River Rough, River Smooth. Anthony Dalton
man on board, caught us up and prompted our first tea break of the expedition. Obviously there was no particular urgency on this day.
For the next stage I joined Ken Ormand and Ben in the canoe to take photographs of the York from a different perspective. She was a stirring sight. Many of the rowers wore sweatbands around their heads. With their black hair, quite long on some of them, dark skin, and solid builds they looked every inch a crew of traditional Cree York boat tripmen. Only their modern, casual clothes told a different story. As we couldn’t see into the boat from our lowly position, they could just as easily have been carrying a load of furs for transshipment on Hudson’s Bay Company ships to England.
Tripmen, the York boat crews of the last century, were so called because they were paid by the trip.22 Normally they were paid half their wages at the beginning of the journey and the other half if they completed it alive. They rowed the boats. They portaged the freight and their York boats overland to avoid the worst of the rapids. They lowered the boats on handlines down some cascades and ran others with all on board. Unlike the tripmen of old, none of this crew was getting paid, before or after the voyage. Except for that difference, our experiences would reflect closely those of the long-dead heroes of this and other wilderness rivers in Canada.
The Cree, in particular the Swampy Cree, were considered by the HBC to be at least as reliable as their own European servants at hauling freight on the rivers.
“The Indian trippers invariably deliver their goods here in better condition than the Red River freemen,” Governor Simpson reported.23 Simpson acknowledged to the London office that the Natives were more honest than the Company’s own European and Canadian servants. As a consequence of their reliability and credibility, the Norway House York Boat Brigade crews travelled without company officers.
“Indian trippers are by far the cheapest we can employ,” claimed another Company man.24 No doubt the last was especially true; although the Company did accept the obligation of partly feeding the tripmens’ families while the men were on the rivers.
Flotillas of York boats, manned by Cree tripmen, frequently left Norway House in the summer months to make the downriver trip to York Factory. Those miniature armadas became known as the Hayes River Indian Brigades.25 Travelling as a group gave them the opportunity of helping one another over the more difficult portages. The more manpower available to move a boat, the faster the job got done.
The Hayes River freight route had been in use, in some form or other, since at least the late seventeenth century. It wasn’t until the 1820s, however, that the Hayes River Indian Brigades began to become a serious work force on the river. By 1865, when the freight traffic on the Hayes River was at its zenith, the Hudson’s Bay Company employed 146 Indians (mostly Cree) fromYork Factory and Oxford House.26 Norway House contributed a further forty-eight. Collectively they annually moved forty-eight York boat loads,27 or a hefty 135 tons (137.16 metric tonnes), of freight from the remote post close to the shores of Hudson Bay to the waters of Lake Winnipeg.
On the first day of the 1994 expedition we travelled north down the Nelson River. Like the Hayes and the Churchill, the Nelson also flows north and east to Hudson Bay. In fact, it joins the bay only a few kilometres north of the Hayes. It is, however, a much wider and shallower river that was never a serious contender for the busy transportation route from the bay to the Red River Settlement. The route had been tried, but was dropped in favour of the Hayes River.
Each of the three virtually parallel rivers flows over the ancient rock of the Precambrian Shield. Dating back to the Archeozoic period, the rock formations are well in excess of 1,300 million years old.28 They were there when the first algae appeared; the first signs of life. And long before the first homo sapiens. We, the latest step in the human evolutionary chain, would travel where a relatively limited number of our kind had journeyed.
Global warming, regularly in the news today, is not a new phenomenon. Global warming ended each of the ice ages. As the land warmed up and the glaciers of the last ice age began to melt and retreat 11,500 years ago, a huge lake was formed. Stretching across Manitoba, from Hudson Bay to well south of the 49th parallel, and from central Saskatchewan deep into northern Ontario, Lake Agassiz29 was once the largest glacial lake in North America. As the lake has slowly subsided and the land returned, the rivers have continued their uninterrupted flow. Those rivers have been carving and fashioning this track since the last ice age ended. Today, as always, they have the ultimate control over this route and its travellers.
Although we had left Norway House early in the afternoon, with only half a day in which to travel, we were confident of reaching beyond the first rapids before nightfall. Hour after hour the rowers kept their pace. Occasionally one would call for water and a tin mug was passed forward or back as the need arose. Drinking water was simply scooped from the river without stopping the boats. In fact, the only water we ever used came from the river or from the lake beside us.
For the initial thirty kilometres or so from Norway House the river is peaceful. The rowers settled in to an easy rhythm, driving the boat north on a smooth, wide waterway. At Sea River Falls the river’s attitude changes dramatically. From one bank to the other, the Nelson River is nearly half a kilometre wide. Stretching the width of the river is a messy set of rapids running over a sharp ledge, and a wicked assortment of rocks staggered over varying horizontal distances. The total vertical drop is not much more than about three metres. It was still far more than the York boat could handle.
I was well aware that Sea River Falls was a dangerous rapid. A stone monument30 in Norway House bears the inscription:“Erected by the Commissioned Officers of the Hudson’s Bay Company In Memory of Horace Belanger, Chief Factor, who was drowned near here on the 1st October, 1892 and of Stanley Simpson, Clerk, who was drowned at the same time in trying to save the life of his master and friend.”
That drowning took place at Sea River Falls when Belanger’s canoe overturned.
CHAPTER 4 York Boats
JOSEPH CONRAD WROTE, “THE LOVE that is given to ships is profoundly different from the love men feel for every other work of their hands.”1
The taciturn boat-builders born on the windy, almost treeless, Orkney Islands in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would, no doubt, have agreed with Conrad. Boat-building was a special skill. It was also a labour of love. The Orkney Islanders had learned well from their Viking ancestors. Some of them would carry those skills to the new world.
It is not certain exactly when the first York boat went into service in the North American wilderness. It is, however, well known that the earliest York boats were not used on the Hayes River system. Nor did they originate at York Factory.
An Orkneyman named Joseph Isbister2 (pronounced Eyes-bister), is credited with having had the foresight to design and build the first York boat in the first half of the eighteenth century. Isbister was the factor in charge at the Hudson’s Bay Company post at Albany House, on James Bay. Perhaps tired of the limited strength and cargo-carrying capabilities of the freight canoes, Isbister wanted something much more durable.
His eventual creation owed a lot to the open fishing boats used by his kinsmen around the shores of the far-off Orkney Islands, north of Scotland’s mainland. They in turn bear remarkable construction and design similarities to the Viking longboats of an earlier era.
Isbister’s heavy wooden boats began work for the company sometime after 1745. For a long time they were simply known as “inland boats.”3 The term “York boat” came later when York Factory was their main port. By 1779,York boats were the regular means of transport on the Albany River and by 1790 they could be found as far away as the Assiniboine River, some five hundred kilometres west of the head of the Albany River. There is little doubt that many of those York boats had made the long journey far inland from Albany House.
Around 1795,York boats started hauling freight — furs primarily — downriver from Cumberland house to Norway House and York Factory. Their journeys took them along parts of the Saskatchewan and Nelson