An asylum for Tories.
A colonial constitution of the regulation English pattern was granted to Nova Scotia in 1758, and France formally released her claim by the treaty of 1763. At the same time Cape Breton, which had been a second time captured (1758), was added. The Englishmen in Nova Scotia were largely of the official and trading class, having little in common with their neighbors of the more southern colonies. In the Revolution several thousand loyalist refugees found an asylum in the peninsula.
For the remaining French colony, Canada, special treatment will be necessary.
106. Hudson's Bay Company.
Similarity to the Massachusetts Bay Company.
The Hudson's Bay Company, from the time it was chartered by Charles II. (1670) until its lands were sold to the British Government (1869), was a joint-stock association, with exclusive commercial and political privileges, very similar to the Company of Massachusetts Bay. To-day it trades as a private corporation; its former territory—the lands draining into Hudson's Bay—is now open to all on equal terms.
French opposition.
Fur-trade factories, protected by strong forts, were early planted by the company at the mouths of several sub-arctic rivers, such as the Rupert, Moore, Albany, Nelson, and Churchill, the only inhabitants being the small garrisons and the company's trading servants. Several expeditions were successively made to Hudson's Bay by French war vessels; much devastation was wrought and blood spilled, until in 1697 the treaty of Ryswick put an end to the trouble, and left the company in undisputed possession. It had lost more than £200,000 in this predatory warfare, but soon regained its position, through the profits of the fur-trade.
American rivals.
After the fall of New France (1763), the Hudson's Bay Company met formidable rivals in the enterprising Northwest and American organizations; the story of the fierce competition which ensued, with its effect on American settlement and international boundaries, belongs to the period covered by other volumes of this series.