May 2nd Through Time: Birthdays, Breakthroughs & the Birth of the Hudson's Bay Company

On May second, 1670, King Charles the Second of England granted a royal charter to something called the Hudson’s Bay Company. It was a piece of paper, really, giving a handful of adventurers exclusive trading rights over a vast, vaguely defined territory in North America. And that piece of paper, signed on this day over three hundred and fifty years ago, created the oldest continuously operating company in the world. It’s just another day on the calendar, isn’t it? May second. But when you start pulling at the threads, you find these moments — these hinges of history — where the world pivots on a signature, a battle, or a birth.

And looking back, we can see the shape of the world we now inhabit forming in those single, concentrated points in time. We can see what they couldn't. Of course, May second has seen its share of monumental, world-shaking events. On this day in 2011, a decade-long manhunt ended in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The killing of Osama bin Laden was a moment of stark, televised finality. It was an event that sent shockwaves through geopolitics, a moment of closure for some and the beginning of new questions for others. It was the endpoint of a story that began on a clear September morning ten years earlier.

And go back further, to 1945. On May second, the Battle of Berlin officially ended. Soviet soldiers raised their flag over the ruins of the Reichstag. The heart of the Nazi regime had fallen, and with it, the war in Europe was all but over. Imagine the sound of silence after years of gunfire. That was the sound of May second, 1945, in Berlin. A city in rubble, but a continent sighing in relief. The world that would become the Cold War was being born in those very ashes. This day also gave us the very words that described these events. On May second, 1611, the King James Bible was published in London.

Forget its religious significance for a moment — think of it as a linguistic big bang. Phrases like “a law unto themselves,” “the blind leading the blind,” “the salt of the earth”... they all spring from this one book, published on this day. It shaped the English language more than almost any other text. It’s the source code for so much of how we still speak and think and tell stories. And the jet age! That started today, too. In 1952, the first commercial jet airliner, the De Havilland Comet, took its first scheduled flight. Suddenly, the world was smaller. Continents were closer.

It was a breathtaking leap into the future. But it was a flawed leap. Early models of the Comet suffered catastrophic failures, teaching engineers brutal lessons about metal fatigue at high altitudes. Every safe flight you take today owes a debt to the tragic, pioneering story of the Comet. And you can’t talk about a day without talking about the people it produced. On May second, 1729, a German princess was born who would later become Catherine the Great, Empress of all Russia. She was a force of nature, a brilliant, ruthless, and enlightened monarch who expanded her empire and dragged Russia into the modern world.

And on this same day, centuries later, we get Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and David Beckham — figures who have, in their own very different arenas, completely reshaped what it means to be a global icon. From a Russian Empress to a wrestling superstar... May second clearly has a flair for producing personalities who dominate their age. But I want to go back. I want to go back to that piece of paper signed in 1670, and I want to go to a dark, smoky tunnel in 1972. Because in those two moments, separated by three centuries, you find the most extraordinary story about what this day, May second, really means.

Let’s start with the charter. The Hudson’s Bay Company. It’s so easy to hear that and think... a department store, right? But in 1670, it was an act of almost unimaginable imperial ambition. King Charles the Second granted the company a monopoly over every river and stream that flowed into Hudson Bay. That territory was called Rupert’s Land. And how big was Rupert’s Land? It was one-point-five million square miles. It covered nearly forty percent of modern-day Canada. It was larger than the entire Roman Empire at its peak. And it was all handed over, on paper, to a private company for the purpose of the fur trade.

Think about that. A king in London, who had never seen the land, gave it to a company that would rule it like a private kingdom for two hundred years. This wasn't just a business. It was a de facto government. The company built forts, it made treaties — and broke them — with Indigenous nations, it set prices, it dispensed justice. The entire economic and political development of a huge part of North America was dictated by the hunt for beaver pelts, all flowing from the authority of that single charter signed on May second. When we look back from now, what we see is the blueprint for a certain kind of extractive capitalism being laid down.

The idea that a vast, inhabited land could be declared "owned" from an ocean away, its resources claimed for the benefit of distant shareholders. It’s a story of astonishing audacity, of fortunes made, and of a continent being reshaped by commerce. It’s grand, it’s epic, and it feels impossibly remote. Now. Let’s jump forward. Two hundred and two years to the day. May second, 1972. We’re no longer in a London palace. We’re in Kellogg, Idaho. A mile underground, in the Sunshine Mine. It’s America’s richest silver mine. Miners are heading in for their shift. For a while, it’s just another Tuesday.

But then, around mid-morning, some of them start to notice smoke. In a hard-rock mine, small fires from equipment weren't unheard of. They usually burned themselves out. So at first, the smoke was just... normal. An annoyance. But by 11:40 AM, groups of miners in different tunnels knew. They knew this was no ordinary flare-up. A fire had broken out in an abandoned section of the mine, and it was spreading. And the smoke, thick with carbon monoxide, was being pumped through the labyrinthine tunnels by the mine’s own ventilation system. The very system designed to give them air was now delivering poison.

The chaos of the evacuation, the desperate search for breathable air, the men trying to build barricades against the smoke... it’s a vision of hell. Ninety-one men went into the mine that day and never came out. For over a week, rescue teams searched, finding only bodies. Then, miraculously, two men, Tom Wilkinson and Ron Flory, were found alive, having survived for seven days in a pocket of clean air. But they were the only ones. What the investigation revealed was a systemic failure. The mine operator had been cited for fire safety violations. The polyurethane foam used for certain supports was known to be incredibly flammable and toxic.

The self-rescue devices the miners carried were inadequate for a carbon monoxide fire of that intensity. It was a disaster that was not just possible, but in hindsight, seemed almost inevitable. And here’s the connection. Here’s where the past becomes so vividly, painfully alive. That charter from 1670 was about extracting wealth from the ground on a massive, continental scale. The Sunshine Mine is the story of what that extraction looks like at the human scale. One is a story of kings and monopolies and the drawing of lines on maps. The other is a story of smoke and fear in the dark, a mile beneath the earth.

They are two sides of the exact same coin. The grand, sweeping ambition of the Hudson’s Bay Company and the terrible, intimate cost paid by the men in the Sunshine Mine are both part of the same long story. It’s the story of taking things from the earth, and the price that is paid for it. On one May second, a king signed a paper that launched an empire of wealth built on that premise. On another May second, ninety-one men paid the bill for it with their lives. The Sunshine Mine disaster led to the Federal Mine Safety and Health Act of 1977. It completely reformed mining in America.

Just as the crashing Comets led to safer jets, the deaths of those ninety-one miners forced a reckoning. We learn. We learn through trial, and far too often, through tragedy. So when we look at a day like May second, we see the whole spectrum. We see the birth of empires and languages, the end of wars, the rise of icons. But we also see the quiet, devastating moments that force us to change. The moments that remind us that history is not just made in palaces and on battlefields. It's also made in the dark, a mile underground, where the real cost is counted. History isn't a list of dates.

It's the accumulated record of choices, big and small, whose consequences we are still living, every single day.