Hudson's Bay Company

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~ the eulogy ~

On 2 May 1670 Charles II signed a charter for the Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson's Bay, with his cousin Prince Rupert of the Rhine as the first governor and seventeen others behind him. The grant was written in the language of the period, which meant it gave away everything that drained into a bay nobody in London had surveyed. The company then spent 150 years building posts around that coastline and trading European goods for beaver pelts, with a rival out of Montreal fighting it hard enough that the two were forced to merge in 1821.

The fur business faded and the company became a retailer, which is the part most Canadians actually experienced. It bought Simpsons and Zellers in 1978 and took over Kmart's Canadian stores in 1998. By the 2000s the Bay was the anchor department store in most Canadian downtowns. It had moved its head office from London to Canada in 1970, on its three hundredth anniversary, having been a British company operating in North America for the entire period before that.

Jerry Zucker bought it in 2006 and the American property investor Richard Baker's NRDC Equity Partners took it in 2008. What followed was a decade of buying department store chains with debt against the real estate underneath them. Lord and Taylor came first, then Saks Fifth Avenue for $2.9 billion in 2013. Galeria Kaufhof in Germany followed in 2015. Baker took the company private in March 2020, weeks before the stores were shut by the pandemic.

It filed for creditor protection with the Ontario Superior Court on 7 March 2025 with 9,364 employees left, down from about 70,000 in 2006. The court cleared liquidation of all but six stores on 21 March and those sales began three days later. The last six went into liquidation on 25 April. On the afternoon of Sunday 1 June 2025 the remaining 80 Hudson's Bay stores closed along with three Saks Fifth Avenue locations, and about 8,300 people, eighty nine percent of the payroll, were out of work.

~ the dossier ~

~ the land it sold ~

Rupert's Land was the drainage basin of Hudson Bay, roughly 1.5 million square miles, and the charter handed the whole of it to a company on the strength of a signature in London. The people already living there were not consulted, and the legal fiction that they could be granted away underwrote two centuries of the fur trade.

In 1869 the company sold it. The Deed of Surrender transferred Rupert's Land to the new Dominion of Canada for £300,000 and a twentieth of the fertile belt. The company also kept the land immediately around its trading posts, and the handover took effect on 15 July 1870. A third of a country changed hands for what was even then a modest sum, and the company kept the real estate that mattered commercially. That land is the reason it lasted another 155 years.

~ the other charter ~

England ran the same play in the eastern Mediterranean, and it is the closest thing to a Turkish entry in this grave. The Turkey Company took a charter in 1581 and the Venice Company in 1583. When both lapsed, Elizabeth I merged them into the Levant Company on 11 September 1592, seventy eight years before the Hudson's Bay charter was written. It held the monopoly on English trade with the Ottoman Empire and kept factories across the Ottoman lands, the largest of them at Aleppo. It also paid for the English ambassador to the Porte out of its own revenue. Raw silk and mohair went west, English cloth and tin came east.

Parliament dissolved it on 19 May 1825 and it surrendered its charter back to the Crown, which took over the consulates it had been running. So the two companies were the same instrument pointed at different halves of the world, one at Izmir and one at James Bay. The Levant Company gave its charter back to the king who had issued it. Hudson's Bay sold its own at auction two hundred years later.

~ what thirty million bought ~

Canadian Tire agreed on 15 May 2025 to pay $30 million for the intellectual property, meaning the Hudson's Bay name and the coat of arms. The striped blanket pattern, in use since the eighteenth century, went across with them, and Zellers was excluded from the deal. The American side went into Saks Global. In August 2025 the entity chartered in 1670 was renamed 1242939 B.C. Unlimited Liability Co.

The charter itself went to auction with the art collection. Heffel put 27 paintings up in the fall, and on 3 December 2025 holding companies belonging to the Thomson and Weston families won the bidding for the 1670 document, with the Ontario court approving the sale on 11 December. The vellum outlasted the company by six months and then was sold as an artifact by the trustee winding it up.

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