Bay
Chartered Company came to be founded. Soon after their first pioneers
were established, in 1670, at Fort Nelson, on the west coast of Hudson
Bay, near where York Factory now stands, there was born--or brought
out from England as an infant--a little boy named Henry Kellsey, who
as a child took a great fancy to the Amerindians who came to trade at
Fort Nelson. As he played with them, and they returned his affection,
he learnt their language, and--for some inconceivable reason--this
gave great offence to the stupid governor of the fort (indeed, when
Kellsey as a grown man, some years afterwards, compiled a vocabulary
of the Kri language for the use of traders, the Hudson's Bay Company
ordered it to be suppressed). Stupid Governor Geyer not only objected
to Kellsey picking up the Kri language, but punished him most severely
for that and for his boyish tricks and jokes; so much so, that
Kellsey, when he was about ten years old, ran away with the returning
Indians, some of whom had grown very fond of him whilst they stayed at
Fort Nelson.

Six years afterwards an Indian brought to the governor of the fort a
letter written by Kellsey in charcoal on a piece of white birch bark.
In this he asked the governor's pardon for running away, and his
permission to return to the fort. As a kind reply was sent, Kellsey
appeared not long afterwards grown into a young man, accompanied by an
Indian wife and attended by a party of Indians. He was dressed exactly
like them, but differed from them in the respect which he showed to
his native wife. She attempted to accompany her husband into the
factory or place of business, and the governor stopped her; but
Kellsey at once told him in English that he would not enter himself if
his wife was not suffered to go with him, and so the governor
relented. After this Kellsey (who must then have been about seventeen)
seems to have regularly enrolled himself in 1688 in the service of the
Company, and he was employed as a kind of commercial traveller who
made long journeys to the north-west to beat up a fur trade for the
Company and induce tribes of Indians to make long journeys every
summer to the Company's factory with the skins they had secured
between the autumn and the spring. In this way Kellsey penetrated
into the country of the Assiniboines, and he finally reached a more
distant tribe or nation called by the long name of Newatamipoet.[1]
Kellsey first of all made for Split Lake, up the Nelson