Editor, Glyndwr Williams states in the Preface, "... Volume XXX should in some way, be a commemorative volume; and so he selected for publication four separate documents from the period 1670 to 1870, those two hundred years in the Company's history to which the previous twenty-nine volumes of the Record Society relate. The first document is the Albany journal (B.3/a/I) kept by Anthony Beale in 1705-06. It is the earliest journal from Bay posts to have survived, and as such it is the forerunner of the great series of post journals which form so substantial a source for the history of the Company in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The second document is an anonymous account (E.2/I2,pp.622-42) by a Hudson's Bay officer of the taking and destruction of Prince of Wales Fort, Churchill River, and York Factory, by a French Squadron commanded by La Perouse in 1782. The third document is a narrative (B.57/a/3) by James Tate, a Company labourer at Eagle Lake post, of his experiences in the hands of the Northwesters between 1890 and 1811. The fourth document is perhaps the one of most general interest, Governor George Simpson's celebrated 'Character Book' of 1832 (A.34/2). Probably no single document in the Archives has been used and quoted so extensively, and a critical edition to this remarkable series of confidential entries on the Company's Chief Factors, Chief Traders, clerks and postmasters in the year 1832 ..."
