s. Next
came the governor, mounted, and behind him Hamlyn and Macdonald, also
on horses. Twenty men loaded like beasts of burden formed the line,
and finally M'Gillivray with his wife and family brought up the rear.'
On the nineteenth day out from York Factory Simpson reached Fort
Langley at the mouth of the Fraser.

How far away it all seems now in this new twentieth century! And yet,
as in the case of Alexander Mackenzie, there is a wonderfully intimate
human link connecting that time with our own; for Lord Strathcona was
born before the amalgamation of the rival companies in 1821; he became
the last resident-governor of the Hudson's Bay Company while Francois
Beaulieu, Mackenzie's centenarian voyageur, was still alive; and he
lived until 1914, the year of the Great World War.

[1] For the canoe voyages of Mackenzie, to the Arctic in 1789 and to
the Pacific in 1793, see _Adventurers of the Far North_ and _Pioneers
of the Pacific Coast_ in this Series.

{41}

CHAPTER III

SAILING CRAFT: THE PIONEERS

When we call Canada a new country in the twentieth century we are apt
to forget that her seafaring annals may possibly go back to the Vikings
of the tenth century, a thousand years ago. Long before William the
Conqueror crossed over from France to England the Vikings had been
scouring the seas, north, south, east, and west. They reached
Constantinople; they colonized Iceland; they discovered Greenland; and
there are grounds for suspecting that the 'White Eskimos' whom the
Canadian Arctic expedition of 1913 noted down for report are some of
their descendants. However this may be, there is at least a
probability that the Vikings discovered North America five centuries
before Columbus. The saga of Eric the Red sings of the deeds of Leif
Ericson, who led the discoverers and named the three new countries
Helluland, Markland, and Vineland. Opinions differ as to which {42} of
the four--Labrador, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, or New England--are to
be included in the Vikings' three. In any case, the only inevitable
two are Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, with which the subsequent history
of Canada also begins.

But even if the Vikings never came to Canada at all, their ships could
not be refused a place in any history of sailing craft; for it is the
unique distinction of these famous freelances of the sea to have
developed the only type of ancient and mediaeval hull which is the
admiration of the naval wo