A Year Inland: The Journal of a Hudson’s Bay Company Winterer

Uses of Henday’s Journal

Uses of Henday’s Journal During the middle decades of the eighteenth century, would-be competitors criticized the Hudson’s Bay Company for its lack of interest in exploration; the company, they said, monopolized trade while it ‘‘slept at the edge of a frozen sea.’’1 At the same time, French advances west of the Great Lakes caused trade returns to fall; Natives who had previously made the difficult, dangerous journey to the Bay were now intercepted at the edge of the prairies. Clearly the company had to explore the western interior and to modify its trade strategies, or at least make some gesture towards doing so. The wintering policy that Henday’s trip inaugurated was not a new idea: following the French precedent of coureurs de bois, Henry Kelsey and William Stewart had travelled inland half a century earlier. Their journeys did not materially alter the Hudson’s Bay Company’s habits of trade, nor did those of Henday and the young men who wintered with Natives for almost four decades after him. This practice continued even after Cumberland House was built, west of the old French post of Basquia, in 1774. The company preferred to attract visitors from the interior to the Bayside forts rather than to organize a network of inland posts. Sending young men inland appeared to respond to French competition, and could be done at low cost, with little change in annual administrative routine. Any initiative to bring about real change in HBC trading practice would need to satisfy the London Committee’s inclination for caution, thrift and business as usual. Henday’s journal was useful to the Bayside factors in two ways. First, its status as an empirical report ensured its acceptance as a reliable account of inland conditions. And second, Henday’s commercial failure reported in the journal texts of Graham’s ‘‘Observations’’ Notes to this section are on pp. 390-94. 371 (e.2/6, e.2/4 and e.2/11), no less than his success announced more than a decade earlier in the text sent to London (b.239/a/40), justified contemporary views on trade held by Isham, Graham and Ferdinand Jacobs, all associated with York Fort and therefore concerned with the Saskatchewan trade. The empirical status of Henday’s journal reflected a double tradition of ships’ logs and the Royal Society’s scientific interest in such accounts as records of exploration. Henday’s year inland was not only a response to the French commercial threat; as with Hearne’s exploration of the Coppermine River two decades later, the Hudson’s Bay Company also hoped to win wider political recognition of its charter right to monopolize the vast continental interior west of the Bay. While the British public and its political representatives hoped for territorial annexation and a northwest passage, the company thought in terms of trading relationships with the people who lived ‘‘on the back of this Land, and to the westward of Churchill River.’’2 A record which could satisfy these various aims of scientific curiosity, imperial ambitions and commercial expansion would go far to justify the expense of an employee’s annual wage and the goods he would need to distribute as ‘‘encouragement’’ to Native leaders. Henday’s instructions enjoined him to chart his progress using ‘‘a Compass, hand Line paper &c &c’’ and to ‘‘be very exact in Keeping a Journal of your travels and observations Daily, observing the Courses, trying the Depth of water in the River or Lakes when in your Cannoe,’’ then every evening ‘‘to Remark Down Every thing that occurs to your View Daily, mentioning when you Come to any River or Lake the name, when you meet with any Natives what Nation &c.’’3 Isham’s instructions to Henday touch on all of the categories of eighteenth-century scientific reporting: logging courses and distances , sounding bodies of water, cataloguing soils and flora, enumerating large animals, describing Native customs, noting opportunities for resource exploitation and trade, together with the injunction to keep a careful account of all these details each day. Henday’s journal responds faithfully, even mechanically, to these categories of enquiry, as sample entries in the four texts demonstrate: Wednesday fine weather, wind NWt. took my departure from Jack Island, att the Entrance of Nelson pond, and steered WSWt 25 Miles, when we Came to ye River on the West side which is Nelson River, goes through the middle of it; this Day past 28 Islands, the water very deep all this...