ADVENTURERS IN ENGLAND.

Hokitika Guardian, 3 January 1927, Page 1

ADVENTURERS IN ENGLAND.

HOW TRAPPERS WORK IN THE ARCTIC. (By SIR PERCIYAL PHILLIPS, in the London “ Daily Mail.’ ) WINNIPEG, Oct. 24. Canada’s fur trade is still invested with miiih of tlie romance that surrounded her pioneers when they first invaded the frozen North. Behind the stately title of her oldest corporation—- “ The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England 1 ratling into Hudson’s Bay ” —there is a fine and stirring story ot enterprise and Em-pire-building which began more than 250 years ago.

Times have changed since the good .ship Nonsuch arrived in the Hinnies in 1669 with a cargo of beaver pelts. The Hudson’s Bay Company still scours the North for furs, but it also runs a chain of eleven great department stores divided among the cities and towns of Western Canada. It still barters with the ingenuous Indian and the Eskimo in the Arctic, but it also runs beauty parlours for fastidious women in Winnipeg and Vancouver, and even maintains creches where shopping mothers can register their infants like so much unwanted luggage. THE SAME BON. Nevertheless, furs remain the most important consideration, and with that trade survive some of the ancient customs that date from its inception. Tlie furs ships still sail from the Thames in consort, and part company as did their predecessors in the days of sail. Only a few months ago the Bayrupert sot out from Gravesend carrying her despatches for tlie Hudson’s Bay posts in the original oak-and-brass-bound box t-liat had made innumerable voyages to the northern seas. One cannot realise the magnitude of the field covered by these Adventurers Out of England without looking at a map which embraces Canada and the North Pole. All that vast tract of territory north of flip transcontinental, railway is divided into ten fur-trading districts, each an Empire in itself. In these districts are more than 200 posts. The farthest is 500 miles beyond the Arctic Circle. There are 20 posts strung along the ragged shores of Hudson’s Bay and .Tallies Bay. served by a steamship plying once a year from England. Fourteen posts in the Western Arctic are on “the boat ” of a vessel which sails from Vancouver during the summer. The remaining posts depend upon almost every conceivable kind ot transportation. which is often slow as well as laborious—steam, petrol and electric tauches, freight- canoes, freight barges pushed by shallow draught tugs, oneman canoes, and in the most remote, areas dog teams and man power for portage. GIRLS IN THE WILDERNESS. There is one appalling stretch of wilderness in the North-West, from Edmonton to the mouth of the McKenzie River—a distance as it is travelled of more than 1.800 miles, over which a regular passenger route is maintained. Two English girls made the journey last summer.

It is linked together by a chain ot boat services uniting Slave Lake and Athabasca Rivers, with one 14-miles gap over which everything has to be carried. “Portage” is the term for The outlying posts are usually no more than a wooden store and a managers’ house, with perhaps a warehouse added at the larger stations. Here the Hudson's Bay Company agent lives through the bleak Arctic winter, wrapped in Eskimo fur garments. awaiting the skins brought in by trappers. The latter are usually white men, then Indiana, and finally

Eskimos in the northernmost trapping region. These trappers do most ol their work in winter. Gradually they accumulate their stocks of pelts, skinning each animal where it is caught and drying tlie, skin expertly by stretching it oil a wooden frame. They usually make hut one or two trips to the Company’s post during the season. There the pelts are graded and paid for on a cash basis according to their quality and the state of the market—which is an important factor. SECRET WIRELESS CODES. The Company’s agents are kept informed of market prices by telegraph or wireless. Listeners-in in Canada constantly hear odd messages, supposedly relating to the quality of different kinds of vegetables, being broadcast from Winnipeg or Edmonton. These are the fur quotations, coded for secrecy. Trappers equally with agents maintain a lively interest in market fluctuations. Wireless has been a blessing to them. The editor of the Calgary Herald ’ received a letter from a far North-Western trapper during the summer asking him to broadcast the fur quotations at least twice a week. The trapper had bought a receiving set in order to keep himself in touch with the outside world, and he explained naively that he wanted it for “business as well as jazz.” Service with the Adventurers of England is maintained in the traditional way. Twenty new apprentices, all lads from the north of Scotland, came out last summer to undergo five years' training at remote trading posts.