This story shines a light on an intrepid sea captain’s voyages from the London Docks to Montreal and around Cape Horn to the Pacific Northwest in the last half of the 19th Century.
Drawing from research on his own family history and 600 pages of Hudson’s Bay Company archived logbooks, Robert Harvey tells a gripping story about the fur trade west of the Rockies and the HBC’s role in trade between Canada and England.
Captain James Gaudin called on all of his experience at sea to survive two shipwrecks and to sail the Horn on 16 demanding voyages. In 1873 he wed Agnes Anderson, the Métis daughter of a fur trader from England who fondly named her adventurous husband ‘No Tame Cat.’

Robert Harvey lives on Denman Island, one of the Gulf Islands on the Pacific Coast. Relying on his own sense of the Sea gained in teenage years on coastal towboats, he wrote this story following retirement after 54 years as a courtroom lawyer. He is an Honorary Member of the CMMC (The Company of Master Mariners of Canada) Vancouver Island Division.