Merchant Kings

by Stephen R. Bown

  After being honoured in Britain, the aging merchant king set off on a grand, nearly two-year adventure around the world.

  He crossed North America, moved on to Siberia and proceeded west overland back to London. He then commissioned a ghost writer to prepare his lively travel account of the excursion. When he returned to Lachine after his globe-girdling romp, he settled into his role as the patriarch and pillar of Montreal’s upper class. Simpson shied away from any mention of his humble beginnings; he was now a man of power, respectability and influence. He was also getting on in years. Now in his sixties, he had considerably less energy to spare for legendary tours of his fur domain. “The journeys to the interior & the duties I have there discharged for upwards of thirty years,” he wrote, “are becoming increasingly irksome, & unless circumstances may arise which appear to render my presence desirable I shall not in all probability recross the height of land.” His wife died in 1853 , and his own declining health limited his physical activities. One of his old field colleagues wrote that “our old Chief, Sir George . . . tottering under the infirmities of age, has seen his best days. His light canoe, with choice of men, and of women too! can no longer administer to his gratification.” After the loss of Old Oregon, Simpson was no longer the undisputed master of the company’s formidable holdings. Its monopoly and Simpson’s power began to erode in other ways too.

  The idea of monopoly had fallen out of favour. Free traders were cropping up throughout Simpson’s domain, just as they had appeared around Fort Vancouver before it became American territory. In 1849 a free trader in the Red River colony, Pierre-Guillaume Sayer, was captured by the company and charged with the crime. But instead of receiving a prison sentence or banishment, he was merely released by the magistrate. This mild response effectively ended the company’s government-sanctioned monopoly. The Métis community would no longer tolerate the authoritarian dictates of Simpson or the company. As the nineteenth century progressed and scattered communities and settlements sprang up, other commercial activity unrelated to the dwindling fur trade evolved. The people who founded these communities were not prepared to accept that the Hudson’s Bay Company store must be their only source of goods and provisions. There were complaints about the company’s high-handed tactics, which included searches and damage to property, threats and general harassment. One report describes how “company clerks, with an armed police, have entered into settlers’ houses in quest of furs, and confiscated all they found. One poor settler, after having his goods seized, had his house burnt to the ground, and afterwards was conveyed prisoner to York Factory . . . On our annual commercial journeys into Minnesota we have been pursued like felons by armed constables, who searched our property, even by breaking open our trunks; all furs found were confiscated.” The land was no longer an uncharted wilderness, and the company could no longer continue as its only government. Indeed, the company had become an embarrassing anachronism.

  In 1849 the company lost some of its power on Vancouver Island with the creation of the Crown Colony of Vancouver Island and the appointment of a governor for the new colony.

  When he resigned two years later, however, his job was assumed by James Douglas, the head of the company’s Pacific District, and for a while Douglas acted as both the governor of the colony and head of the company while negotiating punitive treaties with the thirty thousand native residents of the region. In 1858, after a gold rush and an influx of American prospectors from California, the company’s control over its territory on the mainland Pacific coast was ended with the creation of the Crown Colony of British Columbia. Pieces of the empire were falling away.

  Simpson wrote a letter to the London Committee in 1856, presciently pointing out their “very critical position, the authorities being overawed by the numerical strength of the Halfbreed race; so that, at any moment an unpopular measure of accidental collision might lead to a general rising against the Company and the destruction of their establishments. In the meantime, by tact and forbearance, we contrive to maintain the peace and are making large returns—a state of things which may continue one, two or more years, although at all times liable to be interrupted suddenly.” Racist condescension aside, the note reveals that Simpson’s intelligence was still keen, even if his body was failing, and that he had not lost his legendary understanding of the way of things on the ground. When the company was founded, it had held absolute power over its employees. Later, it became so powerful that it could impose its authority on an increasing number of its customers, the First Nations. But when the company’s territories, despite Simpson’s efforts, attracted settlements of English-speaking peoples of European descent— including the “half breeds” or Métis he sneered at (though most of his children were Métis)—the company’s dictatorial monopoly powers had to end. Improved methods of travel and communication meant that the company could no longer control the reports of activities from within its domain.

  Word was getting out denouncing the company’s heavy-handed defence of its profits for the absentee lords who owned and controlled it. Simpson might delay the process, but the inevitable end was in sight. An editorial by George Brown in the Toronto Globe concluded that “there can be no question that the injurious and demoralizing sway of that Company over a region of four millions of square miles, will, ere long, be brought to an end, and that the destinies of this immense country will be united with our own. It is unpardonable that civilization should be excluded from half a continent, on at best but a doubtful right of ownership, for the benefit of two hundred and thirty-two shareholders.” Others echoed the sentiment, both in Canada and, more importantly, in London.

  In the 1850s Simpson still sallied forth for an annual inspection of the company’s forts, but his personal business interests had shifted more to activity in Montreal than in Red River or the Athabasca country. While he continued to lobby officials on behalf of the company, he broadened his involvement in other business ventures, particularly railways, mining concerns and steamship operations. He was not above manipulating high-placed political and financial figures to meet his goals. On one occasion, he famously offered “10,000 golden reasons” to a prominent official to secure government contracts for one of his steamship lines.

  The Hudson’s Bay Company’s licence was up for renewal in 1859, coinciding with the rising public antipathy to its practices. In 1857 Simpson was called to provide testimony to a British House of Commons select committee investigating the activities of the ancient monopoly. Then sixty-five years old, Sir George Simpson strategically coughed, paused and delayed under repeated questioning. He still managed to proclaim that Rupert’s Land was unsuitable for settlement, despite the success of several agricultural communities such as the Red River colony and the thriving company farms on the Pacific coast, despite even his own countering opinions in his 1843 book, in which he lauded the great agricultural potential of the very lands he now described as only suitable for beaver trapping.

  Not surprisingly, Simpson’s opinion, once virtually unchallenged, was now considered not to be credible, if not directly misleading. The select committee recommended that all of Rupert’s Land be annexed by the Province of Canada and that the company and its several hundred wealthy British shareholders should lose all their vaunted powers and privileges.

  In 1870 the entire remaining territory of the Hudson’s Bay Company became part of a new nation, the Dominion of Canada. The company’s despotic days had ended; it would now have to live or die as a regular business, albeit one with vast landholdings in western Canada and with entrenched supply lines and depots spanning half a continent. Tragically but not surprisingly, the hundreds of thousands of indigenous peoples were not consulted in this monumental business transaction between the British company and its colonial government. But Simpson did not live to see it. He died in Lachine in 1860, before his company was stripped of all its special powers.

  Even the loss of a monopoly could be turned to profit. The venerable company set about selling its la
nd to the incoming settlers who were pushing west as the century progressed. When they could no longer defend their monopoly—whose value, in any case, had declined—the company supplied the settlers with goods from the company store, fought for exclusive rights to transportation along key waterways and generally prospered. Several company fur trade forts later became provincial capital cities in the country of Canada: Fort Garry became Winnipeg, Manitoba; Fort Edmonton became Edmonton, Alberta; and Fort Victoria became Victoria, British Columbia.

  Simpson, “the Little Emperor,” charted the course for one of the most unusual business enterprises in history, the empire of the beaver. Propelling it to meteoric success, he arguably contributed to a great territorial loss for his nation in Old Oregon by pursuing policies of short-term benefit to his employer, yet his expansive, profit-driven vision ultimately laid the foundation for the British political dominance of northern North America. Like many of his contemporaries, but perhaps even more so, Simpson was a sexist, racist, domineering braggart who manipulated politicians and business associates to gain what he wanted: more power and money for himself and the Hudson’s Bay Company. The narrow focus of his interests in life, his use and abuse of others, his role in suppressing indigenous culture and autonomy, do not leave much to be admired by our modern sensibilities. He left nothing of his vast estate, estimated to be in excess of 100,000 pounds, to any of his numerous children who had indigenous mothers, and he instructed his executor to withhold the substantial stipends to his “official” daughters if they chose to marry an inappropriate suitor.

  Personal foibles aside, Simpson was undeniably one of the most successful global merchant kings of all time. He directly altered the course of North America’s history with his commercial acumen, iron determination and arrogant self-assurance, coupled with his seemingly unfathomable devotion to make ever more money for his company, even at the expense of all other facets of his life. A year before his death, he wrote his titular bosses on the London Committee, in a fitting epitaph to his life, warning them of his impending resignation after forty years of service: “During that very long period I have never been off duty for a week at a time, nor have I ever allowed Family ties and personal convenience to come in competition with the claims I considered the Company to have on me.”

  At the end of his life, he had been preceded in death by nearly everyone who had been a part of his life, from his wife to his business comrades and numerous enemies. But Sir George Simpson was not one of those men who outlive their era, diminishing in fear and confusion as the world changes around them. Simpson was such a dominant and powerful force for four decades, an unchallenged autocrat ruling half a continent, that his era ended only with his passing and with the loosening of the reins of power he had firmly grasped for himself four decades earlier.

  An early nineteenth-century sketch of Aleksandr Baranov drawn in Sitka near the end of his life, the only known portrait of the famous Russian merchant king.

  This nineteenth-century print shows Baranov’s Castle atop a commanding hill in New Archangel, or Sitka, Baranov’s residence and the main port for Russian America.

  The imperious Sir George Simpson, or “the Little Emperor” as he was sometimes known, is shown with clenched fist and determined visage in this famous nineteenth-century portrait.

  Regally perched in the middle of his canoe, top hat firmly in place, Sir George Simpson arrived at his wilderness fur trade forts to the braying of his personal bagpiper, Colin Fraser, as depicted in this 1923 Hudson’s Bay Company calendar.

  A troop of industrious anthropomorphised beavers communally labour in this fanciful seventeenth-century scene from Hermann Moll’s The World Described.

  The Hudson’s Bay Company coat of arms. For nearly two centuries the company held titular sway, a grant from the English King Charles II, as “true lords and proprietors” over millions of kilometres of North America.

  Cecil John Rhodes was the founder of the diamond conglomerate De Beers and the monopoly British South Africa Company, which used a private army to invade central eastern Africa. He allowed the new territory taken by his company troops to be called Rhodesia in his honour.

  Resembling ants on a giant hill, miners toil amidst the dust and heat in this early 1870s photograph of the Kimberley diamond mine in southern Africa.

  The African king Lobengula is surrounded by supplicants and retainers in his inner compound at Gubulawayo, in this print from the 1880s.

  In this drawing from Punch magazine in 1892 , a stylized and heroic-looking Cecil Rhodes bestrides Africa like a colossus boldly holding aloft a telegraph wire that stretches from the Cape in the south to Cairo in the north.

  Chapter 6

  “Great Britain is a very small island. Great Britain’s position depends on her trade, and if we do not open up the dependencies of the world which are at present devoted to barbarism, we shall shut out the world’s trade. It must be brought home to you that your trade is the world, and your life is the world, not England. That is why you must deal with these questions of expansion and retention of the world.”

  CECIL JOHN RHODES, C. 1895

  Diamonds and Deceit

  CECIL JOHN RHODES AND THE

  BRITISH SOUTH AFRICA COMPANY

  1

  THE OPEN-PIT DIAMOND MINE THAT THE YOUNG CECIL John Rhodes beheld in 1871 was to some observers a marvel of modern industrial know-how; to others it was a horrid blemish, a gash in the landscape. The mine was a 35,000-square-metre, irregular, 70-metre-deep hole gouged into the earth in South Africa. The soil, light brown near the surface, shaded towards a darker blue near the bottom, where it was harder to work. The hard blue soil was to be the young man’s destiny. Thousands of black Africans hacked at the earth with picks and shovels hauling the potentially valuable earth to the surface in horse-drawn carts. When the sun had settled later in the day and the heat had subsided a little, the workers emerged from the pit “as flies come up a wall, only capering as flies never caper—and shouting as they come,” in the words of contemporary traveller Anthony Trollope. In the early 1870s hundreds of independent mining claims had been staked in the pit, each one owned by lone, mostly white, miners who employed a handful of black African labourers to tease the diamonds from the soil. By the end of 1871 more than fifty thousand stake-owners and workers crowded the pits and nearby communities. The work sites may not have looked impressive at first sight, but fortunes were being made here in short order. Rhodes, accompanied by two Zulu labourers and an ox cart full of tools and supplies, set off towards the makeshift city of canvas tents that dotted the horizon, through the throngs of rough and dirty fortune seekers to find his brother. He was going to stake a claim and hunt for diamonds.

  Rhodes had arrived in southern Africa for the first time at the tender age of sixteen, joining his older brother Herbert, who had established himself as a cotton farmer in the Cape Colony. While his father was urging Rhodes towards a career in the clergy, he preferred a career as a barrister, a choice opposed by both his parents. Deferring his education and joining his brother was a family compromise that temporarily preserved the peace. At the time, no one could have known that he would spend the rest of his life in southern Africa, returning only periodically to Britain, nor that he would have an enormous impact on southern Africa’s future and die there after a distinguished though tarnished career.

  He had not been born or raised to expect such things. Born in Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire, on July 5 , 1853 , Rhodes was the fifth son in a large family. His parents were devoutly religious; his father was a vicar in the Church of England, and young Cecil, whose interest was in history and classics, was an upstanding member of the congregation, a teacher of Sunday school and Bible classes. As Cecil was a sickly, asthmatic boy, his parents hoped his trip to Africa, with its hot, dry climate, would prove beneficial for his weak constitution.

  At that time southern Africa was a patchwork of nationalities and political jurisdictions, dominated but not firmly controlled
by the British. Although Portuguese mariners had originally pioneered a sea route around the Cape of Good Hope in the late fifteenth century, it was the English mariners of the English East India Company and the Dutch mariners of the Dutch East India Company who were frequent visitors to Table Bay en route to and from the spiceries in the early seventeenth century.

  In 1650 the Dutch monopoly company sent Jan van Riebeeck to establish a fort and small settlement at the Cape to resupply ships. He was also given the task of locating and befriending the Khoikhoi people, the local inhabitants, hiring them as hunters and buying cattle from them so that the community of around eighty settlers would be mostly self-sufficient. Initially the settlement grew extra vegetables and fruits that served as provisions for the scurvy-ridden mariners of the company as they passed through on their way to and from the East Indies.

  Eventually, however, the colonists grew weary of the Dutch company’s monopoly powers and moved farther inland, driving the indigenous cattle herders out of their territory. In order to retain its jurisdiction over the migrating colonists, the company continuously expanded its borders, which in turn pushed the settlers even farther inland. In 1714 the company outlawed further migration to the colony in an attempt to keep the independent-minded colonists from migrating beyond its control.