Charles II Grants Charter: Hudson's Bay Company Rises

Two French fur traders convinced the English crown to claim a territory larger than Western Europe, and the document that made it happen fit on a single sheet of parchment. On May 2, 1670, King Charles II granted the Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson's Bay a royal charter that gave them exclusive trading rights over the entire watershed draining into Hudson Bay. The territory covered 1.5 million square miles, roughly a third of modern Canada. Pierre-Esprit Radisson and Medard Chouart des Groseilliers had explored the region and recognized that the richest beaver-trapping grounds lay north of the Great Lakes, accessible by ship through Hudson Bay rather than by the arduous canoe routes from Montreal. When French authorities seized their furs and fined them for trading without a license, the two men took their knowledge to England, where Prince Rupert, the king's cousin, organized a syndicate of investors. The charter named eighteen shareholders, granted them a commercial monopoly, the right to make laws, build forts, raise armies, and wage war against non-Christian peoples. The Company's territory, called Rupert's Land, encompassed all lands draining into Hudson Bay and its tributaries, though no European had mapped most of it. Indigenous nations who had inhabited these lands for millennia were not consulted. For two centuries, the Hudson's Bay Company operated as a de facto government across northern North America, establishing a network of trading posts where Indigenous trappers exchanged beaver pelts for manufactured goods. The "Made Beaver" became the standard unit of currency, and the Company's policies shaped relations between European settlers and Indigenous peoples across the continent. In 1870, the Company surrendered Rupert's Land to the new Dominion of Canada for 300,000 pounds. The HBC still operates as a retail company, making it one of the oldest commercial enterprises on Earth.