Hudson's Bay Trader (second Edition, 1978) :: Buy from Oxfam on The UK High Street

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In this personal diary of a year Spent at a Hudson's Bay Company fur trading post in Baffin Island Lord Tweedsmuir has written a first-hand description of the life as it was then lived by fur traders, trappers, hunters and Eskimoes. In those days no aeroplanes had invaded the silence of the Canadian eastern Arctic. It was linked to the outside world by the annual visit of the coast supply ship, the famous old Nascopie. The tiny scattered community of Hudson's Bay Company traders, missionaries, doctors, and Royal Canadian Mounted Police lived as remote from the civilised South as did the Eskimoes. There were under twenty white men in the whole of Baffin Island. No one who knew the Eskimo tin those days, still untainted by the outside world, will ever forget them. Those men of the North did not speak of the seasons of the year, but of nine months of winter and three months bad going. Travel was by dog team, when land and sea were frozen and by schooner in the brief hot summer. That world came to an end in 1939. It was the last year of the old remoteness of the Eskimo. This enthralling travel book and exciting adventure story follows the high literary tradition of the author's father, John Buchan. Thus it was particularly appropriate that, after the author had joined the Canadian Army, it was John Buchan who discovered the manuscript of the diary, and used much of the material in it to give him the authentic background and local colour for his last novel Sick Heart River. Hudson's Bay Trader is illustrated by more than sixty photographs, most of which were taken by the author. About the author Lord Tweedsmuir was born in 1911, educated at Eton and Oxford. He entered the Colonial Service and became an Assistant District Commissioner in the Uganda Protectorate from 1934 to 1936. He was invalided out of the Service with a tropical disease. He joined the Hudson's Bay Company and, in an endeavour to recover his health, spent the year before the war as a fur trader in their service at Cape Dorset, Baffin Land, in the Canadian Arctic. He has returned many times to the North in subsequent years in pioneering adventures, mostly concerned with mineral prospecting. Tweedsmuir Islands off the coast of Baffin Island are named after his father and himself.
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Hudson's Bay Trader (second Edition, 1978)

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