Voyageurs

by Margaret Elphinstone

  ‘It would take more than that. Thee speaks of it very much as the Friends in Yonge Street do.’

  ‘So the marriage was objectionable to them too?’

  ‘A Friend may not be married before a priest. My sister was disowned for marrying outside the Society.’

  William gave a long low whistle. ‘There's more in this than I reckoned.’ He gave me that sharp sideways glance I was beginning to recognise. ‘But you've not disowned her?’

  ‘She's my own sister.’

  ‘Ay, true, but that's not what I asked.’

  ‘Thee was telling me about the Michilimackinac Company being a nest of hornets.’

  ‘I said Mackinac was a nest of hornets. Very well, the Michilimackinac found itself up against the Yankee traders right from the start – well, that was exactly why we floated the Company, to get upsides with them, so we knew what we were in for. A new American company was on the way up – the American Fur Company it is now. This is the name you'll hear everywhere in Mackinac, laddie – mark it well: Astor. Astor, I said. You mind that name well.’

  ‘Astor.’

  ‘Ay. He comes here to Montreal every year, and stays with old Mr Henry. He's an honoured guest at the Beaver Club; couple of years back he brought his daughter along too. You'd never guess . . . That man is a weasel in a chicken coop, by my reckoning.

  ‘Anyway, to cut a long story short, eventually a new Company was set up – the South West Company. That happened just after your sister was lost. So our Alan Mackenzie came back across Lake Michigan without her, full of his own grief no doubt, and found that while he was gone trade was worse than ever, and the Americans were doing their best to get all the old North-Westers out of the South West and out of Mackinac.’

  ‘But even so, he stayed in American territory?’

  ‘He's there still. We're not at war yet. The agreement just now is that the North West doesn't trade south of the American border, and the South West doesn't trade north of it. And for some reason, which to be honest I haven't fully fathomed, it suits McGillivray that you should go and find Alan, and take him this letter.’

  I thought it all over for a little while, while the log fire blazed and crackled, and William Mackenzie helped himself to another glass of port. ‘So far as I can tell, William McGillivray's interests are in trade, and not in war?’

  ‘Mr McGillivray is a trader, not a soldier. I keep telling you, laddie, the real issue is the border in the far west. Now that's worth going to war for. Fact is, the Company can only operate unhindered in Canadian territory. It's always going to be that way. So we need to establish our Canadian border, once and for all, from Fort William to the Pacific coast. That's what matters. Mackinac will be a dead duck, out of it. The best furs are all up north now anyway.’

  ‘That's what thee thinks. It's not what William McGillivray thinks, is it?’

  He darted another sidelong glance at me. ‘No, lad, I don't think it is. But he plays his cards close to his chest, Mr McGillivray. He has to. He wouldn't be sending you to Mackinac if he'd given up our interests there. He wouldn't give you a personal letter to carry to a young clerk – one who isn't even in employment with us right now – if there wasn't a reason for it. I just want you to have some idea what you're getting into, seeing as I started you on this track.’

  ‘I thank thee, friend. But I started myself, on my own track. I'll take any road that hath no evil in it, to get where I want.’

  1 Since I was a young man I have lived through twenty years of peace. The world is much changed, and Friends have changed with the world, insofar as men like myself understand the affairs reported in the newspapers to be very much our concern. The elders rebuked me when I took out a subscription to the Manchester Observer a few years after Waterloo, but I think I was in the right of it. The Manchester Guardian – for so it is now – is less concerned with just reform these days than it was in the twenties, but I still ride over to Keswick for it twice a week, or send the lad. It is six years now since that Act was passed which allows a man to take part in public affairs without taking an oath, which would be contrary to the principles of our Society. I rejoiced to see Joseph Pease take his seat in Parliament, and I care not who knows it.

  2 Such an action was in no way consonant with our Peace Testimony. I'm quite aware of my own backslidings, but I have committed myself to tell the truth, and omit nothing relevant.

  3 At least, I know not how it may be now, for the old North West went down these fifteen years ago, and the Hudson's Bay Company, which bought the old partners out, is altogether a more autocratic institution.

  4 Though I learned later that they publish as many books in the Americas as they do in Europe. In fact they have almost all the accoutrements of civilised living, manufactured on their own territory. Somehow I had not expected that.

  CHAPTER 9

  I COME TO THE DAYS WHEN I WAS MONSIEUR GREEN-horn,1 travelling with the agent Hugh Chisholm and a dozen voyageurs across the wilderness that covered half a continent. Hugh dined with us the night before we left. He was a sandy weather-beaten fellow with a wit so dry it took me days to learn that I had to take his meanings aslant if I was to make any sense of what he said. He and William disposed of several bottles between them, but the only effect of wine on Hugh was to make him more whimsical than ever. I can think of no man for whom I could have acted the role of servant more easily than he. He gave his orders as if it were all a game, and though he could be sharp enough in action, I never saw him ruffled or out of temper, not even when we lay abed too long, and the voyageurs pulled out our tent poles, which they use under the cargo in the canoe, so we were left wallowing in a heap of damp canvas, struggling to make ready.

  As for the voyageurs: Jean-Pierre was our avant, that is, our bowsman, who had charge of all the voyageurs, and Marc our gouvernail. (Everyone made much of our shared name. Marc seemed to think that it conferred some sort of responsibility on him, which was to my advantage, for in the canoe he stood with his steering paddle just behind where Hugh and I sat side by side. From there he'd regale me with stories, or simply warn me what was coming next, for which I was at times most grateful.)2 Jacques was our cook. The other milieux were seasoned voyageurs, all but Alban, whose first voyage it was. He was a lad of fourteen, but all the tricks that are played upon novices were played on him and me alike, and so we grew to be comrades, for all the ten years between us.

  That first day I found them a drunken, bawdy lot – for it was easy to guess what they were talking about. We left from above the rapids at Lachine, and paddled ten miles or more along the shore of Montreal Island, until we reached the Lake of Two Mountains – Hugh translated the French for me – a choppy stretch of open water longer than Windermere. As we pulled away from Lachine the voyageurs were singing. Little did I know how that song – and many like it – would become woven into the rhythms of my brain. Indeed, even now, as I sit at my desk in my quiet study – Grasmoor is all shrouded today in weeping mists – that same tune comes back to me:

  En roulant ma boule roulant

  En roulant ma boule.

  En roulant ma boule roulant

  En roulant ma boule.

  The verses are a nonsensical tale about dead ducks – I discovered several of the songs feature this topic; I cannot imagine why – but they have stayed in my head from that day to this, when so many more weighty topics have vanished in the mists of memory.3

  Before we finally left Montreal Island, the voyageurs went ashore at the Convent of St Anne, where I understood that some Catholic or pagan rite takes place, to bless them on their way. They were very anxious I should join them in this, but, although Hugh went, and said it would be politic in me to follow his example, I was adamant (which cost me Jacques favour, and possibly that of others; this took several days to remedy) and I waited by the canoes. I was a little feart, not so much of the wilderness ahead but of the strange company I had got myself into. The men might be the worse for a wild night, but today they were dressed l
ike peacocks, in their bright woven sashes and coloured caps. It was I, in my sober grey coat and broadbrim, who was the kenspeckle one.

  To compound the temptation of the songs, Hugh had with him a fiddle, and on fair nights he would play to us, and the voyageurs, after fifteen hours of paddling upstream, would up and dance until the fire died down. Then they would suddenly retire under their upturned canoes, roll themselves in their blankets and fall immediately asleep. I could not think the dancing wrong in them; they are simple folk, and express their gaiety easily.4 They are also tough and courageous, and immensely strong. I towered over all of them, and was used to hard work at home, but even so I could only carry half the burden that they took up at every portage along the route.

  The first day out of Lachine I felt so cramped I wondered how I'd support the weeks ahead. Our canoe was packed to the gunwales with canvas bales containing all the trade goods William had shown me stacked in the company warehouse – blankets, beads, cloth, ironware, tobacco, and so forth – as well as kegs of liquor and gunpowder, and long boxes filled with muskets. Somehow the voyageurs made their places in among all this. There were no benches, and no legroom either, as far as I was concerned. I passed many a mile, when the water was calm, lying back in my little hole, with my legs up on the bales in front of me, watching the clouds moving overhead, and the forested banks slip past. Somewhere between the first long rapids and la Chaudière the voyageurs agreed – I'd been speaking to Marc about it – that I might try my hand with the extra paddle. If I'd had to sit still for five weeks I'd have – no, the plain truth is that I would not have gone mad – but I'd have found it ill to bear. When Marc – for he was the one who could see my efforts – reported with a shrug that I was pas mal, they even readjusted the load so I could put my feet to the floor while I paddled, giving me stern warnings not to put my weight on the fragile birchbark skin which was all that lay between us and the river. Marc was strict with me until I learned the art of feathering; before I got into the way of it he said it was like having a startled mallard trying to take off beside him. I was a fair pupil. When we finally parted at Sainte Marie du Sault the voyageurs were kind enough to say they'd miss their voyageur de plus and even Jacques, who was of a sullen sort, said it would be tough crossing the lake sans l'aide de cette pousse extra de derrière.

  Hugh thought all this was a fine joke. He spent the quiet hours reading, but I couldn't borrow his books, for they were all in Latin. His favourite was poems by one named Horace. Sometimes he would smile to himself, and translate a passage for me, and occasionally, if he could be bothered, he'd explain the irony to me.

  I'd thought that all we had to do was canoe upriver through the day and camp at night. I soon learned better. The Outaouais River proper began with a long stretch of white water – this before we had well set out. We were scarcely in the canoes at all, but had to scramble, heavily-burdened, along a rough trail, while the half-loaded canoes had to be pulled up the rapids with ropes. I'd never seen anything like it; I was expecting every man of ours to be drowned as I watched from the shore, and indeed there are little crosses made here and there along the banks, each marking where a voyageur met his death. Carrying Hugh's tent and personal effects (as well as my own small knapsack and blanket) was my job at the portages.5 My load was as nothing to the voyageurs, who carry two ninety-pound bales on their backs at a time. Hugh told me many of them die young, and they suffer much from hernias, and broken backs. Those first rapids were twelve dangerous, weary miles of dragging and portaging. By the end of that day I was beginning to regret that I had committed myself to voyage right up the Outaouais River, for already I'd have been glad never to see it more.

  Talking to Hugh, it dawned on me for the first time that our rivers at home are very little, because we have not the hinterland or height of land. The rivers of Upper Canada are a different colour. Our rivers are loud and fast, with ice-coloured water fresh out of the hills. The water runs clear over a grey stone bed; sometimes one sees moss on the stones underwater as clear as if it grew in air. When a road crosses a river, it goes by a solid grey-slate packhorse bridge, wide enough for a cart. The rivers of North America are so great that sometimes, as thee canoes along one bank, thee can't see the other. No roads, no bridges – ‘twould be impossible. What we did begin to see was a range of hills ahead and to our right. Whenever I lift up mine eyes to the hills – and this is my first prayer every day of my life – I cannot choose but to glorify God and all his works, most particularly that he created the mountains and hills. My native mountains are – I can say this without prejudice – the most perfectly formed mountains in the whole world, containing within them a great diversity of wildness without immensity. On the North American continent the mountains are on the whole diffuse, and too thickly forested. Alan told me there are mountains in the far west beyond anything I've ever seen, but I have naught to say of that; ‘twould be but hearsay.

  ‘Twas not mountains that formed my prayers on that far continent, but rivers. The river was all. I heard it in my dreams at night; before I looked out of our tent in the morning I listened to hear what it had to say to me of the day ahead; its current was the accompaniment to my days; my very thoughts were shaped by the sound of it.

  The voyageurs paddle all day because they must. Their strokes are very fast – fifty strokes a minute for hours at a time – and sometimes furious. The profits of the North West Company rest wholly upon their speed, so the Company pays each man 400 livres to spend the best part of the year paddling from Lachine to Fort William and back again. It was not like that for me: I paddled when I chose, and for long hours I gave my blisters a rest. Poor Alban's hands were a mass of bleeding sores until they hardened up. And yet, on the long stretch up to la Chaudière, as often as not the men sang at their work, and I have to admit that the tune helped me greatly to get into the rhythm of it. I kept my eyes fixed on Jean-Pierre's back – for every man must follow the avant – watching the lift of his arm, and the quick pull back, matching the movement to the song as I tried with all my might to keep time with him:

  A la Claire fontaine

  M'en allant promener,

  J'ai trouvé l'eau si belle

  Que je m'y suis baigné.

  Il y a longtemps que je l'aime

  Jamais je ne l'oublierai.

  My paddling muscles grew sore, and then hard. I was lulled into a false sense of growing ease until we reached la Chaudière. Just before we came to this cauldron of falling waters we camped opposite a great bluff, where all evening we saw the flickering fires of a loggers’ camp on the south bank half a mile away. I hadn't yet seen the force, but all that night I heard it roaring through my dreams like a vengeful beast, and everywhere around us the forest was damp and verdant from the blown spray.

  We started on the portage the next morning. When Marc showed me the path I thought he was joking (for the voyageurs’ sense of humour was often quite unfathomable). We had to scramble with our loads up rocks as steep as Raven Crags in Mungrisdale. The narrow path was worn down to the rock. The first time I followed Marc to the bluff above the falls I nearly walked over a sheer edge, where the path had been washed away. No one saw. There was a shaking fear in the pit of my stomach, but I didn't let on for shame at my carelessness, for was I not the only mountain-dweller among them?

  We got all the bales along that treacherous path, while the hungry waters churned in the depths below. The men jogged along under their loads, over pine roots worn icy-smooth, across moss-covered slippery rocks, as if there were no sheer drop just inches from their passing feet. Then came the canoes. Four men portaged each one, but the path was much too narrow. I was on the downside amidships, being taller. The canoe was a dead weight digging into my right shoulder, and as the other three moved it kept shoving me to the edge. The great bow bumped against a scarred pine – this must have happened many times before – and the whole boat lurched towards me. I braced myself – it was going over – we couldn't hold it – and tried to take
the weight across my back. All of a sudden the ground gave way under my left boot. As I slipped I heard my nailed boots scraping. I let the canoe go and threw myself flat against the rock.

  The world went slow. The waters roared beneath me, and for an eternity I hung there in the balance. My feet dangled over emptiness. Under my fingers there was naught but wet rock. It sloped so much it was like to tip me off. All that stopped me slipping was the rough wool and the buttons on my coat. I heard a bumping and breaking among the pine boughs – that was the men dragging the canoe away from the edge, stern foremost. Then Marc's voice above me, ’Sacré, Mon Dieu! Arrêtez Marc! Ne bougez pas! Quoique vous fassiez, surtout ne bougez pas!‘

  I couldn't have moved. Even when I breathed I seemed to slip a little.

  ’Tendez la main! Oui! Oui! Un peu plus! Encore! Bon!’

  Very cautiously I moved my arm upwards. A pair of hands grasped my wrist. ’Et maintenant l'autre!‘ I reached up my other hand, and that was grasped also. ’Bon! Bon! Mon Dieu, c'est aussi dur que de pousser un tauteau!‘

  Marc and Jacques slowly dragged me clear until I could feel solid earth under my feet. I stood up shakily. We looked at the place where a full yard of the path had slipped into the abyss. The newly exposed rock was white. Bits of earth and little pebbles were still trickling downwards. I was mortified. I, of all men, should have known not to put my weight so near a cornice, path or no path. It was that damned canoe pressing on my shoulder had stopped me thinking – I was swearing inside my head, as I had never sworn before. It was from hearing it all around me, and my own shame.

  After la Chaudière portage the men retired early, exhausted, as soon as we'd eaten our pease porridge, seasoned, as a reward for our efforts, with an extra ration of salt pork. We could still hear the falls thundering behind us, too near for me to sleep easily tonight, I felt, and so I lingered. Only Jacques, Hugh and I were left alone by the fire. (I never knew men so proficient at making fire out of a strike-a-light and birch bark shavings. No fire could be carried in the canoes, so we had to kindle a new flame every evening.) Jacques watched tomorrow's pease porridge as it simmered in the kettle, and stirred it occasionally with a peeled stick. A myriad lights twinkled in the great river as it swept smoothly past us. The roar of the force five miles away was like endless rain drumming on a slate roof, yet where we were, we were bathed in the calm gold light of evening, like a little kingdom of peace amidst the ragings of the world.