"Newman, Peter C. - Company of Adventures 03 - Merchant Prince" - читать интересную книгу автора (Newman Peter C)

to remember the good old days, then drinking some more to forget them.
These were the men who would gladly have sold the Bay blankets off their
beds to maintain the Company's reputation.They missed the fur trade
because it had been less a business than a way of life, an escape from
the restrictive codes of civilization. Now it was finished, and so were
they.
Somebody mentioned George Simpson McTavish, an HBC Factor who had spent
forty years at the Company's most isolated posts. To break his seclusion,
he had domesticated a mouse and discussed in great earnestness each day's
events with the friendly rodent. McTavish always travelled with a loaded
pistol, not as a defence against attack, but to shoot himself in case he
broke a leg on the trail and couldn't get back to his post. That's
lonely. Nothing ever happened to McTavish, except that the mouse died,
but I couldn't get him out
 Xviii

of my mind, trekking across some screaming), stretch of wilderness,
wondering when he might have to put the gun in his mouth.
Canada's back country, where the original HBc held sway, was populated by
many such "ordinary" men and women. They spent tiieir lives in that obscure
killingground of the soul the poet Al Purdy called "north of summer."
Concealment of emotion was their chief article of faith-and nobody ever
waved goodbye.
Thinking and writing about these "ordinary men" I had grown to admire so
much, my memory twigged to a line in Shakespeare's Henry 1,~ after the
battle of Agincourt, when the King requests a list of the English dead.
"Edward the Duke of York, the Earl of Suffolk, Sir Richard Ketly, Davy
Gain, Esquire; none else of name," replies the King's herald.
"None else of name "-history's most devastating epitaph-yet it fits most
ofthe hard cases who lived and died here, on the margin ofthe known world,
in the service of the Company of Adventurers.
Defining the gravitational pull of that benighted Company has been my
obsession over the past decade. In the pages that follow, I have tried to
explain that fatal attraction-to chronicle how the Company's quirky
behaviour played such an essential role in determining Canada's history,
geography and national character.
 PART I
LABRADOR SMITH
 CHAPTER 1

THE MAN WHO
BECAME A COUNTRY

""o I ' s Smith? What is Smith?...
Hzhy, Smitb is not a name, but an occupation!"
-Thomas Wilson

IF THEY REMEMBER HIM ATALL, most Canadians retain only a vague folk
memory of Donald Alexander Smith as the centrepiece of their country's
most famous historical photograph. He is that bearded gentleman in the