Hudson's Bay Company Arctic Fur Trading Posts
Trading Company Recruits Staff in Remote Scottish Islands
Oct 11, 2009
From its incorporation in 1670, the Hudson's Bay Company recruited young men for their trading posts in what was to become Canada, from Scotland, the Hebrides, Orkney and Shetland Islands as well as England. The company was looking for boys eager to get away from the lack of opportunity and poverty of their homeland to make their fortunes and often to make history in a vast and unexplored land. But it was their familiarity with a hard life in those cold, barren and isolated islands which made them ideal recruits for the North.
Recruiting Fur-traders From the UK
Even after the HBC headquarters had been moved from Beaver House in London, to Winnipeg, recruiters would make two trips a year to the UK, advertising, interviewing and selecting about twenty young men on each trip. In the early 1970s, successful candidates were offered a two year contract with the "Company of Merchant Adventurers Trading into Hudson's Bay" and the magnificent sum of $ 3,600 per annum. Room and board would be deducted from this at seventy-five dollars a month. The company paid the airfare to Canada and a return flight at the end of the contract. The young fur-traders were not to marry, there were no established hours or days of work and none of the young men knew exactly where they would be sent.
After a week in Montreal being introduced to the operations of the HBC's Northern Stores Department, the new recruits were assembled in a board room with a large map of Canada showing each of the HBC posts dotted right across the country from Baffin Island to the northern Rockies, and were asked to decide where they would like to work.
HBC Posts on Baffin Island
The posts on Baffin Island were perhaps the most iconic with images of tidy, white-painted, red-roofed buildings grouped together on some rocky, treeless coast, the Inuit gathering to trade with their dog teams or kayaks. The reality was slightly different. By the 1970s the original small trading post remained but was now part of an Inuit settlement with a school, nursing station, power plant and ski-doos rather than dog teams.
In a larger settlement like Pangnirtung with a population of about eight hundred, the original store had become another warehouse and a new one built, selling everything from canned food and eight-track players to gasoline, ski-doos, freighter canoes and rifles. Almost inevitably the store manager would be a Scotsman, someone who had shown aptitude and liked the life. Often he would have married either an Inuit girl or one of the nurses from the Nursing Station, like him, recruited in the UK.
In a larger post like this there might be three or four trainees at various stages in their first two year contracts having been transferred from post to post to give them experience in different stores and with different managers.
In a small post like Broughton Island, just above the Arctic Circle on the east coast of Baffin, there would be just a manager and one trainee. There, in a settlement of less than three hundred people, the HBC store was the hub of activity. It was both the source of most food, clothing, fuel, ammunition, boats, ski-doos, traps and rifles, but effectively controlled the cash flow and was the only place where Inuit hunters could sell their skins.
The new HBC man, or "Bay-boy" would be given little time to adjust to his new home. Often his arrival was timed to coincide with the annual sealift when 95% of the post's supplies for the year were landed and when all the skins purchased over the previous year were shipped out. This three or four day event went on for twenty-four hours a day with barges shuttling between the freighter and the beach. Everything had to be sorted quickly and moved up to the warehouses. Tinned food had to be stacked in the heated warehouses, biscuit, flour, lard and whatever else could survive the minus forty temperatures of the approaching winter went into the unheated ones. The whole community helped with sealift, women lugging fifty pound bags of flour and the men forming long lines to pass cases of food into the warehouses.
Fur Buying from the Inuit
As the new clerk grew more comfortable with the store and his customers and started to learn a little Inuktitut, the manager would start showing him how to grade and buy skins. Most were sealskins, Harp and Common Jar with a few white fox and polar bear, which had been cleaned, salted and stretched to dry by the hunters wives. The hunter would arrive with them at the store rolled up together, sometimes ten or twelve, sometimes just one. Harp skins were the most valuable, large and beautifully marked. The clerk would learn to assess the thickness of the fur, the cleanliness of the scraped skin and whether or not it had been damaged by bullets or harpoon.
When hunting was good the buying would go on all day with the skins stacked up around the clerk until he was standing several feet off the floor. On quieter days there was the short-wave radio-telephone service to work at, laboriously spelling out and receiving message, passing along weather reports or getting news of a rare plane that just might be able to fly up from Frobisher Bay.
But a three hundred year presence in the North was coming to an end. More and more HBC staff were leaving for better paid jobs. Co-ops were cutting into business and as flights in and out of isolated settlements became regular schedules, the posts' monopoly of business, finance and influence declined until finally the HBC withdrew from the North.
Sources
PRYDE, Duncan: Nunaga, Ten Years of Eskimo Life, Walker and Company 1972.
MAURICE, E.B.: The Last of the Gentlemen Adventureres, Coming of age in the Arctic, Harper Collins, 2005.
Beaver magazine, Vo. 42, No.1, 1962: Study of Wage Employment and its Impact on the Eskimo.
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