Freshwater Passages: The Trade and Travels of Peter Pond

15. Return

289 CHAPTER FIFTEEN Return Departure On May 15, 1788, Pond left his fort on the Athabasca River, southward bound for Lake Superior.He traveled in a lone canoe with eight paddlers, racing ahead of the brigade carrying the year’s haul of furs. Five weeks later, at Cumberland House, he stopped and talked with Malchom Ross, who he told of their great success in the Athabasca country that season. Ross would report that Pond boasted they had traded “400 Packs each roughly 90 lb which is double the quantity they ever brought from there before, such is the progress these people make where there is none to oppose them.”¹ Pond was eager to tell the Hudson’s Bay Company man about his explorations. He told Ross “the latitude of their Northernmost Settlement which he said was in 64 North Latitude, Longitude he was not sure of but as near as he could make out it was 195 West.”This was clearly a misunderstanding, for 195 degrees west of Greenwich is almost to the shores of Kamchatka, but Pond told Ross how close he thought he had been to the Pacific Ocean. He reported that he had spoken with “Indians who saw Captain Cook when he made his voyage round the North Hemisphere,” and he claimed that he would just as soon travel “to the Sea Shore on the West side of the Continent from their Northernmost Settlement, as come to Cumberland House from there.” Ross remained 290 ∙ return skeptical.“I did not believe all that, but such was the account that I had from his own Mouth.”With the exception of the inflated longitude, this is largely the same account that Pond would give to J. Mervin Nooth and Isaac Ogden in Quebec. Pond loved to share his knowledge and was enthusiastically telling everyone who would listen, even a competitor from the Hudson’s Bay Company, about his ideas and plans.² Pond initially planned to return that fall,and he still intended to make his journey to the Pacific, but once he got to Grand Portage his plans changed. He would never return to the Northwest. It may be that he was unable to reconcile differences with his partners in Grand Portage. Signs of unrest can be found in Patrick Small’s letter to Simon McTavish, quoted in the previous chapter. Small alludes to Pond being troubled by something, but does not elaborate. He writes,“I am quite surprised at the wild ideas Mr. Pond has of matters, which Mr. MacKenzie told me were incomprehensibly extravagant.” It seems most likely that these “wild ideas” concerned his plan for a voyage to the Pacific and then to Russia to present his map to Catherine the Great, but the next sentence adds some confusion: “I wrote [Pond], in answer to his of the 3rd Dec., as satisfactorily as I could. I observed to him he could have no reason to think that anything was even thought of contrary to the mutual interests of all concerned.” Apparently, Pond had begun to think that the other partners’ interests and his own were diverging. Perhaps he had a complaint with his place in the new partnership, as he had during the last restructuring. After all, his district was making great profits, while his share had gone from one-sixteenth to one-twentieth. Small reported to McTavish that Pond thought he needed to go to Grand Portage to address his discontent, but Small also indicated that Pond intended to return: “I put it in his option to go with or after the packs, but represented to him that he required to be expeditious, if he intended returning after seeing the Grand Portage.”³ Perhaps Pond wanted to make his journey to the Pacific during the summer of 1788 but put it off so that he could negotiate his place in the new partnership . But once he had the chance to meet face to face with the Montreal partners he realized that it was time to wind down his relationship with return ∙ 291 the North West Company. He would remain a partner for almost two more years after leaving Athabasca, but his future activity would not take him west of Grand Portage again. In 1790 he sold his share to William McGillivray, a young nephew of Simon McTavish’s, and returned home to Milford.4 Pond left the North West...