Canada is one of the largest countries in the world.
Its huge open spaces never fail to astound me.
This is a record of my travels across this magnificent land
from coast to coast and back into its past.
Canada's history has been shaped by its unforgiving landscape, but when
explorers learned how to cope with these extremes, the country opened up before them as trade routes were
established and industry grew, dominated by one of the greatest companies the world has ever seen.
The industry was the fur trade and the company was British, the Hudson's Bay Company.
This is the historic French River, a key avenue in the fur trade.
I'm going to be spending a few days in the area
as I explore the incredible story of how this industry shaped a nation.
This is what all the fuss was about.
This is a beaver pelt.
Since medieval days, hat makers had recognised that the fur from beavers had a particular quality.
It wasn't the long guard hairs that they wanted, it was these shorter underhairs.
When these were felted, they locked together very tightly,
enabling the production of superior felt, ideal for making hats,
particularly tall hats.
FOLK MUSIC
From the seventeenth century onwards, beaver fur was all the rage in Europe.
Quite simply, what you wore on your head defined who you were.
It's incredible to think that fur transformed this place
from an unknown backwater into an extremely valuable piece of land.
When the fur trade started, the Hudson's Bay Company had not been
established and the nation of Canada was still 300 years away.
France and England were competing for colonial power, the French with
settlements in the east, while England laid claim to the north.
But this was a land of claim and counterclaim, where the maps were still being drawn.
The French began trading from here.
Their base was Montreal and they used the rivers as a direct avenue
to the fur trapping lands, to trade with the indigenous population.
Some of the earliest fur traders were known as the coureurs des bois, the runners in the woods.
Men like that used to take their canoes deep into the forests and
meet the First Nations out there on their own terms, carrying with them incredible trade goods.
This was an amazing arrival of technology when it first came to the forest.
There were muskets and shot and powder, traps,
all designed to help with the hunting, metal kettles.
When brass and copper kettles first came to the forest, that was a revolution.
Until this point, Indian women had had to do their
boiling by putting hot rocks into birch bark containers.
At the start of the fur trade, there were ornamental axes like this, very often designed to be a pipe as well.
Indians liked that in trade.
But as time went on, things became more practical and it was
well tempered tomahawks like this that became the most popular item.
The fur trade has been blamed for causing damage to indigenous cultures.
The French river is home to the Dokis nation and Norman Dokis offers his view.
Norman, a lot of people who are new to the history of the fur trade
automatically assume that it had a negative impact for First Nations. What's your opinion of that?
It certainly benefited our people in terms of the modern
equipment that we were able to have, you know, and easier to start a fire for instance and pots and pans.
These were revolutionary items.
We thought that these items were of such great value that the Europeans'
god must have given you these gifts, you know, and when the...
missionaries came, you know, we believed in their god and it did make life a lot easier, you know?
But it did make life challenging too as well, in terms of losing some of our culture and our identity.
Ironically, it was an example of First Nations technology
that made the fur trade possible, the birch bark canoe.
This is the best way, maybe the only way, for me to get a clear idea of what it was like back then.
The paddles in the water, the noise of the rapids and the smells of the forest.
It was made from the forest and was the perfect craft for the rivers that flowed through the forest.
It was the one piece of indigenous technology the Europeans had no match for.
So they adopted it.
This craft and the men who paddled them took everything the rivers could throw at them.
I'm about to find out how well.
ROARING WATER
Welcome to Big Pine rapid.
Wow, that's amazing.
That's the first rapid I've run in a birch bark canoe.
The canoe's fantastic. I wasn't so good, I have to say.
Talk about nervous!
The thought of
damaging this fantastic boat, very much in my mind.
Makes me all ham fisted.
These boats are much quieter than even a cedar canvas boat, they're silent and there's
this smell of cedar in your nose which is kind of ethereal as you go into the maelstrom of the rapid.
And of course this rapid has had thousands of birch bark canoes go through it.
Some well, probably, and probably not so well.
So I wanted to make sure I was in the black and not in the red, as it were.
What a fantastic experience.
The birch bark canoe was the single most important item the fur trade would adopt from the First Nations.
Strong enough to carry everything needed but yet light enough to carry past major obstacles.
This practice was called a portage.
It was the only vessel that could turn the rivers and their rapids from obstacles into highways.
Unfortunately, I've already damaged this canoe
but that gives me an opportunity to show another reason it was used.
Running repairs.
Just coming into the beach I managed to tap a rock and some of
the resin has come off, so I've just done a jury repair, running repair.
That's one of the great joys of the birch bark canoe, although it's more
fragile than modern materials, it's very easily repaired.
All you need is resin from the forest and some fat.
Historically, bear fat was the preferred choice.
And the fat makes
the resin more malleable
and that's all there is to it.
I mean, it's a fantastic craft, really, made from the fabric of the forest itself.
Beautiful.
As the trade grew, a piecemeal, haphazard organisation grew up around it.
Small companies banded together and the French authorities began elementary control.
Small canoes were all well and good, but to turn a real profit,
the companies needed something a little larger.
The Montreal canoe was the super tanker of the fur trade.
In a craft like this, crews could leave Montreal in the spring, heading for the trapping lands.
There, they would exchange their trade goods for furs and return
fully laden in the autumn before the rivers froze for the winter.
It was a tough life, paddling 14 hours a day at 55 paddle strokes a minute.
They were up before dawn and didn't pitch camp till sundown.
They became known as the voyageurs.
This Montreal canoe was built by Jeremy Ward and volunteers from the Canadian Canoe Museum.
The Montreal canoe, the canot de maitre, was a very important boat
in the fur trade and in Canadian history.
It was as large as you can build a birch bark canoe
before they start to just collapse under their own length, you know?
Whether it's a 12 foot birch bark canoe or 36 feet long, the thickness of the bark is pretty much the same.
Birch trees grow what they grow.
A standard canot de maitre, a standard 36 foot birch bark canoe, was expected to be carrying about
65 bales of cargo, and that's a 90 lb bale, so we're looking
at about three, three and a half tonne of cargo. Astonishing.
With then on top of that, a crew of paddlers and food and their agret,
their equipment, you'd be well over four tonnes, 8000 lbs in a canoe.
These boats were built to carry tremendous loads and cover tremendous distances
and yet be able to be portaged and lined and poled in rapids and sailed with a sail, and paddled, of course.
I've built a birch bark canoe in the past and know just how much work
goes into creating something that is not just functional but beautiful too.
The detail and passion that has gone into this craft is exceptional.
I'd never built a 36 foot canoe before, I'd worked on ones about 10 feet shorter than this.
And this always lurks as the holy grail really.
They're such a glutton for materials which are hard to come by.
The birch bark, there's about a kilometre of root in this canoe.
To go to the source for your materials and take those materials from a standing, living tree and
convert it ultimately into something as beautiful and fragrant and as efficient as a birch bark canoe.
And I remember, as do the folks who helped build this, every tree that went into this boat.
And I think in today's world, you're pretty disconnected from that.
From the source. That's right.
If it came out of a retail store, you'd never know.
Whilst the paddling was relentless, it was the portages that were the most arduous part of the journey.
One of the most famous grande portages was eight and a half miles long.
It wasn't just rapids that demanded portages.
Canoes were carried overland from one river system to another.
This meant that eventually a canoe could leave Montreal
and travel right across Canada, by transferring from one river system to another as it went.
It's really interesting bringing a real birch bark canoe to this
historic portage because you view the whole landscape differently.
You're looking for the easiest route across cos, birch bark or not, that boat is heavy.
It's also six foot wide, so you've got to find the easiest way through.
Back in the days of the fur trade, these portage trails were maintained by the people using them.
I need to go ahead now and clear some of the branches, so they can get through.
JEREMY: This kind of canoe is one of those just classic icons of an age.
The largest voyageur canoes full of a team of paddlers of varying ethnicities,
the shared culture and technological cultures as well.
You've got European technologies adapted by First Nations people,
Europeans adopting aboriginal technologies.
Nowhere else in the world that I know of
does an indigenous technology completely outclass the imported boats,
the way a birch bark canoe does.
Champlain mentions this in the 1600s, standing next to the rapids
and saying, they have these wondrous vessels that they can pick up and throw on their backs
and that's the key to turning this from being an obstacle into a highway.
In voyageur days, four of them would have carried this, the rest would have been busy with the load.
Are we coming towards me, Jeremy?
We're gonna go sideways, just down a bit.
Just left it off, yeah, perfect.
OK, now you're there.
The portage was a time-consuming process.
This canoe is not fully laden.
It's taken us hours and it was back-breaking work.
Hey, I've got the stern. All right.
We'd set up camp in a historic fur trade campsite.
These places were often near rapids, and this one is near a place called Blue Chute,
but setting up camp can be hazardous.
I've come up to take a tour round the crew's camp and found something a little alarming.
This little plant down here, innocuous as it may seem, is poison ivy.
Its leaves are grouped in threes and each has a jagged edge.
It contains a noxious oil called urushiol.
Some of the First Nation tribes in eastern North America
were known to burn it when the wind was blowing in the right direction,
so that the smoke would go into the faces of their enemies.
And the smoke could carry this oil into their lungs and cause blistering there.
One of the earliest accounts of chemical warfare,
and well, I hope the crew are going to be careful cos that could really end in tears.
This is not just an ordinary campsite on the French River,
this campsite was actually a voyageur campsite.
And I thought what more fitting than to make their sort of cooking setup, using a trade axe,
and see how I get on.
The axe is very good.
Very typically, they would make a tripod to cook over,
just from a few branches like this tied together with withies,
but sometimes they needed to cook with more than one pot
and so there was a little modification that they made in those circumstances.
And that's what I'm going to do today. So I start by making the tripod here.
Pretty good. And I've made a couple of withies, that's just a sapling that I twisted to make it pliable.
I imagine that they would have left these tripods standing
because anything that saved you work at the end of the day,
after a long, hard day's paddling, would have been a blessing.
Although the Indian tradition was not to leave them standing because they thought it brought bad luck.
Maybe it informed a war party that you were in their territory - we'll never know.
There, that's the tripod.
Now the other end, I need a bipod.
It doesn't have to be so robust.
I like this tomahawk, very good indeed.
And again, just another withy...
to bind around at this end.
For this withy, I'm using maple.
What could be more Canadian than that?
And there, you can see the leaves are starting to turn that glorious red,
now that autumn is coming to an end.
OK, so there's bipod and I've got a crossbar.
The crossbar goes on top of the tripod, and the other end is supported
on the bipod.
To suspend the pots, it's also withies that are used.
I've cut these branches so there's a hook on the bottom
and I can simply wrap it around the branch
and then around itself
several times.
Then you lastly tuck it back upwards
and then under one of the original twists a couple of times, like that.
That'll be good for my kettle,
goes straight over the fire.
And on this occasion I've got a forked branch, I've twisted one branch
and I'm working here on pictorial reference from the period.
And all I'm going to do on this occasion is take the twisted branch around the other side.
Like so,
a couple of times,
leaving that long bit sticking out the top,
which is what I've seen depicted
in some of the paintings and sketches I've used for reference.
And there we go. And that will hold my main meal pot very nicely.
So now I can have two pots on the fire, or more if I wanted - I'd just make the fire longer.
It's very simple, very effective.
I find knowledge of this way of life in all sorts of places
but one of the best ways is through old paintings.
If you study the pictures, there are clues to the way they did things.
Indeed, it was pictures that inspired me to come here.
It's very evocative being here.
It's almost possible to hear the laughter of the other people
who pulled their canoes up on this shore.
If you look carefully at the rocks, you can see the slight scars of previous camp fires.
Almost certainly, some of those date back to the days when the voyageurs stopped here.
And, of course, they didn't have televisions or radios to keep them entertained,
so they had to find their own entertainment,
musical instruments, laughter, songs,
and many of them also spent their time carving.
We know that from cups and the like that have found their way into museums.
And I thought, that that's exactly what I would do as I sat here tonight.
I'm losing the light, so I'll only be able to do so much by firelight,
then I'll get out the sandpaper and give it a little bit of cleaning up.
But it is a bit spooky being here, really.
It's a nice feeling, though.
The voyageurs' day started early with the call "Sa levez!"
They would get on the river before breakfast
so that there was less to pack up and they could make a quick getaway.
It also broke up the day of paddling.
I have my own method to help speed up mornings when I'm canoeing.
In the morning, I don't relight my fire.
In fact, what I do, the night before, last thing,
is I top up my thermos flask, so I've got hot water to have a wash in the morning and for breakfast.
Then I put billys with river water back on and those will boil and become sterilised
and then cool overnight, so that I've got cold water to top up my water bottle, which is just perfect.
That also means I've got cold ashes and I can brush this away.
It's the detail of this way of life that fascinates me.
The tools, the pastimes, the clothing.
Voyageurs wore decorative sashes.
Some believe they were used to prevent hernias caused by their strenuous work.
Whatever their function, they were certainly beautiful and were finely woven.
A craft kept alive by Carol James.
They're called finger-woven sashes.
The origin of them is the First Nations peoples here, the Indians, wove using grasses and buffalo hair
and diverse fibres to make belts and bags.
When the Europeans came, they brought factory spun threads, multi-coloured threads,
and the classic voyageur sash that we talk about today, this is the pattern that's associated with it.
It's absolutely beautiful, isn't it? I mean, it's stunning. It is, it is.
I've met Carol in the rather intriguing location
of Winnipeg Hospital, where she does much of her weaving.
Tell me about the yarn, because this isn't ordinary wool yarn, is it?
No, the yarn that is used in the traditional sashes is
a worsted yarn, which means that the threads are all lined up,
one in line with the other and they're.... It's spun in a method intended to be good for wear.
It long-wearing sort of thread.
Most yarn that you buy these days is a woollens yarn,
which means that the threads are all different directions in it,
so the threads will push out, so they create air space.
Bulk? It's for warmth.
And this is what the yarn looks like when I purchase it.
What I do is I twist it much tighter and then of course, when you twist it that tight,
it wants to kink like this, so you have to expose it to heat to reset the twist.
And then I've dyed them
different colours, natural dyes.
This, for example, is a madder dye.
Now I've heard of people actually having folded these in half to make like a pocket when they're in use.
Yes, yes, yes, that's definitely the case.
There's another thing that happens, when you weave the sash,
you notice there's quite a directionality to them, the arrows,
it's pointing down quite a bit.
And when you work, the threads tangle like this.
If you're making a twelve-foot sash, you start at one end and you have eleven feet worth of tangles to undo,
the first bit and then that goes down.
People got smart and they would work, start from the middle and work to one end
and then come back to the middle, work the other end.
And so the pattern turns around at that spot,
so depending on how you work, where the pattern turns around,
you're going to have quite a lot of puckering, which also makes a pocket. Aha.
Now I've put in a little triangular piece here, so that it will lay flat,
but if you didn't put that in, you might have a nice little pocket there as well. That's interesting.
You'd better show me how it's done. All right. The threads are all lined up lengthwise to start with
and we divide them into two groups - the even numbered threads and the odd numbered.
And how many threads are there all told, in this sash? 286.
So I'm going to find the very centre of the work.
Here we go. Yeah. That's the centre.
All I do is follow with my eye the previous sideways thread here,
so I take this one here, which is a back one, it comes to the front.
The next one here is a front one and I put it to the back.
Back to front, front to back, back to front, front to back.
That's all you really need to know. Now yes, they do tangle - at the bottom, I get the opposite.
As I'm dragging this white one across, I am getting it tangled there. This really isn't a problem.
When I decide that's enough, I put in my little safety belt here.
This is what gets me, it's that you can stop.
It's really very accommodating!
I take the threads one at a time and I pull on them gently, gently and that tangle just comes right undone.
It looks like it's knots but it just that up down, up down pattern.
And if we pull on that gently, gently...
Carol, if I was to do this, I'd end up with a cat's cradle.
I've a friend in Scotland who'd call it a sniggle heap. A sniggle heap, that's a lovely word.
Paddling the rivers was back-breaking work.
From Montreal to the trapping lands and back again was a round trip of over 1,000 miles.
In 1668, two French coureurs de bois - effectively freelance fur traders -
Pierre Esprit Radisson and Medard Chouart des Grosseilliers, had a brainwave.
Why not shorten the distance by setting up trading posts on the shores of Hudson's Bay?
Hudson's Bay is a huge inland sea.
Trading posts on its shores would be much nearer to trapping lands.
Not only that, but from there, it would be quicker to get to Europe.
It would be possible to halve the time it took to get furs from the forest to the hat makers.
Radisson and Grosseilliers had been operating outside the French attempts to regulate the trade.
They were unlicensed and unwanted by the authorities.
So they took their idea to the English.
This was 1668, two years after the Great Fire of London, three years after the plague.
It's testament to the spirit of the age that the English agreed.
And what happened next was to transform Canada's history.
In 1670, King Charles II granted a royal charter
to create the Hudson's Bay Company.
In short, he claimed the land as British soil.
Over 300 years later, the Hudson's Bay Company is still going strong
and the charter is proudly displayed in their headquarters in Toronto.
It's incredible to look at this piece of parchment.
This has got to be one of the most important commercial deals ever made in history.
Granted by Charles II,
it gave title to all the land that drained into the Hudson's Bay.
When it was signed, nobody really understood how vast an area that was.
Perhaps if they had, they'd have asked for more than
two elk and two beaver to be given to the royal family whenever they visited Hudson's Bay Company land.
It must go down as one of the biggest royal gifts ever made.
Joan Murray is historian to the Hudson's Bay Company.
It's about 40% of modern Canada and it's over a million and a half square miles.
I think if anybody had any clue that that was really what was on the table,
it might have been worded a little bit differently.
Now, the Hudson's Bay Company has a unique role in the history of Canada.
Yes, it has a unique role in the history of Canada and, I venture to say,
probably a unique role in world history.
I don't think there's any other company that has ever been so entwined with
the development of any nation anywhere upon the planet.
The Hudson's Bay Company was owned and run by rich English businessmen.
It was based in London but many of the employees came from further afield, the Orkney Isles.
The sort of makeup of the Orkneys, their remoteness, the ruggedness of the landscape,
bred the sort of person
who would find adjusting to the wilds of northern Canada
as minimal as possible.
These were people who were coming for five years on a contract.
They weren't going to be able to go home for five years.
They were going to have to be self-reliant
and used to harsh climate and limited amounts of physical resources.
And so the Orkneymen seemed to fit the bill quite well.
It was this combination of powerful backing, legal ownership and hard working staff
that would help forge this company
and turn it into the largest landowner in the world.
The fur trade now had two competing centres,
the English in Hudson's Bay and rival French companies in Montreal.
They had very different approaches.
Hudson's Bay Company spent the first hundred years of its existence, from 1670 to 1774,
in a series of forts that were ringing Hudson's Bay and James Bay,
waiting for natives to come down and trade with them.
In contrast, the French were further south,
sending their canoes inland through the river system to fetch the fur.
They didn't take the news of the Hudson's Bay Company lying down.
In 1681, to counteract the arrival of this competition,
they imposed new regulations to increase their control of the industry.
They were not going to give up without a fight.
By now, for the voyageurs, there was almost a career path from novice to expert.
What you would see in the middle of this boat are the novices, the mangeurs de lard, the eaters of lard.
Because pretty much that's half of their diet, the other half was corn.
At the stern, you'd have the gouvernail, which is French for rudder, steering the boat.
At the bow, you have the devant, who's setting the pace, the stroke.
And the canoe would travel in groups, so there may be four or six Montreal canoes travelling in a pack.
And they would be governed by the guide or the guide.
They had a bit more of a privileged role in that they sometimes were not
even carrying on a portage or performing hard labour when they get to their destination
but they also took responsibility for any losses, both cargo or crew or boat.
So in this situation here on the French River,
a guide would say, "Levels are high, I know that we can run that set"
and away we'd go.
Now they weren't supposed to be running rapids but, as you've seen,
the portages take a long time to get the whole kit across.
Any opportunity to avoid that was avoided.
So the guide was really at the peak of their career.
The demand for beaver was relentless.
When the fur trade started, it's estimated there were as many as six million beaver in these lands.
By the 1700s, those numbers were dwindling.
Because of the competitive spirit and entrepreneurial spirit of the Europeans,
the beaver was trapped so heavily in the area,
because it just right along the route,
"Let's make a few extra bucks on the way back," you know,
that the beaver became extinct along the French River.
Hudson's Bay Company profits rose rapidly.
To try and compete, the French were driven deeper and deeper inland, into English territory.
Within a few years, they were biting into Hudson's Bay Company profits.
The company noticed that profits were starting to drop.
Allegedly they had a monopoly to the interior to the drainage basin,
but of course a monopoly's only as good as your ability to enforce it
and if you never leave the shoreline,
it's going to be quite unusual that someone else isn't going to go inland,
and try and beat you to the punch, which what happened.
Our decision to move inland was the result, finally,
of London listening to their reports from their overseas field staff
who said, "You know, we have to do something about this
"because if we don't, no-one is going to come and trade with us."
The Hudson's Bay Company set up their first inland post in 1774.
Over the following decades, forts were built right across Canada.
As the forts spread inland, the company employed their own voyageurs to transport the furs to the coast.
This is Fort Carlton, established in 1810.
Rebuilt recently, it gives us the best way of experiencing what a fur trade fort might have been like.
Fort Carlton was a very important place. It was a hub.
It received furs from the trapping grounds further north
and re-supplied the voyageurs with food,
in the form of pemmican made from buffalo meat from the prairies just south of here.
So this was a really important post and in this reconstruction
you get a real sense of what life would have been.
This, of course, was what it was all about, the furs.
All sorts of furs were brought in.
We've got wolf here, coyote, the long-legged lynx,
otter, and this is a made beaver,
that's a small beaver pelt, and that was the most important.
Other things as well, that's the scent gland, the castoreum from a beaver,
very aromatic, and that had medicinal value in Europe.
And what would have happened here is that the traders would have graded
these furs and packed them up for transportation east.
And they did that using a press.
This is the kind of press that was used to pack the furs and
they were packed, like all the trade goods of the day, into 90lb bales.
And each voyageur was responsible for six bales, and when it came to portage,
you would carry two bales at a time, that's a load of 180lbs.
By now the Indians weren't just trapping for the fur trade,
there were other jobs available for them too.
We always had communities of what were called home Indians
and these would be people who had become settled, living in camps right outside the post,
who were usually employed seasonally.
The women would do sewing, the men would hunt, they might be making canoes,
they might be doing other work for the company on a paid basis.
The trade goods were now sold in the shops at these forts.
So you want some goods?
Show me the furs.
You can picture the scene, can't you?
All the goodies on display, very, very tempting.
Everything you'd need for life contained within this store.
And interestingly, that throughout the fur trade,
the trade goods hardly changed for hundreds of years.
As the trade spread further inland, so more and more of the First Nations
gained access to the trade goods.
But they were demanding customers.
They were very fixed on quality. Our famous point blankets which have been in production since 1780
were essentially created to meet native demand.
The French had been trading blankets of that type.
Points are simply a means of determining the size of the blanket
but the First Nations peoples quickly understood that the points indicated a consistency in quality of product
and so that's what they wanted from anybody that they were dealing with.
So we had to make a similar product in order to keep them as customers in the face of competition.
They also were not averse to testing the product that they were trading for.
There are stories of them burning the nap off a blanket to check the tightness of the weave,
to see how well made the products are.
I found it very, very interesting,
looking at one of the old standards of trade, that there's tobacco.
Now I think of tobacco as something that the native North Americans are growing and using ceremonially,
and yet they traded for Brazilian tobacco
because they found it of very high quality, a very fine commodity, a precious commodity.
And so they were willing to trade furs for Brazilian tobacco.
These forts were the beginning of the colonisation of the land
that became Canada, many of them becoming towns and then the cities of Canada today.
Cities like Edmonton and Winnipeg
were fur trading posts to begin with.
The distance back to base grew for both the French and the English
and don't forget, every river the voyageurs had paddled down,
they would have to paddle up, against the current on the way back.
To avoid the strain and time of a portage,
they would employ every labour saving method they could think of.
For example, pulling the canoe up the river, using ropes and poles.
Sometimes they would unload half the cargo, the so-called demi charge, half full.
VOYAGEUR MUSIC
In the illustrations I've seen,
when they tracking the boats up these rapids they only have one rope,
but they have men with poles on board. On board.
The ropes weren't just any old rope, they were made from cod line,
so that's like making your rope out of nylon cord today.
It must have been very strong. It would, yes. The simplicity belies the sophistication, doesn't it?
Have you ever done that before? Never done that before, no, no.
It does that a lot more easily than I expected. I would have expected more drag on the hull.
That was good fun, good fun, good fun. How were the poles?
The poles were good. That rock down there is absolutely dead smooth,
it's like trying to get a grip on a mirror, so we were pushing and skating all around.
When do you think was the last time a boat was tracked up through here, a birch bark canoe?
Wouldn't that be an interesting one.
Yeah, yeah, I'd be guessing it's a century or more anyway.
Of that size, yes.
This canoe is running very light.
The Montreal canoes could carry three and a half tonnes.
No wonder the last time the poles were used was cause for celebration.
There is a spot on the last river that they used to call l'anse aux perches, the poles' cove,
and in this one spot, all the men threw their poles overboard with a loud huzzah.
It must have been a great feeling to throw away poles you didn't need any more.
The final stretch was in sight and the poles were now excess baggage,
easily replaced before the next trip.
Well, there we go, I just about finished it.
Probably over the coming days I'll see a few things that I'm not happy with.
I might just carve it a little bit more
but I've been working on this now for a few weeks.
Before I started filming, I already hollowed this out, cos it takes a while.
But then the last couple of evenings I've really cracked in on it
and done the decoration and the finishing.
The design itself is borrowed from a drawing of an actual voyageur cup.
I've modified it a little bit to suit the piece of wood that I've got,
but it gives you some idea of the ornate efforts they went to
in their cups and something of their view of the world as well.
I'm just going to put some oil on it.
A little bit of cooking oil and now the grain will start to show itself.
The designs should really start to stand out now.
I love the way wood darkens up
when you put oil on it.
The wood's hungry for the oil.
There we go, a finished noggin.
And you can see the beaver that connects the handle to the bowl,
that's exactly as the original. And then fish
depicted on the side, looks like a pike there.
And then here cord, plaited leather there that I've put on.
And on the end is a little carved Indian figure, and the purpose of this
is to tuck that under the voyageurs' sash
so that that would sit on top of the sash and this would hang down.
And you can imagine that sitting on top of the
beautifully woven sash, just looking out for problems, to keep him safe.
The French River really is a very special place.
Camping with me on the river is the modern day guide, author and paddler, Kevin Callan.
Kevin, the, the French River is a quieter place today.
Yeah, it is. I think it was a highway back in the voyageur times.
They were here to go through it, to get from point A to point B as quick as possible to make money.
And, I don't know, it's nice to relax in it.
I think what's interesting, when you look at paintings of the voyageurs,
there they were, engaged in an industrial process.
I mean, these were the truckers of their age.
It was hard work, there's no denying that.
But the paintings capture those moments of life
that modern canoeists still enjoy.
Oh, the one painting of the lady looking at the lily,
that has nothing to do with the truckers going down the highway.
It has to do with the serenity of nature and enjoying...
I mean, if you had a job like that, it would not be an easy job, right away, right.
You had to enjoy something. And even if you were forced to be a voyageur -
a lot of them were put to be voyageurs
because they couldn't operate the farm, cos they were the youngest or the oldest of the sons -
but you might as well enjoy it and I think they did.
Today though, the canoe and canoeing is still massively important
in the cultural psyche of Canadians, isn't it?
Oh yeah, we should not have a maple leaf on our flag, we should have a canoe.
I mean, I have no idea why the maple leaf is on our flag. The canoe made Canada, it's still making Canada.
I see so many canoes on top of vehicles and when I see that,
I don't see just some other recreational vehicle for the weekend, I see a way of life.
It's certainly true that the canoe built Canada.
As the Hudson's Bay Company grew in strength and wealth, it branched out from the fur trade.
The charter had given it dominion over all the lands that drained into Hudson's Bay,
a right that it would defend resolutely.
It began to finance searches for minerals, exploration and the drawing of maps.
It even employed artists to make a record of the land and the people they encountered.
Artists like Paul Kane.
He travelled across Canada with the Hudson's Bay Company, recording the life of the First Nations.
It's almost as if he knew that the spread of the trade would cause this life to change forever.
I visited the Royal Ontario Museum where curator Ken Lister is an expert on his work.
Paul Kane travelled across the country,
specifically to document Indian people and the Canadian landscape.
Amazing journeys, snowshoe, horseback.
He wasn't always travelling with the Hudson's Bay Company
but they were his main water transport, as it were, across the lakes and the rivers.
But, you know, as he was going, he took the opportunity to sketch.
Hudson's Bay Company brigade stops to go over a portage,
gives Kane an opportunity to sketch, and he did that at many of the portages, many of the falls.
I mean, for me, it's the detail in the sketches. It's the bush-craft.
Absolutely. You'll see the way in which the conical lodges were made,
the way in which the fish weirs were made,
the way in which canoes were used on the St Mary's Rapid,
where they're poling, where the back person is paddling
and the front person is poling
and he's got his dip net, and it even shows the details of the dip net,
so you can almost take a Paul Kane sketch
and make that dip net because of the detail. The detail's really there.
And in that picture, the guy's still got his, in the stern he's paddling,
but he's got a pole ready as well. That's right. It's very interesting.
Here, there's an illustration of something I'm very familiar with,
a hand drill fire starting set,
and even that contains a lot of detail.
And I can tell maybe that this stick has a pith by the notches,
how they've been drilled into the stick there.
One of my favourite sketches shows, um, blankets being dried.
It looks like they've stopped after a rainstorm
and you can see blankets on the bushes.
That's right. And in front of the fire.
And a beautiful tripod made using paddles as well as sticks.
That's right, yeah.
He really felt, as he was going across,
that he was making a document
of the native people he saw and the Canadian landscape,
but he was also, I think, astute to the fact that these were going to be inspirational points for him
so that when he comes back and sits in the studio,
he's gonna have 600 sketches that he can take inspiration from to make his record
and I think we have to keep in mind that it's the oil paintings that he saw as his record.
The sketches were like field notes, for reference, but the oil painting is what he wanted to be known by.
It's really interesting, you can look at some sketches
and he makes almost a direct transfer from sketch to oil
but then in others, the changes are quite dramatic.
There's a sketch of a buffalo pound and it, really a very accurate rendition
of the way in which the Cree Indians made a buffalo pound,
where you have the stumps which lead the buffalo into the pound,
but there's a turn before the pound,
so the buffalo essentially are tricked to run into the pound.
But, when you look at the painting itself, Paul Kane shows the stumps
that lead the buffalo into the pound running directly into the pound,
which did not happen.
And so, we have to know how to interpret his work,
because if we're looking at the oil painting as an ethnographic document,
we have to be able to ferret out of that, those details in the painting,
what is accurate and what is artistic.
And the reason the Paul Kane collection is so important
is because we have both the sketches and the oils at our disposal for study.
In 1763, the English finally ousted the French from this land.
But Montreal traders still posed a threat to Hudson's Bay Company business.
In 1779, after more than 100 years of struggle,
this epic tale of competition entered its final chapter.
The traders of Montreal banded together to try and match
the commercial might of the Hudson's Bay Company.
They called themselves the North West Company.
The North West Company had a lot of entrepreneurial spirit and a lot of very dynamic people.
The model of management for the North West Company was much more direct.
The owners were owner-operators essentially, and they were on the ground.
They knew what they were managing, they had experience of the fur trade.
HBC was a very different model.
People were investors, the management that ran the company were independent investors
who had literally, almost exclusively, no experience of the fur trade.
The fur trade had come a long way from the days of the coureurs des bois.
In many ways, it was the North West Company who inherited the mantle of these early entrepreneurs.
For 40 years, they were a thorn in the side of the Hudson's Bay Company, cutting off their supplies,
threatening their profits and stealing their land.
The competition became increasingly desperate, even spilling over into bloodshed,
as canoes from both sides fought over the same fur.
The two companies actually came to actual bloodshed out west,
which was profitable for neither of them.
It got to be very, very bad for business.
HBC had two real advantages.
One was that its business cycle was a lot shorter.
By travelling right into the shores of Hudson's Bay, they were able to do a business cycle,
over with trade goods and back with furs, in twelve months.
The second advantage the company had was actually the business elite that ran it.
Because they were so well connected in London,
they had some very important relationships.
A lot of the directors were actually directors and, in some cases, governors of the Bank of England,
which meant we could get a lot of credit if we needed it.
We could afford to run deficits operating against them, whereas they could not.
The Hudson's Bay Company were just too strong to be beaten.
In 1821, the North West Company finally gave up the struggle
and merged with the Hudson's Bay Company,
in the process creating one of the largest companies the world has ever seen.
A company with no-one to challenge its authority.
Combined, the two companies laid claim to a staggering one twelfth of the earth's land surface.
But perhaps their greatest legacy is this. Canada.
Without their fur trade explorers,
this would simply have become another annexe to the United States, south of the border,
and the Queen's head wouldn't be on the coins of Canada today.
Canada was officially created in 1867.
Almost 300 years after the first beaver pelts were sent to Europe,
the knowledge of the First Nations,
the skills of the woodsmen and the commercial know-how of the English
had turned this difficult terrain
into the second largest nation on earth.
The Hudson's Bay Company had created a country.
But it also gave us something else, very important to me.
It financed some of the greatest explorers ever to emerge from Britain -
woodsmen who are hardly known today,
but who deserve a far better place in the history books.
It's in their footsteps that my journey now takes me.