An organisation that was pre-eminently one of the creative forces of Canada was that of the Hudson's Bay Company, which traces its origin to a voyage of adventure made by two Frenchmen, Pierre Esprit de Radisson and Menart Chouart sieur Degroseillers, who were allured by rumours of the "inexhaustible harvest of furs" that awaited enterprising traders. Baffled for the time by {10} obstacles that seemed insurmountable, they returned to England to ask the assistance of King Charles II., and in 1666 was formed a company that included Prince Rupert (a cousin of the king), the Duke of Albemarle, the Earl of Craven, Sir George Carteret, and other noblemen and merchants, as the incorporators, to whom, in 1670, the king granted a charter to comprise "the whole trade of all the seas, bays, rivers, and sounds, in whatever latitude, ... and territories of the coasts which are not now actually possessed by any of our subjects, or by the subjects of any other Christian prince or state." In the following year two vessels were sent out within a short period and there sprang up a group of trading posts. Radisson remained for life in the service of the Company. Against the living background of Canadian history in all its varied activities, no one contributing factor stands out with such prominence as that of this Hudson's Bay Company which, for two and a half centuries, dominated the country and whose commercial importance played so large a part in her development. Let no one mistake the purpose of the Company, however, as one inspired by purely philanthropic or patriotic ardour. The dominant aim was by no means primarily that of the development of the new and almost unknown country. The servants of the Company were not braving the terrors and hardships of the wilderness on exclusively altruistic inspirations. On the contrary, it was {11} their policy to conceal the existence of the vast riches of the land and to represent it as inaccessible to any one beyond Indians and hunters. Even as late as the comparatively recent date of the decade of 1860-70, the pupils in Canadian schools were taught that all the Hudson Bay region was uninhabitable; that it was a desolate "No Man's Land," so to speak, covered with ice and snow. No effort to change this impression was made by those concerned with the administration of the Company, but, rather, they were more or less untiring in assisting to confirm it. They had their occult reasons for not being averse to the representation of the entire North-West as being quite valueless for the purposes of civilisation. The impression, if not the conviction, was well authorised that the climate rendered the region quite impossible for habitation; and the region in which now lies the most wonderful wheat-growing belt of the world, and whose fertility under cultivation renders it capable of supporting a population as large as that of the entire United States at the present time (estimated at