All hands discerned a ship with a strange sail, such as Dutch and Spanish pirates carried, bearing down upon them shoreward.  The lesser fear was forgotten in the greater.  The St. Pierre’s crew crowded sail.  Heading about, the two explorers’ ships threaded the rock reefs like pursued deer.  The pirate came on full speed before the wind.  Night fell while Radisson was still hiding among the rocks.  Notwithstanding reefs and high seas, while the pirate ship hove to for the night, Radisson stole out in the dark and gave his pursuer the slip.  The chase had saved him a mutiny.

As the vessels drove northward, the ice drifted past like a white world afloat.  When Radisson approached the entrance to Hudson Bay, he met floes in impenetrable masses.  So far the ships had avoided delay by tacking along the edges of the ice-fields, from lake to lake of ocean surrounded by ice.  Now the ice began to crush together, driven by wind and tide with furious enough force to snap the two ships like egg-shells.  Radisson watched for a free passage, and, with a wind to rear, scudded for shelter of a hole-in-the-wall.  Here he met the Eskimo, and provisions were replenished; but the dangers of the ice-fields had frightened the crews again.  In two days Radisson put to sea to avoid a second mutiny.  The wind was landward, driving the ice back from the straits, and they passed safely into Hudson Bay.  The ice again surrounded them; but it was useless for the men to mutiny.  Ice blocked up all retreat.  Jammed among the floes, Groseillers was afraid to carry sail, and fell behind.  Radisson drove ahead, now skirting the ice-floes, now pounded by breaking icebergs, now crashing into surface brash or puddled ice to the fore.  “We were like to have perished,” he writes, “but God was pleased to preserve us.”

On the 26th of August, six weeks after sailing from Isle Percee, Radisson rode triumphantly in on the tide to Hayes River, south of Nelson River, where he had been with the English ships ten years before.  Two weeks later the Ste. Anne, with Groseillers, arrived.  The two ships cautiously ascended the river, seeking a harbor.  Fifteen miles from salt water, Radisson anchored.  At last he was back in his native element, the wilderness, where man must set himself to conquer and take dominion over earth.

Groseillers was always the trader, Radisson the explorer.  Leaving his brother-in-law to build the fort, Radisson launched a canoe on Hayes River to explore inland.  Young Jean Groseillers accompanied him to look after the trade with the Indians.[5] For eight days they paddled up a river that was destined to be the path of countless traders and pioneers for two centuries, and that may yet be destined to become the path of a northern commerce.  By September the floodtide of Hayes River had subsided.  In a week the voyageurs had travelled probably three hundred miles, and were within the region of Lake Winnipeg, where the Cree