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.