Company of adventurers

Summary: Peter C. Newman's sweeping chronicle of the Hudson's Bay Company is a vivid and dramatic account of the people and events that unlitmately determined the destiny of a continent When Charles II granted the original Charter to his cousin Prince Rupert, and his gallant Company of Adventurers, it was the beginning of the world's largest private commercial empire. There has never been a business enterprise like it: the HBC's territory eventually covered one twelfth of the earth's surface and was ten times the size of the Holy Roman Empire at its height. Its dominion stretched from London across Canada, down to San Francisco across the Pacific to Hawaii. The Governprs of the HBC were the merchant princes of London's financial district, future kings of England, First Lords of the Admiralty and directors of the the Bank of England. Most of them never saw their domain - a land many believed was suitable only for convicts. Newman deftly recreates the predawn raids of Chevalier de Troyes and the heroic sea battle of the little known military genius Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville that were part of the English-French struggle for dominance of the bay. The men who survived the battles and the pitiless landscape were the unsung heoreis of Canadian history. They and many others became the Caesars of the wilderness - the men and womenwho created the Company that became the heart of a nation.