For many years it was the opinion of all ranks of people, that the Hudson's Bay Company were averse to making discoveries of every kind; and being content with the profits of their small capital, as it was then called, did not want to increase their trade. What might have been the ideas of former members of the Company respecting the first part of these charges I cannot say, but I am well assured that they, as well as the present members, have always been ready to embrace every plausible plan for extending the trade. As a proof of this assertion, I need only mention the vast sums of money which they have expended at different times in endeavouring to establish fisheries, though without success: and the following Journey, together with the various attempts made by Bean, Christopher, Johnston, and Duncan, to find a North West passage, are recent proofs that the present members are as desirous of making discoveries, as they are of extending their trade.
That air of mystery, and affectation of secrecy, perhaps, which formerly attended some of the Company's proceedings in the Bay, might give rise to those conjectures; and the unfounded assertions and unjust aspersions of Dobbs, Ellis, Robson, Dragge, and the American Traveller, the only s that have written on Hudson's Bay, and who have all, from motives of interest or revenge, taken a particular pleasure in arraigning the conduct of the Company, without having any real knowledge of their proceedings, or any experience in their service, on which to found their charges, must have contributed to confirm the public in that opinion. Most of those Writers, however, advance such notorious absurdities, that none except those who are already prejudiced against the Company can give them credit.
Robson, from his six years' residence in Hudson's Bay and in the Company's service, might naturally have been supposed to know something of the climate and soil immediately round the Factories at which he resided; but the whole of his book is evidently written with prejudice, and dictated by a spirit of revenge, because his romantic and inconsistent schemes were rejected by the Company. Besides, it is well known that Robson was no more than a tool in the hand of Mr. Dobbs.
The American Traveller, though a more elegant writer, has still less claim to our indulgence, as his assertions are a greater tax on our credulity. His saying that he discovered several large lumps of the finest virgin copper is such a palpable falsehood that it needs no refutation. No man, either English or Indian, ever found a bit of copper in that country to the South of the seventy-first degree of latitude, unless it had been accidentally dropped by some of the far Northern Indians in their way to the Company's Factory.
