ABSTRACT

In 1841, at the age of sixteen, Robert Michael Ballantyne set sail from Britain to begin a career as a clerk with the Hudson Bay Company (HBC). His destination, as he would phrase it in his 1893 autobiography Personal Reminiscences in Book Making , was “the heart of that vast North American wilderness which is variously known as Rupert’s Land . . . and the Great Nor’west, many hundreds of miles north of the outmost verge of Canadian civilization” (4). Ballantyne’s departure from his native Edinburgh for this unfamiliar domain was dictated by some testing financial circumstances. The family publishing house had suffered badly from Walter Scott’s bankruptcy in 1826, and the £20-a-year salary Ballantyne would earn with the HBC comprised “an adequate, though not a princely, provision” (4) that would allow the young man to be self-sufficient. Notwithstanding the necessity of making his own living, Ballantyne appears to have relished the six years he spent in Canada, which is hardly surprising given the rosy picture he paints of his role “fur-trading with the Red Indians; doing a little office-work, and . . . canoeing, boating, fishing, shooting, wishing, and skylarking” (5). These years were, he recalls, “a highly romantic period of life” that resulted in his first, juvenile foray into literature, a poem that opened with a rather hackneyed evocation of his northerly surrounds: “Close by the shores of Hudson’s Bay, / Where Arctic winters – stern and grey – ” (qtd in Reminiscences 7).