Two French coureurs de bois managed to interest English merchants in the opportunities of Hudson's Bay, the inland sea in North America. On May 2, 1670, the English therefore established the Company of Adventurers Trading into Hudson's Bay (HBC). With his charter of the same year, King Charles II granted the company the largest empire any private company has ever controlled. The founding charter granted the company control over all lands draining into Hudson's Bay, a very large area called Rupert's Land, which included much of the western prairie and northern subarctic regions. In the northwestern reaches of North America, English rule from then on was sustained by the HBC.
Compared with the French, the HBC's traders …
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Citation: Spies, Marion. "Hudson's Bay Company". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 30 April 2004 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=521, accessed 26 November 2024.]
