At times Miles Macdonell endeavored on shipboard to drill his future servants and settlers, but he found them a very awkward squad—­not one had ever handled a gun or musket.  The sea seemed generally too tempestuous in mood for their evolutions.  As the ships approached York Factory the interest increased.  The “Eddystone” was detailed to sail to “Fort Churchill,” but was unable to reach it and found her way in the wake of the other vessels to York Factory.  It seemed as if the sea-divinities all combined to fight against the Colonists, for they did not reach York Factory, the winter destination, until the 24th of September, having taken sixty-one days on the voyage from Stornoway, which was declared by the Hudson’s Bay Company officers to be the longest and latest passage ever known on Hudson Bay.  Then settlers and employees were all landed on the point, near York Factory, and were sheltered meantime in tents, and as they stood on the shore they saw on October 5th, the ships that had brought them safely across the stormy sea pass through a considerable amount of floating ice on their homeward journey to London.

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.  The winter was so long, weary and deadly, that in the spring the survivors of the Colony were moved to Port Royal in Acadia and the Ste. Croix was given up.  This was surely dramatic; this was tragic indeed.  But in the fourth year of this Century, the Tercentenary of this event was celebrated in Annapolis and St. John, as the writer himself beheld, and the shouts and applause of gathered thousands made a great and patriotic epic.