Here is adventure indeed. Here is what used to be called a “boys own” account of derring-do in the Arctic wilderness. This excellent work covers the early history of the Hudson’s Bay Company (still extant in Canada today as a minor department store chain) from even before its inception, through, if not to the present, then certainly well into the late 19th century.

To a degree, the story of the Hudson’s Bay Company is the story of Canada, and the author, the occasionally sharp and acerbic Peter C. Newman, is nothing if not a Canadian patriot. The story of the HBC is also the story of winter, of the Arctic, of the very concept of “the North”. It is the story of the wild north woods and the ice-fringed Arctic sea.

I was pointed in the direction of this work by reading Bernard de Voto’s history of the “mountain men” engaged in the American beaver fur trade in the wilderness west of the Missouri – “Beyond the wide Missouri“. Newman does spend some time comparing and contrasting what happened in the lands further south that eventually formed the United States, with what happened in the northern part of the North American continent, the lands which (Alaska excluded) ultimately became Canada. They are very different stories. In the lands that formed the USA, Newman opines, there was a social contract; in Canada – allegiance (to the British Crown). In the thirteen colonies that became the USA, there was revolutionary will; in Canada – tradition. The Americans enshrined in their constitution, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness“. The Canadians valued “peace, order and good government“. In the mostly temperate lands that became the USA, what mattered was individual excellence. In the harsher climate of the Canadian Arctic, what mattered was collective survival. I shall make no public comment on which of these may or may not better.

These differences highlighted by the author do point up the cultural and social differences between Canada and the USA right down to the present day. To me, they also show that the history of the American continent could have been very different. There was nothing inevitable or permanent about the British Empire; there was and indeed is, nothing inevitable or everlasting about the United States.

Where Newman really excels – and this is why I love reading history – is in his looking in between the lines of history, his going off at a tangent, and visiting the less-travelled by-ways of the past. Here is a book two inches thick on Canada and the Hudson’s Bay Company, and there is page after page describing that European aristocrat and warrior Prince Rupert of the Rhine, nephew of the English King Charles I, and notable cavalry general of the English Civil War. I think this form of digression is great: it is found in full measure in the work of the greatest historians. Read Halberstam’s “The Coldest Winter” about the Korean War, and you will learn much about Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency and his early life, and about how the Republican Party has got into the trouble it remains in right up to this day.

Another area I enjoyed is Newman’s dealing with explorer-heroes. Or maybe that ought be hero explorers? He is most helpful in laying out the exploits of a long line of incredibly tough and stalwart adventurers pressing into the Arctic tundra. (Note: I use the word “incredible” in the most literal sense here rather than the modern overused nonsense – that is, to me, it is barely credible that those guys could have been that tough!!)

He covers well the laissez-faire economics of the Hudson’s Bay Company, particularly in the time of the reticent Sir Bibye Lake, and the fundamentally commercial rather than political or cultural purpose of the HBC. This company was not at all the same as the East India Company, although it existed in parallel with the East India Company, and was arguably in some senses similar.

Towards the end, we read the story of the lost Franklin Expedition and of the unravelling of that mystery by the supremely capable but very conceited John Rae. Rae hinted – indeed, as good as proved, that the men of the lost expedition had resorted to cannibalism, but the culture and mores of the British Empire at that time did not permit the idea that British White Men would eat each other in extremis. Rae himself put himself outside the pale of the Establishment of the time by suggesting such things. It would have been quite natural and understandable in the west at that time, far easier for the British public, any public, to feel that the Franklin Expedition had perished at the hands of some terrible cannibal Arctic tribe – Newman notes that the press of that time found the “spectre of an Arctic tribe of man-eaters irresistible“. As a reader of macabre horror, I start to more easily realise how and why writers such as Edgar Allen Poe and even the later H.P Lovecraft, had such a fear of the Arctic and such an inappropriate negative attitude to the Esquimaux.

Reading this, I’ve learned a lot: about Canada, about the Orcadians (the men of the Orkneys whom the HBC hired to do much of the initial work), and about the politics and economics of Stuart and Georgian times. The Orcadians came out to the Hudson Bay and were probably better fed and clothed than they would have been at home in Kirkwall at that time – and they could come back home, if they survived a five year hitch, to five years’ unspent wages! Always interesting to read about prices and profits: some of the initial exploration was conducted by a ketch called “Nonsuch”. It was bought by the Company in 1669 for £290, and sold after the voyage for £125. The Company spent £650 on trade goods outbound, and sold the furs and other cargo after the return voyage, for £1379. And after all that, still made a loss!! But, it was worthwhile “proof of concept” that the Hudson’s Bay Company could trade successfully in the Canadian Arctic. The financial backers, we read, “were pleased” with these figures. It’s a shame that many people look down their noses today at entrepreneurs who have the same energetic attitude to commercial and technical risk.