The Hudson''s Bay Company
In 1661 two Frenchmen, Medard Chouart des Groseilliers and Pierre-Esprit Radisson , reached the southern end of Hudson Bay overland and realized it was the same inland sea described by earlier seafaring explorers. They returned to the St Lawrence laden down with furs, upon which the French governor arrested them for trapping without a licence. Understandably peeved, they turned to England, where Charles II's cousin, Prince Rupert, persuaded the king to finance and equip two ships, the Eaglet and the Nonsuch . After a mammoth voyage, the Nonsuch returned with a fantastic cargo of furs and this led to the incorporation of the Hudson's Bay Company by Charles II on May 2, 1670. The Company was granted wide powers, including exclusive trading rights to the entire Hudson Bay watershed - to be called Rupert's Land . The HBC was a joint-stock company, the shareholders annually electing a governor and committee to hire men, order trade goods and arrange for fur auctions and shipping. By 1760, trading posts had been built at the mouths of all the major rivers flowing into the bay; these were commanded by factors , who took their policy orders from London. The orders were often unrealistic and based on the concept of native trappers bringing furs to the posts - the direct opposite to the Montreal-based North West Company, whose mainly Francophone employees spent months in the wilderness working with the natives. Unsurprisingly, the NWC undercut the Company's trade and there was intense competition between the rival concerns right across the north of the continent, occasionally resulting in violence. In 1821 a compromise was reached and the two companies merged . They kept the name Hudson's Bay Company and the British parliament granted the new, larger company a commercial monopoly from Hudson Bay to the Pacific. However, the administrative structure of the Company was changed. A North American chief factor was appointed and his councils dealt increasingly with local trading concerns, though the London governor and committee continued to have the last word. The extensive monopoly rights ceded to the new company were fiercely resented by local traders, and, in a landmark case of 1849, a local jury found a Metis trader by the name of Sayer guilty of breaking the monopoly, but simultaneously refused to punish him. Thereafter, in practice if not by law, the Company's stranglehold on the fur trade was dead and gone. Furthermore, the HBC's quasi-governmental powers seemed increasingly anachronistic and when a company official, James Douglas , became governor of British Columbia in 1858, the British government forced him to resign from the HBC. This marked the beginning of the end of the Company's colonial role. In 1870 the HBC sold Rupert's Land to Canada. In return it received a cash payment, but, more importantly, retained the title to the lands on which the trading posts had been built and one-twentieth of the fertile land open to settlement. Given that the trading posts often occupied land that was the nucleus of the burgeoning western cities, this was a remarkably bad deal for Canada - and a great one for the HBC. Subsequently, the HBC became a major real-estate developer and retail chain, a position it maintains today
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