Rainy Lake House

by Theodore Catton

  In London, McLoughlin and Bethune soon located the Hudson’s Bay House at Numbers 3 and 4 Fenchurch Street in the heart of the East Side’s mercantile district. The company headquarters occupied both levels of a two-story stone building. On the ground level, a high central archway led to cavernous fur stores; on the level above, offices and filing rooms were ranged down a narrow, musty hallway. The fur stores were stuffed to the rafters with rack upon rack of beaver, marten, fisher, otter, mink, wolverine, bear, lynx, wolf, fox, and muskrat skins. All were arranged in such a way as to facilitate an occasional “sale by the candle,” or public auction. At these events, buyers would pack the floor, and bidding for each lot of furs would go on for as long as it took a one-inch candle to burn down. Whoever got in the last bid before the candle flame guttered out secured the lot for sale.6

  Through its royal charter, the company owned rights to dock its ships at Deptford, one of the oldest shipyards in the Port of London. Furs were landed dockside and were trundled from there down narrow lanes to Fenchurch Street, a thoroughfare thrumming with traffic and trade. Together with Cheapside, Cornhill, and Gracechurch streets, Fenchurch Street formed one of the radiating spokes within the ragged perimeter of the ancient, walled section of the city. From those four main trunk roads branched the many little crooked alleyways and cobbled mews that comprised the better part of the old city’s bewildering maze of streets. The mercantile district was the commercial heart of London, jammed with dockyards, warehouses, produce markets, and livery stables. Above the jumble of roofs and chimney pots and columns of smoke loomed the massive dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral.7

  The shipyards stretched for miles eastward along the Thames, a good many of them built since the start of the Napoleonic Wars. Besides the old shipyards at Deptford and Millwall, there were the East India Docks at Blackwall, the New West India Docks of the West India Dock Company, and the recently completed Commercial Docks at Surrey. Barks and brigs and sloops of all sizes were packed like sardines in their berths, while the many vessels slowly coming and going on the river made a veritable forest of masts and sails.8

  In the eyes of the two Nor’ Westers the London streets were a chaos of noise and confusion. Horse-drawn wagons, handcarts, hackney coaches, two-wheeled hansoms, and sedan chairs vied for openings in the slow-­moving traffic, their drivers shouting and cursing at one another. Pedestrians thronged the sides of the street, jostling past the innumerable street vendors, who had in their stalls or their baskets every imaginable item from articles of furniture to roast potatoes and gingerbread. Bobbing along in this endless, roiling stream of humanity were the numerous messenger boys and pickpockets. And the throng went on day after day in all kinds of weather. When the cold, damp fog rolled off the Thames, the people just bent into it. When it rained, all the pedestrians jockeyed to take the wall to avoid the curtains of water pouring off the shingle roofs.

  McLoughlin could not help but notice all the dandies around him. London was the center of fashion in 1820, and both he and Bethune had little idea of what was new in Englishmen’s dress before they took their sudden plunge into London society. Most English gentlemen now wore trousers instead of breeches—not the loose-fitting pants worn by peasants and working men, but skin-tight trousers designed to show off a man’s legs. The model new look was to dress in a smart, black waistcoat fitted snugly over a white linen starcher, skin-tight trousers, Wellington boots, and, of course, a beaver felt top hat. Society men accessorized: in place of the old sword scabbard hanging from a waist belt, they now carried a fancy umbrella.9

  Unfortunately, no official record of McLoughlin’s and Bethune’s negotiations with the London Committee is known to exist, and we are left to imagine what kind of impression the two rough-hewn Canadians in their rustic finery made on their London hosts. It is likely that after their initial contact the meeting place moved from the Hudson’s Bay House to one of the nearby coffee houses, since that was where merchants and businessmen conducted most of their business affairs. A favorite meeting place among the Hudson’s Bay men was Garraway’s Coffee House on Broad Street. Also popular were the numerous coffee shops tucked into every nook and alleyway around the Royal Exchange, at the center of the mercantile district. These establishments catered to the middle-class merchants, bankers, and lawyers of London’s East Side, providing coffee and a place to sit, smoke, read the newspapers, and discuss business for just a penny a cup. It is likely that McLoughlin and Bethune found themselves frequenting one of these establishments sometime during the month of December, trudging back to their private lodgings for each long winter night.

  They must have soon realized, however, that the London Committee was holding them at arm’s length. Almost on the day the two men arrived in England, William and Simon McGillivray intensified their own efforts to forge an amalgamation of the North West and Hudson’s Bay companies. John Caldwell, the colonial government official whom McLoughlin and Bethune had met aboard the Albion, brought the McGillivrays the news that the two Canadians had arrived from New York to strike a deal on behalf of the wintering partners, whereupon the McGillivrays determined to preempt them. The men of the London Committee perceived their advantage. With two teams of negotiators from the fractured North West partnership in London at the same time, they saw that they were in a very strong bargaining position. If either the McGillivrays or the wintering partners demanded too much, the Hudson’s Bay Company men only had to turn to the other party. Andrew Colvile of the London Committee decided that the McGillivrays held the balance of power in the rival company, and so he would deal mainly with them. His main interest in parleying with McLoughlin and Bethune, therefore, was to hold them in the wings until his negotiation with the McGillivrays was concluded.10

  The key negotiator on behalf of McTavish, McGillivrays and Company was Edward Ellice, a wealthy Londoner, investor, merchant, and member of Parliament. Ellice had dabbled in the fur trade as early as 1803, when a short escapade to North America earned him the nickname “Bear.” By 1819, he had become a major shareholder in the North West Company and its principal London agent. Near the end of that year, Ellice had put together an offer to buy all the Hudson’s Bay Company shares held by the dying Lord Selkirk as a way to position the two companies so they could broker a merger. Andrew Colvile had spurned that offer, but Ellice had patiently stayed in the game. Now, one year later, the McGillivrays looked to him to negotiate a deal.11

  In early January, “Bear” Ellice and John Caldwell visited Colin Robertson at his East Side lodgings to discuss the prospective merger. Ellice said he greatly resented McLoughlin and Bethune coming to London with powers of attorney to negotiate on behalf of the other wintering partners; it was very damaging and it put him in a bind. Neither he nor Robertson knew whether the doctor was parleying with the Hudson’s Bay men right then or not. Evidently Ellice went to Robertson in the hope of finding out. When Robertson claimed not to know, Ellice turned their conversation to another topic. The next day Robertson went to Andrew Colvile, reported the fact that Ellice was curious whether McLoughlin was currently negotiating with the London Committee, and asked Colvile point blank whether he was talking to McLoughlin. Colvile would neither confirm nor deny it.12

  A few days later, Simon McGillivray joined Robertson for breakfast. Like Ellice, he soon inquired as to what McLoughlin and Bethune were up to—were they in touch with the London Committee? Robertson said he could not enlighten him on that. Simon McGillivray then got spitting mad, referring to the matter of the eighteen powers of attorney that the doctor held in his pocket. As Robertson wrote afterwards, he railed against the doctor “with the utmost contempt.”13

  On February 6, Andrew Colvile informed Robertson by letter that the London Committee was very close to a deal with “the N.W. Co.”—by which he meant the McGillivrays and Ellice. Perhaps McLoughlin received the news as well, for around that same time he left London and sailed across the English Channel to visit his brother David, who was also a doctor and had a successf
ul medical practice in Boulogne, France. He sojourned with his brother for about one month, returning to London in March. If he had any expectation of participating in the final stage of negotiations in the latter part of March, he was disappointed. The gentlemen of the London Committee and the McGillivrays and Ellice signed the instrument forming a union of the two companies on March 26, 1821. McLoughlin and Bethune were not invited.14

  Simon McGillivray would later insist that without the untimely defection of McLoughlin, Bethune, and the eighteen winterers, and their meddling in the negotiations, the North West Company would have succeeded in buying control of the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1821. That may have been so, but in the judgment of history the actual outcome was probably better for everyone than an outright victory by one side or the other would have been. “The union of the North West and Hudson’s Bay companies created an enterprise of power unequalled in the history of the fur trade,” the historian John S. Galbraith has written. “The resources, experience and business acumen of the Hudson’s Bay Company blended with the energy of the Nor’ Westers to give unusual vitality to the monopoly that came into being in 1821.”15 If McLoughlin’s role was that of a spoiler, he nonetheless came out on the right side of history. His concern that the McGillivrays acted too much in their own self-interest was not misplaced.

  Despite the fact that McLoughlin’s actions gave the Hudson’s Bay Company the upper hand in the negotiations, Andrew Colvile steered the parties toward an equitable settlement. In the final accord, annual profits were to be divided into 100 shares with 20 distributed to the Hudson’s Bay directors, 20 to the Montreal partners, 40 to the wintering people, 5 to the heirs of Lord Selkirk, and 5 to Simon McGillivray and Edward Ellice. The remaining 10 shares were to be kept in reserve. Colvile recognized that it was not in his company’s long-term interests to be vindictive. Historians E. E. Rich and R. Harvey Fleming praised Colvile’s “good sense” in refraining from using the winterers’ revolt to destroy McTavish, McGillivrays and Company. To cut the Montreal merchants out of the fur trade would not have served the company’s interests in the long run.16

  The union’s most important result was that it reconstituted a monopoly over the fur trade in British North America. Reorganizing the trade as a monopoly was necessary in order to restore its profitability, provide security for investors, and fend off American traders. In particular, the rise of John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company posed an increasing threat to British and Canadian interests. Fur-trade historian Harold Innis went so far as to assert, “American trade after 1815, in a sense, squeezed the two large Canadian companies into one unit.”17

  Another important effect of the amalgamation was to create a more rational and efficient system of supply and transportation based on Hudson Bay. Gaining access to Hudson Bay was, next to ending the strife, the North West Company’s greatest incentive for forming a union with its rival. The 3,000-mile relay system for transporting goods and furs between Montreal and the Athabaska may have been the pride of the North West Company, but it was wildly impractical. Costly both in time and money, it was a poor substitute for the Hudson’s Bay Company’s privileged position on the bay. When the two companies combined, the Hudson’s Bay Company’s most significant contribution to the new enterprise was its royal charter of 1670, granting exclusive rights to trade with Indians in the vast Hudson Bay ­watershed. It was chiefly to protect the royal charter that the Hudson’s Bay name was retained for the reorganized company.

  McLoughlin surely understood that as soon as the system of transport and supply was revamped, Fort William would become a minor post. The four-week canoe run between Montreal and Lake Superior would become a mere tangent to the main flow of goods to and from Hudson Bay. He knew not where his next posting would be, but he did know that managing a hospital for the thousand-odd canoemen who gathered for the rendezvous each summer at Fort William was now a thing of the past.

  The part of the agreement of most consequence for McLoughlin personally, as it was for all traders in the two companies, was a document known as the Deed Poll. The Deed Poll spelled out which men from each company were to be retained as officers in the reorganized company. Since one object of the union was to eliminate redundancies, all traders were anxious to know who would be included in this select group of officers, to be known henceforth as “chief factors” (district administrators) and “chief traders” (their deputies). Those not selected faced either demotion to the rank of clerk or a forced retirement. Altogether the Deed Poll named thirty-two Nor’ Westers and twenty-one Hudson’s Bay men to these coveted positions. To many Nor’ Westers, the selection seemed skewed in favor of the Hudson’s Bay men, who were far fewer in number and on the whole considerably less experienced than the Nor’ Westers. Still, the Deed Poll was balanced enough. By combining the senior personnel of both companies, it turned many former adversaries into new associates.18

  The Deed Poll identified a total of twenty-five chief factors and twenty-eight chief traders. The roster of chief factors included McLoughlin as well as Angus Bethune and Colin Robertson. Among the twenty-eight men selected as chief traders, the name of Simon McGillivray jumped out. This was not Simon McGillivray of McTavish, McGillivrays and Company, but rather his nephew. Born in 1790 to William McGillivray and his Cree wife, Susan, the younger Simon McGillivray joined the North West Company in 1813 and was a wintering partner in 1821. His selection as a chief trader in the reorganized company is notable, not only as a final act of nepotism by the McGillivray clan, but also because his subsequent career with the Hudson’s Bay Company would intertwine closely with McLoughlin’s.19

  The Deed Poll provided for a new system of administration. Virtually all of British North America was divided into four departments, with a governor appointed for each one. Each department’s governor and chief factors were to meet in council on an annual basis. The meeting in council was analogous to the North West Company’s annual meetings at Fort William. It established regulations, planned the next year’s operations, and dealt with personnel matters. The difference was that each governor and council would report to the board in London, where ultimate authority for all company actions resided.20

  Following the amalgamation, the British Parliament gave its approval and support to the new Hudson’s Bay Company in a statute passed later that year. Enlarging upon the royal charter of 1670, it extended the company’s monopoly over the Indian trade to all of British America east of the Rocky Mountains as well as the Oregon country west of the Rocky Mountains insofar as British subjects were concerned. In addition, the act empowered the company to administer all criminal and civil law cases in British America outside of Upper and Lower Canada and the Maritime colonies. The judicial powers were granted with the proviso that the company act to regulate and restrict the trade of liquor to the Indians.21

  As soon as the agreement was signed, McLoughlin and Bethune left London and took a coach to Liverpool. On March 31, they boarded the American packet Amity and sailed for New York. During the voyage, McLoughlin suffered another bout of the recurring malady that had afflicted him ever since his near-drowning in Lake Superior. He did not lay over in New York to rest and recover but immediately took passage on a schooner up the Hudson River, thinking he must get home to his Marguerite. But as his condition worsened, thoughts of what still lay ahead of him—days and weeks bent into a canoe, nights on the ground, cold spray in the face from the dark storm-tossed waters of Lake Superior—he changed his mind. In his present state the arduous journey from Montreal to Fort William would probably kill him. Instead, he transferred to another schooner headed back down the Hudson, had a brief stay in New York, and then boarded another sailing ship for Boulogne, France. His purpose in taking this extraordinary step was to put himself in the care of his brother David. He reached his brother’s place in June. As he had anticipated, his brother insisted that he convalesce there for as long as needed to restore his health.22

  Although McLoughlin had barely seen his younge
r brother since they were young, the two had faithfully corresponded through the years. David had received his medical education at Edinburgh while McLoughlin was still serving his four-year apprenticeship with the North West Company. Twice during his apprenticeship, McLoughlin tried to send his younger brother £100 when David was in danger of falling into debt. (He sent instructions to his uncle Simon to draw on his account and send the money to Edinburgh, but it seems his request was never acted upon.) During the years 1808 and 1809, McLoughlin feared that his brother’s financial difficulties might prevent him from completing his medical degree, or worse, land him in debtors’ prison. Whatever or whoever saw David through his difficulties, he received his degree of medicine in 1810, got an army commission in 1811, and served as a surgeon in Wellington’s army in Portugal and Spain for the next three years. In 1814 he was stationed in Boulogne, and upon completing his military service four years later he returned to that city to establish his own medical practice.23

  When McLoughlin was crossing the Atlantic the first time, he invited his new friend Colin Robertson to call on his brother in Boulogne. Robertson, curious about McLoughlin and his kin, acted on this suggestion and had dinner with David McLoughlin at his home in Boulogne some months later. In a letter to their mutual friend George Moffatt, Robertson remarked that the younger brother “bears a strong resemblance to our friend but it is a polished likeness. What an astonishing difference a little intercourse with the world makes in a man’s manners! Dr. McL. is an elegant, gentlemanly young man, stands high at this place, and seems to be a great favorite with the good folks of Boulogne.”24 Judging by Robertson’s description, David gave an idea of the sort of person John might have become had he not gone into the fur trade.