The Company by Stephen Bown

Author:Stephen Bown [Bown, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2020-10-27T00:00:00+00:00

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WHEN IN MONTREAL, MACKENZIE WAS usually the life of the party, a bon vivant and loquacious entertainer and teller of tales. That his social obligations with the elite of Montreal society—including Scottish entrepreneurs, British army officers, French upper civil officials and the judiciary, as well as visiting autocrats and other dignitaries—involved heavy drinking is well established. He was particularly fond of the infamous Beaver Club, a biweekly gathering held at upscale Montreal hotels and elevated taverns. Founded by Nor’Westers in 1785, its famous motto was “Fortitude in Distress.” Drinking to a high level was the primary purpose, as clannish Scotsmen associated with the fur trade engaged in ritual bacchanalia in the months before the spring breakup. Evenings were notable for feasting, boasting and toasting of each other’s successes, with whisky and wine, and the inebriated antics of the current and former Nor’Wester grandees—the wintering partners, agents, brokers and their rich cronies, but certainly not the lower-status voyageurs.

George Landmann, a lieutenant in the Corps of Royal Engineers, wrote of one such gathering of the Beaver Club. “In those days,” he recalled, “we dined at four o’ clock and after taking a satisfactory quantity of wine, perhaps a bottle each, the married men…retired, leaving about a dozen to drink their health. We now began in right earnest and true highland style, and by four o’ clock in the morning, the whole of us had arrived at such a degree of perfection, that we could all give the war-whoop as well as Mackenzie and McGillivray, we could all sing admirably, we could all drink like fishes, and we all thought we could dance on the table without disturbing a single decanter; but on making the experiment we discovered that it was all a complete delusion, and ultimately, we broke all the plates, glasses, bottles, &c., and the table also, and worse than all the heads and hands of the party received many severe contusions, cuts and scratches.” Other accounts recall prodigious meals of venison steaks, roasted beaver tails and pickled bison tongues, and revellers too drunk to stand or sit, slumped on the floor grasping for a final bottle of spirits. The evening often ended in the broken table being upended and the staggering celebrants clambering aboard for a jolly re-enactment of a canoe shooting rapids, propelled by bellowing gentlemen paddling away with their walking sticks, fire pokers and soup ladles. It isn’t hard to imagine that Mackenzie’s later kidney issues stemmed from this life.

The fur trader and map-maker David Thompson later called Mackenzie a “gentlemen of enlarged views,” which he didn’t intend to be entirely complimentary. Mackenzie was a dominating personality who sought to bend other people to his will and expected them to labour in his interests with vigour and self-sacrifice. He was a difficult man to get along with since he always knew best, and was adept at tirelessly promoting his interests, which in his later years were aligned with an expansion of the British Empire in North America.

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