North America's oldest company began with two French traders and a frozen sea
The Hudson's Bay Company, chartered in 1670, once held a trading monopoly over a third of modern Canada and acted as its de facto government. Its origin lies with two French fur traders who, snubbed at home, sold their plan to the English. It lasted 355 years, until its liquidation in 2025.
Pierre-Esprit Radisson and his brother-in-law Médard des Groseilliers heard from the Cree that the richest fur country lay north-west of Lake Superior, beyond which was a frozen sea. Guessing this was Hudson Bay, they wanted a post there so furs could be shipped out by sea rather than hauled overland. They turned to Boston merchants, whose 1663 voyage was stopped by pack ice, then went to London, arriving in 1665 at the height of the Great Plague. A trial voyage aboard the Nonsuch founded Charles Fort on James Bay in 1668 and came home with a profitable cargo.
On 2 May 1670 Charles II issued a royal charter to the investors, formally styled a company of adventurers, granting a monopoly over every river draining into the bay. That basin, named Rupert's Land after the first governor, Prince Rupert, covers some 3,861,400 square kilometres, though nobody then knew its limits. The company built coastal forts it called factories, run by a factor, and waited for Indigenous and European trappers to paddle in with pelts. The French, by contrast, lived and traded in native villages, and they raided and captured English posts, holding most of them until the Treaty of Utrecht returned the bay to Britain in 1713.
The standard currency of that trade was the wool point blanket. By 1700 it made up over 60 per cent of exchanges, and a lasting myth holds that its stripes showed its price in beaver pelts; in fact they marked the blanket's size.
In 1869 the company handed its lands to Canada and reinvented itself as a retailer of department stores. After a string of owners it spun off its US assets in 2024, sought creditor protection in March 2025, closed its last stores by June and sold its brand to Canadian Tire.
Source: Hudson's Bay Company
