Médard des Groseilliers

Médard des Groseilliers (c. 1618-c. 1696), French fur trader and explorer of the territory around the northern Great Lakes and the Hudson Bay in Canada who, with his kinsman Pierre Esprit Radisson, was instrumental in setting up the Hudson's Bay Company. Médard Chouart, sieur des Groseilliers was born in the Marne region of northern France. He arrived in French Canada about 1639 and later acquired a land grant on the St Lawrence River from which he derived his title, sieur des Groseilliers. During his first few years in New France (as the French colony in North America was known), Groseilliers worked as an assistant to the Jesuit missionaries on the eastern shore of Lake Huron. In 1654 he embarked on his first fur-trading expedition, travelling by canoe from Quebec up the St Lawrence and Ottawa rivers to Lake Huron and through the Mackinac Straits into Lake Michigan. He established a trading post near present-day Green Bay, Wisconsin, and from there explored the Fox and Wisconsin rivers and the upper reaches of the Mississippi River.

Groseilliers returned to Quebec in 1656, and three years later he joined his brother-in-law Pierre Esprit Radisson on another fur-trading expedition, this time to the western end of Lake Superior. From Native Americans, Groseilliers learned of a river that reportedly flowed northwards towards a “great sea”. Groseilliers speculated that this might be a water route between the Great Lakes and Hudson Bay or even the long-sought North West Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Although they did not discover such a route, Groseilliers and Radisson explored lands that were prime hunting grounds for fur traders, and they amassed a valuable cargo of furs. When the men returned to Montreal in 1660, French authorities accused them of engaging in unlicensed fur trading. They soon left French Canada, first for Boston, then for London, where they sought support for a large-scale fur-trading venture to Hudson Bay.

In 1667 a group of London merchants agreed to sponsor their fur-trading venture. The following year, Groseilliers sailed to James Bay, at the southern end of Hudson Bay, and established Fort Charles, which became the first permanent white settlement on the bay. The enterprise proved to be a success from the start, and in 1670, King Charles II granted a royal charter establishing the Hudson's Bay Company. For the next several years, Groseilliers worked for the company, which was given a trade monopoly over all the lands whose rivers emptied into Hudson Bay (the so-called Rupert's Land), a massive area comprising nearly half of what is now Canada. With Radisson, he returned to the service of New France in 1674, and in 1682 was involved in the raiding expedition on the HBC's post at Fort York, at the mouth of the Nelson River, when they seized a large number of furs. Returning to Quebec, however, they again found their efforts unappreciated and high taxes levied on their haul. Groseilliers, discouraged, retired to his estate near Quebec in 1684.