Northern Wilderness episode 2 – The Company that Built a Country

Northern Wilderness episode 2

Northern Wilderness episode 2 – The Company that Built a Country: Ray Mears goes on an epic adventure into Canada’s unforgiving yet stunning wilderness. As Ray travels across land and by canoe, he tells the story of one of the greatest companies the world has ever known – the Hudson’s Bay Company that opened up Canada.


 

 



Ray discovers how those early traders were pioneers who laid the foundations of the modern Canadian state. He also demonstrates local crafts and bushcraft skills that bring the landscape to life.

 

Northern Wilderness episode 2 – The Company that Built a Country

 

The Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), chartered 2 May 1670, is the oldest incorporated joint-stock merchandising company in the English-speaking world. HBC was a fur trading business for most of its history, a past that is entwined with the colonization of British North America and the development of Canada.

Henry Hudson’s expedition had found the northern route into the Canadian interior, by following an arctic passage that allowed the English to avoid the French who were expanding in the south, along the St. Lawrence River
valley. In the 1660s, two Frenchmen, Radisson and Groseilliers, explored all the way to Hudson’s Bay, and learned that the area was rich with furs.

Their tales of the bounty of furs that were to be had made rich businessmen in Montreal, Quebec, and London drool with greed. They managed to raise money to bring a ship load of furs back to England, and convince merchants to invest in the fur trade. As a result, a group of wealthy English merchants formed the Hudson’s Bay Company, in 1670, and the King of England granted the Company a fur trade monopoly for all the lands drained by rivers flowing into Hudson’s Bay. Even though the land did not belong to him or to his country.

Survival expert Ray Mears takes an epic adventure into Canada’s unforgiving yet stunning wilderness, covering over 1,000 miles.

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