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

Keswick turns away, and says to nobody in particular: "Takes a hell of
a lot of killing, the Hudson's Bay
and shuts the door firmly behind me.

TIIEMEMORY OF THAF BRITTLE AFrFRN00N atTheydon Priory stuck with me during
the writing of this third and final volume of my Hudson's Bay history.
Tony Keswick's enduring passion for the Company was by no means unique.
Some of its bachelor officers willed it their savings; one woman executive
confided to me that she loved the HBC more than either of her husbands.
Even the gruniblers, fed tip with their long, slow lives in some dreary
posting, would vo,~N that thev were damn well going to "retire
early"-after only thirty-eight years in the service.
, Fhe one emotion the IiBC never engendered was neutrality. In Canadas
North, many Inuit and Indians insisted its initials should really stand
for the Hungry Belly Company, while their women denounced it as the Horny
Boys'Club. No one touched by the Hudson's Bay Company's Darwinian will
to survive remained una~-fected. To be a Bay man was like belonging to
a religious order that now only bottles brandy-but had once touched the
hand of God.

BY 1870, "IFIENTHIS VOLUME BEGINS, the IIBCs feudal empire was starting
to unravel, its halcyon days buried with Sir George Simpson, the Company's
great instrument of thrust and thunder, who had served as its viceroy from
1821 to 1860. It was under his Napoleonic direction, exercised from the
belly of a birchbark canoe, that the I IBC reached its apogee, spreading
its mandate across a private empire that encompassed a twelfth of
 X-V

the earth's land surface.* In 1870, the Company's landholdings were sold to
the newly confederated Dominion of Canada for Y,300,000 plus title to seven
million acres, its trading monopoly having been disrupted by the influx of
settlers eager to till the rich soils of the Canadian plains. Following a
brief interregnum, the HBC came under the spell of Donald Alexander Smith,
the acquisitive Labrador fur trader who settled the first Riel Rebellion and
eventually rose not only to preside over the FIBC, the Bank of Montreal and
Royal Trust but also became the dominant financier of the Canadian Pacific
Railway and the man who hammered in its last spike. Having lost one empire,
the Hudson's Bay Company moved to consolidate another, establishing its
dominant influence over Canada's Arctic, organizing the trade in fox pelts,
and eventually manning more than two hundred posts in the Canadian North. In
western Canada, the retail trade was channelled into half a dozen downtown
department stores that eventually became the nucleus of a mammoth
merchandising operation, currently composed of 540 outlets with 38 million
square feet of space, selling goods worth $5 billion a year. There were
other ventures, too, such as the HBCs entry into merchant shipping during
the First World War, when nearly three hundred vessels flew the Company's
flag, running the gauntlet with essential food supplies and ammunition to
France and Tsarist Russia, a third of them sunk by torpedoes en route.
Between 1920 and 1970, when the Company's charter was finally transferred
to Canada, turf wars raged between the HBCs patrician British Governors and