e
body of the water does. Split channels must be met by instant
decision; and it is when picking out the proper one that steerage way
tells. As the pace of the rapid increases, so does the danger; for the
slightest false thrust of a blade is enough to make a canoe swerve or
upset. But, with the expert bowman on the keenest of look-outs and the
course under the knowing touch of the still more expert steersman, a
rapid may be run in perfect safety through racing waves which only just
fail to leap aboard, on roaring water which drowns the human voice so
completely that the bowman can only make use of signals, past rocks and
snags on which a single graze would mean a wreck, and, often the worst
of all, from one wild 'throw' to another with quite a different set and
a wrench of two fierce currents where they meet.

All the white man's boats used by the voyageurs approximated more or
less to the shape of the canoe: the various kinds of Hudson river
dug-out, the bateau, the 'Durham,' and the 'York,' which last became
the wooden successor of the birch-bark after Governor Simpson's general
inspection of the Hudson's Bay domain. Only the rather {37} barge-like
'Mackinaw' was completely outside this venturesome class. It was a
useful but humdrum cargo boat, laboriously poled along shallow, quiet
waters, or rowed with lumbering sweeps; or sometimes even sailed, when
it shovelled its way through the water with a very safe wind dead aft.

This completes the tale of Canadian inland small craft that depended on
pole and paddle, oar and towline, and only used a simple sail as an
exceptional thing. But the human interest would not be complete
without some reference to the tours of inspection made by the magnates
of the Hudson's Bay Company. The greatest tours of all were those of
Sir George Simpson, the governor who took charge after the Company
absorbed its warring rival in 1821. In modern business language he
would be called the executive head of the great Canadian fur-trade
'merger.' He was a young promoted clerk, a Scotsman born, with little
experience of the Canadian wilds, but with the natural faculty of rule
and a good deal of diplomacy--the gauntlet in the velvet glove.

Simpson soon grasped the salient features of the people he had to deal
with and very sensibly made his tours of inspection as much like a {38}
royal progress as he could. Time and money were never neglected: his
'record runs' across the wilderness and