CHAPTER 13
AMONG THE INDIANS AND ESKIMO OF HUDSON BAY
A world of ice—The Hudson Bay ships—John Horden—A huge parish—Indians and Eskimo— Bishop of Moosonce—Ungava "The last house in the world"—The tailless cow—Canoe adventures— The sea-ice—Last labors—Si monumentum requiris.
TO those who as boys have read Mr. R. M. Ballantyne's Ungava and Young Fur Traders, the name of Hudson Bay will always suggest a world of glorious adventure and romance. They have visions of Indians shooting swift rapids in their bark canoes, or of Eskimo on an ice-floe fighting a fierce polar bear or lying in wait for an unwary seal. They see the trapper on a winter morning, with his gun on his shoulder, skimming lightly on broad snowshoes over the powdery snow, as he goes his rounds from one trap to another through a forest which has been transformed by icicle and snowflake into a wonderland of magical beauty. Or they remember the traders in a lonely fort, doing their best to keep their hearts jolly and their noses free from frostbite, at a time when the thermometer is fifty degrees below zero, and the pen cannot be dipped into the ink-bottle because the ink has turned into a solid lump of ice.
The present writer has a vivid recollection of a sunny midsummer season spent in the Orkneys. In Stromness harbor he saw some strongly built but old-fashioned vessels preparing to set sail, and felt an almost boyish thrill of delight as he learned that these were the Hudson Bay ships about to start on their annual voyage for the coasts of Labrador, from what is their last port of call in the British Isles. He thought of that solitary route, where sometimes never a sail is sighted from one side of the Atlantic to another. And be remembered that, though the bright summer sun might be shining on our islands, these ships would have to struggle with many, a bristling iceberg before they could discharge at Moose Fort or York Factory the precious cargo on which depended the comfort and even the lives of those who held the outposts of the British Empire along the frontiers of the Frozen North.
Let us go back to the year 1851, and imagine ourselves on board of a stout old wooden ship of the whaler type, which has fought its way from Stromness across the North Atlantic and through the floes and bergs of Hudson Straits, and is now entering the wide expanse of Hudson Bay itself. She is squarely built, and armed at her bows with thick blocks of timber called ice-chocks, to enable her to do daily battle with the floating ice. On board of her as passengers are a young Englishman named John Horden and his wife. Horden is a teacher who is being sent out from England by the Church Missionary Society to try to bring some Christian light into the minds and hearts of the Indians and Eskimo scattered round the shores of this great inland sea. The vessel is nearing her destination, but the danger is not yet over; indeed the worst dangers are yet to come. Horden himself describes their experiences:—
“Ahead, stretching as far as the eye could reach, is ice—ice; now we are in it. More and more difficult becomes the navigation. We are at a standstill. We go to the mast-head—ice; rugged ice in every direction! One day passes by—two, three, or four. The cold is intense. Our hopes sink lower and lower; a week passes. The sailors are allowed to get out and have a game at football; the days pass on; for nearly three weeks we are imprisoned. Then there is a movement in the ice. It is opening. The ship is clear! Every man is on deck. Up with the sails in all speed! Crack, crack, go the blows from the ice through which we are passing; but we shall now soon be free, and in the open sea. Ah! no prisoner ever left his prison with greater joy than we left ours.”
A few days after, the voyagers reached Moose Fort, at the extreme south-west corner of Hudson Bay, and the young teacher found himself on the spot which was to be his home for the rest of his life.
And now let us look at the task which lay before him. When John Wesley said that he took the whole world for his parish, he was speaking figuratively; but this inexperienced young man found himself literally responsible for the educational and religious welfare of a district 1500 miles long by 1500 broad. Indeed, lengthwise his parish stretched out indefinitely into space, for though bounded on the south by the settled parts of Canada, it might be said to extend in the opposite direction right up to the North Pole. Within this huge area, and planted along the coasts of Hudson Bay, a few trading posts of the Hudson Bay Company were scattered, several hundred miles apart. And here and there small bands of Indians and Eskimo were settled, who gained a precarious livelihood by hunting and fishing. Apart from those who lived in the neighborhood of Moose Fort, or visited it from time to time to barter skins and furs for English goods, Horden could reach the people of this vast territory only by toilsome and dangerous journeys, performed in summer in a bark canoe, and in winter on snowshoes or in a sledge drawn by a team of Eskimo dogs.
First of all, however, he had to learn something of the language, or rather of the languages, for there were several of them. Around Moose Fort the Indians were Crees, but in other parts of the country there were Ojjibeways and Chippeways, each of whom spoke an entirely different dialect. Farther north, on both sides of the Bay, were the Eskimo, whose speech bore no resemblance to any of the Indian tongues. The language difficulties did not trouble Horden very seriously. Most Europeans are greatly puzzled by the peculiarities of the agglutinative family of languages used by the native tribes of North America. But though Horden confessed that Cree was a jaw- breaking speech, and that Greek and Latin in comparison were tame affairs, he had so much determination, combined with such a knack for picking up new words and forms of expression, that in a very few months he was able to preach to the people without the help of an interpreter. He made mistakes, of course. Once he was speaking of the creation of Adam and Eve. All went well till he came to describe Eve's manner of coming into the world, when he observed that his hearers were "smiling audibly." He found that instead of saying that the woman was made "out of one of Adam's ribs," he had said "out of one of Adam's pipes." Ospikakun is "his rib," and ospwakun "his pipe." But by and by he was able to speak with correctness as well as fluency, not in one language, but in several. And having taught the people to read, and himself learned how to work a printing-press, he scattered abroad thousands of Gospels and other books which he had translated into the various tongues.
Mr. Horden showed such aptness for his work that before long he was ordained as a clergyman by the nearest bishop—the Bishop of Rupert's Land, who had to make for this purpose a journey of six weeks, mostly by canoe. And now Horden himself began to make those constant and arduous expeditions to all parts of the territory which form the most striking feature of the story of his life. "Arduous," his biographer says, "is but a mild expression for the troubles, trials, privations, and tremendous difficulties attendant on travel through the immense trackless wastes lying between many of the posts—wastes intersected by rivers and rapids, varied only by tracts of pathless forest swept by fierce storms.”
Sometimes he went on from day to day for four or five hundred miles, without ever seeing tent or house or even the trace of a human being by the way. Often he encountered men who delighted in bloodshed, and thought little of killing and eating their fellow-creatures when other means of subsistence failed. Once he met an Indian who during the preceding winter had murdered and devoured, one after another, his whole family of six children, in order to satisfy the cravings of hunger. As for his own food on these journeys, he was obliged to take whatever he could get. "I have eaten," he says, "white bear, black bear, wild cat; while for a week or ten days I have had nothing but beaver, and glad indeed I have been to get it.”
Let us follow him to some of his more distant stations, and see what he found there, or how he fared by the way. First, however, let the fact be mentioned that, after twenty years of remarkably successful labor, he was summoned to England to be consecrated in Westminster Abbey as Bishop of Moosonee, the name given to the new diocese, of which Moose Fort was the strategic center. His elevation in rank and dignity made little difference in the nature of his ordinary occupations, and so, in describing some of the incidents of his tours, we shall take these without distinction from the earlier or the later period of his life.
Far up the eastern side of Hudson Bay lies the region of Ungava, with the Little Whale and Great Whale rivers flowing through it to the sea. For the Eskimo of this district Hoyden always had a special affection and regard. He loved his Indian flock too; but he found these Eskimo more responsive, more eager to learn, and more teachable in every way. Bleak and desolate as the country was around Moose, it was colder and wilder still towards Ungava, where from year's end to year's end the snow never entirely disappeared, and the white bear of the floes took the place of the black bear of the forest. In summer the Eskimo lived in tents made of sealskins; but in winter, like their Greenland cousins, in houses built of slabs of frozen snow. Bears and seals were hunted in winter, but in summer there came the fiercer excitements of a great whale drive. The whales would come over the river bars in vast numbers, and then every kayak was afloat, and with harpoon and line the eager sportsmen followed their prey to the death. On one occasion Mr. Horden himself took part in a whale fishery in which no fewer than a thousand prizes were secured—a world of wealth and feasting to the poor Eskimo.
But no matter what the Eskimo were about, if they heard that the white teacher had come they dropped spear and harpoon, and trotted off to listen, to sing, and to pray, in a fashion which showed how deeply interested they were. By and by Bishop Horden was able to obtain for them a missionary of their own, who settled on the spot, and under whose teaching the whole colony around the Whale River region became not only thoroughly civilized, but earnestly Christian.
Still farther north than Ungava, but on the opposite side of Hudson Bay, is a station called Fort Churchill. Horden dubbed it "the last house in the world," for there was no other between it and the North Pole. There the cold in winter is as intense almost as in any spot on the surface of the globe. The diary of an expedition to this lonely outpost, undertaken in the depth of winter, is specially interesting. Horden travelled in a cariole, or dog sledge, accompanied by Indian guides. The temperature was never less than thirty, and sometimes nearly fifty degrees below zero. The greatest precautions had to be taken against frostbite. Every evening, when they encamped in the forest, about an hour and a half was spent in erecting a thick, high barricade of pine branches as a protection against the piercing wind. An enormous fire was also necessary, for one of ordinary size would have made little impression on the frozen air. When a hearty supper had been cooked and eaten, and the Indians had lighted their pipes, the little company would sit around the blazing pine-logs and tell of hunting adventures, or of hairbreadth escapes from the perils of the forest and the flood. As bedtime drew near, all joined earnestly in a short service of praise and prayer, and then lay down to sleep under the open sky, which glittered with frosty stars, or glowed and throbbed with the streaming rays of the brilliant Northern Lights.
Though the last house in the world, Fort Churchill had a heterogeneous population of English traders, Indians, and Eskimo. The Eskimo of the west were a fiercer people than those on the eastern side of the great bay, and were much feared even by the Chippeway Indians—themselves dangerous customers to deal with. Often an Eskimo would come to the station with his face marked with red ochre, a sign that he had recently committed a murder. This red mark was their peculiar glory, for while they prided themselves on their prowess in killing a walrus or a polar bear, they thought it a much higher honor to have slain a human being. Churchill was thus a very needful field of operations in the eyes of the Bishop, and Horden did not rest until he had planted a church there, with a minister of its own to attend to the wants of the variegated flock.
In spite of its rigors and occasional tragedies, life at Churchill was not without its own small humors too. Horden was fond of telling his friends farther south about the Churchill cows. There were three of them. The first was a dwarf. The second was so lean and supple that she could milk herself with her own mouth, and was therefore condemned to go in harness, carrying a bag round her udder which effectually prevented her from enjoying a drink of fresh milk whenever she pleased. The third member of the dairy had been despoiled of her tail one winter night by some hungry wolves. The result was that when summer came and the flies began to swarm—and in the brief, hot summer they do swarm around Hudson Bay —they threatened to eat up all of her that the wolves had left; for without a tail she was perfectly helpless against their assaults. But an ingenious trader bethought himself of a dead cow's tail which was lying in the store:—
“Why not use that? The suggestion was at once acted upon; the tail was attached to the stump by means of some twine, and over it was tied some canvas, well saturated with Stockholm tar. It was a great success, and the creature was again able to do battle with her diminutive but persevering foes.”
In the course of his constant journeys in such a land, Bishop Horden, as will readily be imagined, had many a narrow escape. Shooting the rapids in a bark canoe is one of the most exhilarating of experiences, but sometimes one of the most dangerous. Horden, who travelled thousands of miles by water almost every year, had full taste of the dangers. Once a large canoe in which he was ascending a swollen river was caught in a strong current and dragged down towards some difficult rapids, while the Indians, with faces upstream, dug their paddles into the water and strained their muscles nearly to the bursting-point. Their efforts, however, were quite fruitless. The canoe went back and back, and at length was swept at lightning speed into the boiling flood. Fortunately the crew were equal to the emergency. In a moment they all turned swiftly round in their places, thus converting what had been the stern into the bow, and by careful steering through the rocks the canoe shot safely out at last into the smooth water beneath the rapids.
On another occasion, a smaller canoe struck with a heavy crash upon a rock right in mid-stream. A great hole was made, and the water came pouring in. But by great exertions the canoe was brought to shore before it had time to sink; and in an hour or two it was sufficiently patched up again. For if an Indian canoe is easily damaged, it is easily repaired.
“One goes to a birch tree and cuts off a large piece of bark, another digs up some roots and splits them, a third prepares some pitch, and in the course of an hour or two the bark is sewn into the bottom of the canoe, the seams are covered with pitch, and we are once more loading our little vessel.”
But the narrowest escape that Horden ever made was connected with the sudden break-up of the sea-ice. They were crossing a frozen inlet on the south of Hudson Bay, when the cold season was rather far advanced for a short cut of this kind to be altogether prudent. Just in the middle, when they were about ten miles from the nearest point of land, the guide gave a sudden exclamation and pointed seawards. As they looked, they saw mass after mass of ice rise up and fall back into the sea; and they knew that, with the approach of the warmer weather, the solid surface was going to pieces before an incoming tide. The guide next struck his stick sharply on the spot on which they stood, and the stick went clean through. Everyone knew what that meant—the ice was quite rotten. "Get into the cariole at once!" the guide cried to Mr. Horden. The Bishop jumped in, but his weight forced the hinder part of the sledge downwards into the sea. Both sledge and occupant might have disappeared in a moment if it had not been for the prompt action of the sagacious dogs. They seemed to realize at once Horden's danger and their own. Straining on their harness, they quickly drew the cariole out of its terrible position, and made for the nearest shore at full gallop, while the Indians ran behind not less swiftly. Eskimo dogs and Indians are both good long-distance runners, and we are not surprised to be told that neither men nor dogs ever thought of halting until they felt the solid ground once more beneath their feet.
There were many trials and anxieties, as well as dangers, in Bishop Horden's life. Once the annual ship from England, so eagerly expected, was wrecked on a reef, and a large part of the provisions and other goods on which both traders and missionaries depended to carry them through another twelvemonth was utterly lost. Sometimes there came a bad season—no game in the forest, no wild geese for the goose-hunters along the shore—and the poor Indians died by the dozen. Above all, there was the great trial of parting from his wife and children, for Mrs. Horden, his faithful companion and helpmate from the very first, had to take the boys and girls to England to receive their education. But the good Bishop never lost his cheerfulness or relaxed his activity. He was true always to the motto of his life "The happiest man is he who is most diligently employed about his Master's business.”
Even on his death-bed his diligence did not cease. His last letter, dictated when he was no longer able to write himself, shows him, like Bede in the well-known narrative of his pupil Cuthbert, busy to the last with the task of New Testament translation. He suffered dreadful torture from rheumatism, the natural result of forty-two years of "roughing it" in a climate where the temperature varies from 100 degrees in the shade at the height of the brief summer to 50 degrees below zero in the depth of winter. But in the intervals between the sharp attacks of almost intolerable pain, he pushed eagerly on with a revised version of the New Testament in the Cree language: "Picture me in my work," he writes to his friends in England. "I am lying on my back in my bed, Mr. Richards is sitting at a table by my side. I have my English Bible, the Revised Version, in my hand; Mr. Richards has my translation before him, which he is reading to me slowly and distinctly. Every sentence is very carefully weighed, and all errors are corrected. This is a glorious occupation, and I cannot feel too thankful that I am able to follow it in these days of my weakness.”
The end came suddenly, but it did not come too soon. Horden had accomplished his task, and left behind him a splendid record of heroic work heroically done. Si monumentum requiris, circumspice, is Sir Christopher Wren's appropriate epitaph in St. Paul's Cathedral.
John Horden's monument is to be seen in the presence of a pervasive Christian civilization all around the shores of Hudson Bay. When lie went there first, he found the people living for the most part under the cruel spell of their conjurers. It was a common thing to strangle the sick with a bowstring in order to save further trouble. Aged parents were got rid of in the same way to avoid the expense of supporting them. Murder for gain was rife on every hand. When Bishop Horden died, a complete change had passed over the great part of the Hudson Bay region. More than one Indian had been educated and ordained for the work of the ministry. Twenty-six native lay teachers, Indian and Eskimo, were busily engaged in various parts of the diocese. Thousands of persons had been baptized into the membership of the Church, and showed by peaceable and upright lives that they were Christians in fact as well as in name.
LITERATURE.—Hudson Bay, by R. M. Ballantyne; Forty-two Years amongst the Indians and Eskimo, by Beatrice Batty (the Religious Tract Society); John Horden: Missionary Bishop, by the Rev. A. R. Buckland, M.A. (London: The Sunday School Union).