The Adventurers Are Back

A couple of decades ago, when I completed my trilogy on the Hudson’s Bay Company, the Canadian Historical Review asked Jennifer Brown at the University of Manitoba to write a commentary about my middle volume, Caesars of the Wilderness. It included three lengthy chapters on Sir George Simpson, the greatest of the Company of Adventurers’ overseas governors, whose stormy stewardship held sway for most of four crucial decades and is the subject of James Raffan’s wonderful book Emperor of the North: Sir George Simpson and the Remarkable Story of the Hudson’s Bay Company. I called Simpson “the birch-bark Napoleon” because he ruled his empire, which then extended over one twelfth of the Earth’s land surface, from his flimsy yet indestructible fleet of canoes. My description of Simpson as “a bastard by birth and by persuasion” acknowledged his Scottish birth out of wedlock and emphasized his temper out of hell.

In her catty review, Professor...