Long Live ‘The Bay’

Apr 02, 2025

By Gray Merriam

Most of the current assessment for “the Bay’ is about business accounting.

That focus emerged from today’s obsession with the consumer-based economic model as the source of knowledge. But there is a lot more to know about the effects of ‘the Bay’ on Canadian culture.

In 1670 King Charles the Second granted the Governor and Company of Adventurers of England a monopoly over all the territory that drained into Hudson Bay. That monopoly was given because two ships of the Hudson Bay Company in 1668 had returned to England with a large haul of highly valued furs. The King saw prospects of huge profits that could be gained by England supporting a business devoted to exploiting the natural resources of this unexplored territory.

Thus several socio-economic trends were introduced to Canada from another culture without full consideration of the ‘territory’ where these cultural beliefs would be enforced.

The roots of this development were clearly demonstrated by a Royal declaration in 1670 that a vast territory surrounding Hudson Bay and extending westward into the prairies would be known as Rupert’s Land. All rights to trade and commerce in this huge territory were granted to the Hudson Bay Company. A Company of Adventurers was formed to govern the territory and exercise a commercial monopoly for the next 200 years.

Under “the Doctrine of Discovery”, England claimed the entire area draining into Hudson Bay. Rupert’s Land was named to honour the first Governor of the Hudson Bay Company and reapplied the tradition of handing governance to political friends and relatives.

Rupert’s Land under the governance of the Hudson Bay Company with a clear objective of profiting by exploiting natural resources beginning with fur. European markets and fashions dictated mainly beaver pelts but did not exclude other furs.

Under ‘the doctrine of discovery’, not only was Rupert’s Land considered unowned but also it was deemed to be unoccupied. In reality, Ruperts’ Land was home to many of Canada’s First Nations.

Many of those people who lived historically on that land were subsumed into the Hudson Bay fur exploitation that followed economic traditions that were also imported.

The Indigenous residents became part of the business that aimed to profit from the thirst for strange fashions in far off cultures.

First Nations residents on Rupert’s Land became low class labour critical to the new fur industry for their intimate knowledge of the land. Their near- enslavement was sometimes reinforced with rum.

The exploiters also fostered a developing subculture of voyageurs among French Canadians. This workforce of ‘voyageurs’ was critical to the exploitation of England’s newfound treasure of marketable natural resources.

The new development was guided mainly by traditional English business practices and little if at all by considerations of traditions of the land or of the original people of that land. The workforce critical to the desired profits was treated as newly developed wilderness slave labour.

But those originating in French Canada brought their own strong cultural forces. The voyageur canoes that the fur trade depended on introduced the idea of the organized work crew to a wilderness where independent action by individuals was the norm.

Upscale managerial positions such as trading post ‘factors’ were filled by importing selected individuals from trusted cultural sources. Trading post factors were usually from Scottish island cultures, particularly Orkney. A wilderness ‘class system’ was imported. Since that system did not include females, the class structure also included ‘country wives’. These indigenous females formed a strange but not unexpected subpart of the wilderness slavery that developed. In most cases they had no rights and their position, including the roof over their head was only temporary.

This societal structure spread across the wilderness and became incorporated into some developing longer-term societies. Thus some foundations of Canada’s social structures were laid and were supported and enforced by governance of the Hudson Bay Company. The North West Company formed in Montreal in 1779 and its competition with the Hudson Bay Company was one of the earliest corporate battles in the Canadian wilderness. There were other business models across the globe but, our lingering adherence as a British Dominion allowed the pioneering influence of the Hudson Bay Company to survive until the consumer-based economic model overcame most other ways of valuing our riches. The final chapter of the Hudson Bay Company will be shaped by variables from modern business schools not by real values of real riches.