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When Sir George Cartwright sailed from Nantucket on August 1, 1665, he was accompanied by Radisson and Groseillers. Misfortune continued to dog them. Within a few days' sail of England, their ship encountered the Dutch cruiser Caper. For two hours the ships poured broadsides of shot into each other's hulls. The masts were torn from the English vessel.
M. Colbert summoned Radisson and Groseillers to return to France and give an account of all they had done; but when they arrived in Paris, on January 15, 1684, they learned that the great statesman had died. Lord Preston, the English envoy, had lodged such complaints against them for the defeat of the Englishmen in Hudson Bay, that France hesitated to extend public recognition of their services.
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."
Hurrying the two Englishmen to another part of the fort, M. Groseillers bade me run for Radisson. I wish that you could have seen the triumphant glint laughing in Pierre Radisson's eyes when I told him. "Fate deals the cards! 'Tis we must play them! This time the jade hath trumped her partner's ace! Ha, ha, Ramsay! We could 'a' captured both father and son with a flip o' the finger!
His sprain had not healed; but he could not miss the opportunity of approaching the Bay of the North. For two days he marched with the hunters, enduring torture at every step. The third day he could go no farther and they deserted him. Groseillers had gone hunting with another band of Crees. Radisson had neither gun nor hatchet, and the Indians left him only ten pounds of pemmican.
Eat, braves, eat! And the padre cuts the capers of a fiend on coals. Still the warriors eat! Still the drums beat! Still the meat is heaped! Then, one brave bowls over asleep with his head on his knees! Another warrior tumbles back! Guards sit bolt upright sound asleep as a stone!" "What did you put in the meat, Pierre?" asked Groseillers absently. Radisson laughed.
In 1676, France granted him fishing privileges on the island of Anticosti; but the lodestar of the fur trade still drew him, for that year he was called to Quebec to meet a company of traders conferring on the price of beaver. In that meeting assembled, among others, Jolliet, La Salle, Groseillers, and Radisson men whose names were to become immortal.
A mémoire written by De la Chesnaye in 1696 see Documents Nouvelle France, 1492-1712 distinctly refers to a coureur's trail from Lake Superior to Lake Assiniboine or Lake Winnipeg. There is no record of any Frenchmen but Radisson and Groseillers having followed such a trail to the land of the Assiniboines the Manitoba of to-day before 1676.
Probably he and his brother-in-law, Médard Chouart, who styled himself the Sieur des Groseillers, in the course of their long trading journeys among the Indians, in 1658 reached the Mississippi. One important discovery they unquestionably made a few years later.
Young Groseillers admitted the savages only one at a time; but the cunning braves pretended to run back for things they had forgotten in the French house. Suspecting nothing, Jean had permitted his own men to leave the fort. Suddenly the mask was thrown off. Springing up, treacherous as a tiger cat, the chief of the band struck at Groseillers with a dagger.
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