For one season at least the settlers will face the rigor of this
Northern Clime.
CHAPTER IV.
A WINTER OF DISCONTENT.
The Emigrant ship has landed its living freight at Fort Factory, upon
the Coast of Hudson Bay--a shore unoccupied for hundreds of miles except
by a few Hudson's Bay Company forts such as those at the mouth of the
Nelson River, and of Fort Churchill, a hundred miles or more farther
north. It was now the end of the season, and it will not do to trifle
with the nip of cold "Boreas" on the shore of Hudson Bay. The icy winter
is at hand, and all know that they will face such temperatures as they
never had seen even among the stormy Hebrides, or in the Northward
Orkneys. Lord Selkirk's dreams are now to be tested. Is the story of the
Colony to be an epic or a drama?
It was by no means the first experiment of facing in an unprepared way
the rigors of a North American winter.
In the fourth year of the Seventeenth Century De Monts, a French
Colonizer, had a band of his countrymen on Douchet's Island, in the Ste.
Croix River, on the borders of New Brunswick. Though fairly well
provided in some ways yet the winter proved so trying that out of the
number of less than eighty, nearly one-half died.
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