268 THE FUR TRADE OF AMERICA 



The only way to get an accurate idea of the size of the king- 

 dom ruled by these monarchs of the lonely wastes is by com- 

 parison. 



Take a map of North America. On the east is Labrador, a 

 peninsula as vast as Germany and Holland and Belgium and half 

 of France. On the coast and across the unknown interior are the 

 magical letters H. B. C, meaning Hudson's Bay Company fort 

 (past or present), a little whitewashed square with eighteen-foot 

 posts planted picket-wise for a wall, a barracks-like structure 

 across the court-yard with a high lookout of some sort near the 

 gate. Here some trader with wife and children and staff of Indian 

 servants has held his own against savagery and desolating loneli- 

 ness. In one of these forts Lord Strathcona passed his youth. 



Once more to the map. With one prong of a compass in the 

 centre of Hudson Bay, describe a circle. The northern half em- 

 braces the baffling Arctics ; but on the line of the southern circum- 

 ference like beads on a string are Churchill high on the left, York 

 below in black capitals as befits the importance of the great fur 

 emporium of the bay, Severn and Albany and Moose and Rupert 

 and Fort George round the south, and to the right, larger and more 

 strongly built forts than in Labrador, with the ruins of stone 

 walls at Churchill that have a depth of fifteen feet. Six-pounders 

 once mounted these bastions. The remnants of galleries for 

 soldiery run round the inside walls. A flag floats over each fort 

 with the letters H. B. C. 1 Officers' dwellings occupy the centre 

 of the court-yard. Banked against the walls are the men's quarters, 

 fur presses, stables, storerooms. Always there is a chapel, at one 

 fort a hospital, at others the relics of stoutly built old powder 

 magazines made to withstand the siege of hand grenades tossed 

 in by French assailants from the bay, who knew that the loot of a 

 fur post was better harvest than a treasure ship. Elsewhere two 

 small bastions situated diagonally across from each other were 

 sufficient to protect the fur post by sending a raking fire along the 



1 The flag was hoisted on Sundays to notify the Indians there would be no trade. 



