"Newman, Peter C. - Company of Adventures 03 - Merchant Prince" - читать интересную книгу автора (Newman Peter C)

Macdonald's second Canadian administration; he served eighteen years in
the House of Commons, much of that time as the powerful pro-consul for
western Canada-known in Parliament as Minister for the Hudson's Bay
Company.
Some of Smith's inore positive legacies included recoinmendations that
led to formation in 1873 of the North West Mounted Police, predecessor
of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and to the founding of Canada's
reserve army. Convinced that it was a sin for a Scot to die rich, he
became one of the most generous and creative philanthropists of his age,
helping establish Montreal's Royal Victoria Hospital and significantly
expanding McGill Universiq,. He won the admiration of a grateful British
Empire by personally donating a regiment of Canada's best horsemen to
help fight the Boer War and by funding the start of Lord Baden-Powell's
Boy Scout movement. He gave away more than $20 million and left many
benevolent Canadian and imperial legacies, including funds
 THE MAN WHO BECAME A COUNTRY 7

for a leper colony and plans for the so-called All-Red Transportation and
Telegraph route that was supposed to circle the globe.
The first HBC executive to evaluate correctly the agricultural potential
oftbe fur country, Smith foresaw that much of the Prairies would become
fertile farmland. To position the H BC (and himself) as recipients of the
revenues from sale of those acres, Smith became one of the principal
promoters ofirnmigration responsible for settling the West.
Smith spent eiqhteen years as Canada's High Conimissioner to the United
Kingdom, quickly becoming as influential in Britain as he had been in
Canada. He bankrolled and became chairman of Burmah Oil and the
Anglo-Persian Oil Company, the innovative energy firms that later spawned
the giant British Petroleum. At the personal behest of Winston Churchill,
then first Lord of the Admiralty, Smith's companies guaranteed security
of oil supply for the Royal Navy as it prepared for the First World War.

It hardly seems possible that any man could have engaged in so much
activitv in a single lifetime, since until the relatively advanced age of
forty-nine Smith was fully occupied by the mundane business of trading furs
with Indians in a remote corner of Labrador, then Justifiably known as "the
world's jumping-off place." Part of the explanation for Smith's long roster
of achievements was the extraordinary stretch of his life. Donald Smith was
born in 182 0, the year of George III's death, and arrived in Canada within
months of Queen Victoria's accession, while the odd soldier who had fought
under Wolfe or Montcalm on the Plains ofAbraham still tottered along the
streets of Quebec. He died in his ninety-fourth year on the eve of the
First World War. His crowded lifetime spanned Canada's evolution from
wilderness to urbanization. He headed west when
 8 LABRADOR SMITH

the buffalo still roamed the plains, and died just before tanks rolled
into the fiulds of France.
It was an astonishing life of significant tenures:
75 years with the HBC