traders who neglected their licenses, and to declare war or make peace
with any people not Christian." Although the Declaration of Rights in
1689 limited the rights granted by exclusive charters, and allowed
British subjects to trade freely to any quarter, yet the Hudson's Bay
Company had in the twenty years previous to that date obtained such a
hold upon the new territory, especially by the erection of forts, that
they easily left all competitors behind.

The spirit of discovery was never so alive among the French as during
those years following the expulsion of Radisson and Groseilliers; yet
the Government in Quebec was slow to realise the serious nature of the
menace in the north; and from the official papers afterwards prepared
for the British delegates at Utrecht, their easy confidence is thus
described:--

"Mr. Bailey, the Company's first Governor of their
factories and settlements in that Bay, entertained a
friendly correspondence by letters and otherwise with
Monsieur Frontenac, then Governor of Canada, not in the
least complaining, in several years, of any pretended
injury done to France by the said Company's settling a
trade and building a fort at the bottom of Hudson's Bay,
nor making pretensions to any right of France on that
Bay, or to the countries bordering on it, till long after
this time."

Trouble, however, came in due course. With a natural distrust of
renegade Frenchmen, Governor Bailey suspected the two friends of being
concerned in a plot set on foot by certain Jesuit agents of the
Intendant Talon in 1673, by which the loyalty of the Indians was to be
alienated from the English traders. After scenes of personal violence,
the alleged traitors justified the suspicions of the Governor by
severing once more the slender tie of their allegiance and returning
to the service of France. Nor was it long before new fruits of their
restless energy appeared. In 1681 the _Compagnie du Nord_ was
organised as a rival to the "Adventurers of England"; and in the same
year the Intendant Duchesneau complained to his Government of the
aggressions of the English traders.

"They" (the English), he wrote, "are still in Hudson's Bay on the
north and do great damage to our fur trade....The sole means to
prevent them succeeding in what is prejudicial to us would be to drive
them by main force from that Bay, which belongs to us. Or, if there
would be an objection in coming to that extre