The Hudson's Bay Company is chartered in London
On this day · 2 May 1670
A royal charter handed a band of fur traders a monopoly over a watershed bigger than most of Europe.
On May 2, 1670, King Charles II sealed a royal charter creating “The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson’s Bay.” Eighteen well-placed investors got more than a trading license. The charter handed them an exclusive monopoly over every river that drained into Hudson Bay — roughly 1.5 million square miles, later christened Rupert’s Land after the company’s first governor, Prince Rupert.
Nobody had mapped those boundaries. The Adventurers were claiming, sight unseen, a territory amounting to nearly 40% of modern Canada, stretching from Labrador to the Rockies.
The company began as a small, under-capitalized, high-risk overseas venture — and is still trading today.
That improbable longevity makes the HBC one of the oldest continuously operating commercial enterprises in the world. In 1870, three years after Confederation, it sold Rupert’s Land to Canada for £300,000, the largest land transfer in the country’s history.
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