the Company with illustrations by Kerry Hodgson

The untold story of the first centuries of Canada’s Hudson’s Bay Company, a now 350-year-old institution that once claimed a vast portion of the globe

THERE ARE MANY WAYS to tell the story of the Hudson’s Bay Company, which claimed and traded on some eight million square kilometres of the Earth’s surface, including large parts of Canada and the northwestern United States. It can start with Indigenous hunters, whose sustainable methods of trapping were exploited by HBC traders for a profit. It can start with European consumers, men and women desperate for the waterproof skins of the beaver, which had been hunted to near extinction in Europe. It can even start with the now-iconic Hudson’s Bay point blanket, something you’re bound to find in cottages and cabins across Canada. The Englishmade wool blanket — cream, with thick coloured stripes — harkens back to the 18th century, when it was the company’s most popular traded good.

This telling of the HBC starts in London, the epicentre of the British Empire. It starts there because although the story of the HBC is a Canadian story, it’s a transnational one, too. It’s the story of an English company claiming and helping to colonize huge swathes of North America, inhabited by sovereign Indigenous nations. From London parlours to Cree communities to the U.S. Senate, it’s a story that connects Canadian history to world history — to the demands of European consumers, the decisions of English officials, the aspirations of Scottish traders and the futures of diverse Indigenous Peoples. It reminds us that although Indigenous history is inseparable from Canadian history, they aren’t always the same. Well before the establishment of Canada, which was never a foregone conclusion, Indigenous actors interacted with British actors as representatives of their own communities and nations. The HBC has become a part of Canadian history. But it’s a story that predates Canada, the making of which is only one small telling. In other words, the history of the Hudson’s Bay Company is a global story for our global era. In October 1666, King Charles II of England granted an audience to two men who had travelled a long way to see him. Médard Chouart des Groseilliers and Pierre-esprit Radisson were from New France. Brothers-in-law and voyageurs, they came to tell the king about the “great store of beaver” they’d discovered west of France’s imperial claims.

If Charles II asked why they hadn’t taken their discovery to his cousin, King Louis XIV of France, they had an easy answer. After returning from an initial expedition to the region west of Lake Superior, in which they’d learned about the potential for a fur trade from the Sioux, des Groseilliers and Radisson presented their bounty of beaver fur to New France’s governor, Pierre de Voyer D’argenson. Expecting to be rewarded for their entrepreneurial spirit, they were instead reprimanded, arrested and fined for travelling without D’argenson’s permission and abandoning their post. After serving their sentences, the two men travelled to New England, where they met English officials who encouraged them to take their vision of an imperial company that traded in fur to Charles II.

Sailing with Charles’ backing, on the same expedition but different ships, the men attempted a journey to Hudson Bay in 1668. But des Groseilliers was the only one to make it, after a storm damaged Radisson’s ship and forced him to return to England. Des Groseilliers set up on James Bay’s southern shores, where he traded with the Cree. Upon his return to England, in October 1669, he confirmed what they had suspected, and Charles II’S papers reported: “Beaver is plenty.”

This confirmation was important for the establishment of the HBC’S charter, but other factors motivated Charles II’S interest in the region. In addition to fur, investors hoped they would discover other natural resources, such as gold or silver. Explorers and monarchs were also eager to find the much sought-after Northwest Passage. All this motivated Charles II when he granted the charter establishing the Hudson’s Bay Company, officially “The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England, trading into Hudson’s Bay,” on May 2, 1670. Characteristic of British imperial ventures at the time, the charter established a legal monopoly aimed at preventing others from doing the same.

Crucially, the charter also claimed some 1.5 million square kilometres of land inhabited by Inuit and First Nations communities. This was land connected to all of the river ways — “Seas, Streights, Bays, Rivers, Lakes, Creeks, and South” — that fed

into Hudson Bay. Charles understood that he couldn’t take land that didn’t belong to him. But he reserved the idea of land ownership for Europeans, ignoring the territory’s Indigenous inhabitants. Charles baked this belief into the HBC’S charter by outlining whose land he would not claim: that of British subjects, or “the Subjects of any other Christian Prince or State.” In other words, any other European power.

As part of Charles II’S refusal to recognize Indigenous sovereignty, he granted a new name for the region: Rupert’s Land, in honour of his cousin, Prince Rupert, who served as the HBC’S first royal governor. By the mid19th century, as the HBC’S landholdings grew, the region would encompass some eight million square kilometres and large parts of modern-day Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Nunavut, Ontario and Quebec, as well as the northwestern and midwestern United States. From the perspective of English officials, this achievement was nothing short of extraordinary, a true marker of how British commerce could transform — or “civilize” — the globe. But parts of this region already had names. For some Indigenous communities, it was Turtle Island; for others, Inuit Nunangat or Denendeh. And for the Indigenous nations who called this region home, the simple act of one man signing a piece of paper, in a candle-lit room across the Atlantic Ocean, would have profound consequences. The basics of the HBC’S fur trade were relatively simple, even if the day-to-day operations were anything but. The company built posts, staffed by English officials and mostly Scottish traders, along rivers that connected to Hudson Bay. From there, traders waited for Indigenous trappers and their middlemen to bring them furs, which they exchanged for goods that were becoming increasingly important to the community’s survival, such as guns and wool. The furs were then brought back to Europe. To standardize the terms of the trade, the company established its own currency, known as “Made Beaver.” This currency valued goods by placing them against the standard of one prime beaver pelt, which could buy you, for example, two pounds of sugar or a pound of black lead.

The company gave the men who worked for it adventure, and in the process they helped spread British business and trade practices, as well as their culture and social values, across the region. They did the work of colonizing and nation-building, such as mapping British Columbia’s interior and charting the Arctic coast, almost always with the help of Indigenous guides.

In late 1770, for instance, Englishman Samuel Hearne reignited the company’s commitment to not just resource extraction but territorial exploration. After two unsuccessful expeditions, Hearne ventured out from Prince of Wales Fort in northern Manitoba into lands that would become Nunavut and the Northwest Territories. He did so under the guidance of the Dene chief Matonabbee, who had saved Hearne’s life on an earlier mission, as well as London governors’ orders to

AS THE HBC’S LANDHOLDINGS GREW, THE REGION WOULD ENCOMPASS SOME EIGHT MILLION SQUARE KILOMETRES and large parts of modern-day Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Nunavut, Ontario and Quebec.

tion, Hearne believed his “discoveries are not likely to prove of any material advantage to the Nation at large.” But when it came to British ambitions in the region, the real value of Hearne’s expedition lay in the contributions it made to a larger system of knowledge HBC employees were amassing about the region. From des Groseilliers and Radisson onward, Hearne was one of several men whose explorations gave HBC, British and later Canadian officials invaluable knowledge on the geography of the region they were claiming — and how best to exploit it. While the company gave men such as des Groseilliers, Radisson and Hearne adventure, and London businessmen bragging rights to large parts of a continent, its founding and dealings had the biggest impact on the Indigenous Peoples who lived in the region. Although HBC officials saw their venture as a business, many underestimated how it created a complex, often contentious web of social relations with the mostly male traders and Indigenous men, women and children.

But just as such relations were starting to form, HBC traders, like other Europeans before them, introduced and advanced the spread of diseases such as smallpox and tuberculosis, to which Indigenous Peoples had no immunity. James Daschuk traces this history in his award-winning book, Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life. He notes that disease killed not just individuals but also cultures and sometimes even entire communities. In Saskatchewan, for instance, disease decimated the people of Basquia and Pegogamaw Cree communities. Elders — those who held important positions within the community and carried traditional knowledge — were particularly susceptible to contamination.

Still, the company depended on Indigenous hunters to bring them the furs they sold in Europe. The fur trade simply didn’t work without Indigenous Peoples’ labour and knowledge. A 1782 report penned by HBC official Matthew Cocking from York Factory, in northern Manitoba, epitomized this thinking: “I believe never a Letter in Hudson’s Bay conveyed more doleful tidings than this. Much of the greatest part of the Indians whose Furrs have formerly & hitherto brought to this place are now no more, having been carried off by that cruel disorder the Small Pox. This great fall is owing to our loss of Indians but what is worse, several of the Indians who brought the little we have got are since dead.” For economic reasons, the HBC took the spread of disease seriously, and