The Canadian Northwest Author:Graeme Mercer Adam 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: CHAPTER III. EARLY DISCOVERERS OF THE NORTH-WEST. The English Trader, Alexander Henry. NE of the conditions on which the Hudson Bay Company received ... more »its original charter was that it should interest itself in geographical research. To a trading corporation this was a foolish proviso. We have seen that the Company took no thought to colonise its possessions: on the contrary, it did all it could to prevent settlement. The aid it gave to discovery, if we except some little assistance to the expeditions to the Arctic Seas in search of Franklin, was very slight. It sought solely its own interests. If it opened up regions in the North-West, it was to establish a trading-post, not to set up a meteorological station or erect an observatory. We doubt if its administrative officers could give, even approximately, the latitude and longitude of any one of its stations. Many of its traders and voyageurs doubtless, in time, became very familiar with the North-West, but only a few of them caught the adventurous spirit of the old navigators and travellers, and forgot their trading operations in their eagerness to explore the country. From the earliest period of colonial settlement at Quebec, tho French led the van in all exploratory effort. The great waterways of the country gave facilities in probing the continent. Quebec was but the gateway to the Far West. From its portal the Jesuit was the first to lead off in the adventurous mission of carrying the Cross into the Canadian wilderness. Closely following the Black Robes, Champlain pursued his toilsome journey, by the Ottawa and Lake Nipissing, to the inland sea of the Hurons. From the home of the Wyandot, detachments of the French missionaries threaded their way through the maze of islands in the Georgian Bay to the St. Mary's river ...« less