A double review with Emperor of the North: Sir George Simpson & the Remarkable Story of the Hudson's Bay Company
by James Raffan
After reading James Raffan’s biography of Sir George Simpson, I didn’t know whether to like or dislike the Hudson’s Bay Company’s legendary governor. It seems Raffan felt this way, too, for he portrayed the stout little charismatic Scotsman, who almost immediately transformed the floundering fur enterprise into a solid business empire, as a man who possessed some disturbingly low qualities.
In an author’s note to Emperor of the North, Raffan says: “I’ll have to admit that some days I was not a fan of Sir George, especially when it came to his treatment of women and his underlings, and particularly of his cousin Thomas.” (The book weighs the arguments over whether Simpson was responsible for the murder of his cousin — a mystery that remains unresolved to this day.)
Raffan, an expert canoeist and curator of the Canadian Canoe Museum, developed an interest in Simpson after learning that the governor — along with the voyageurs who did the actual paddling — holds the record for the longest canoe trip completed in a single season, a record that stands to this day. Raffan ended up writing a balanced, well-documented, yet engaging and colourful story of a man who has no less than ninety-two Canadian geographical features named after him.
The bastard son of a lawyer, Simpson is depicted as a fireball of energy fuelled by the desire to overcome the embarrassment of his origins in a society where pedigree was everything. He sired many of his own illegitimate children— no one knows how many — and referred to his aboriginal country wives as “bits of brown.”
Yet the aboriginal hunters, the Métis, and the voyageurs who tirelessly carried him up and down the country in their canots du nord evidently held the “emperor” in high esteem. Unlike some of his nineteenth-century contemporaries, he listened to them and negotiated with them on their own terms, even if he secretly did not consider them his equals.
A genius for detail who could always keep the big picture in focus, Simpson not only brought together a massively spread-out business enterprise, but was the de facto government presence in an immense territory over which Britain had only a tenuous hold. As Raffan perhaps reluctantly admits, “George Simpson should be counted among Canada’s founding fathers.”
Raffan’s book would not have been possible had the Hudson’s Bay Company not kept meticulous records almost from its founding in 1670. The story of these archives, which came to Winnipeg from London in six twenty-tonne containers in 1974 and today fill a cold-storage vault in the Manitoba Archives Building, is told in Keepers of the Record by Deidre Simmons.
Normally, this sort of subject would appeal only to specialists in the field. But anyone with even a casual interest will find Simmons’ writing accessible. She draws out quirky details. For instance, the hapless clerks — on whose shoulders much of the day-to-day record-keeping fell — toiled away in the windswept, winter darkness of their Hudson Bay posts and were repeatedly frustrated by the problem of frozen ink.
The motivation behind the company’s unusually well-kept records was not so much the recording of history as the preservation of evidence to fight frequent lawsuits. The Hudson’s Bay Company thereby acquired a mass of historical material that is in the same league as the archives of the Vatican.
— Nelle Oosterom (Read bio)
Nelle Oosterom is the Senior Editor of Canada's History magazine.