IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 220

On 2 May 1670, King Charles II granted a charter to a group of English investors, giving them the sole right to trade in the vast region drained by the rivers that flow into Hudson Bay. The territory was named Rupert's Land after Prince Rupert, the king's cousin, who became the company's first governor, and the corporation itself was formally styled the Governor and Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson's Bay. At a stroke, a small circle of merchants had been granted rights over an area that would one day prove to be about a third of the size of modern Canada.

The idea behind the venture came from two French traders, Médard des Groseilliers and Pierre-Esprit Radisson, who had travelled west from the settlements on the St Lawrence and learned from Indigenous peoples that furs of excellent quality could be obtained far to the north. Unable to interest the French authorities in an expedition by sea to Hudson Bay, they took their plan to London, where it attracted the support of Prince Rupert. A trial voyage in 1668–69 wintered at the southern end of the bay and returned with a cargo of furs, proof that the route worked. The investors were convinced, and the charter followed within a year.

The advantages of the bay route were considerable. Ships from England could sail north of Scotland and reach the bay in about six weeks, avoiding the long passage up the St Lawrence to Montreal and the rapids and portages beyond it. Once a post had been built on the shore, goods could be exchanged with the Cree and other peoples who hunted in the interior and brought pelts down the rivers in canoes. The company therefore needed few employees of its own: it needed ships, fortified posts, supplies and a stock of trade goods.

Those goods were chosen with care. Iron kettles, knives, axes, fish hooks, needles, beads, tobacco, brandy and, later, guns were all in demand, and each item was given a value in made beaver, a unit of account based on a single prime beaver pelt. A standard list, the standard of trade, fixed how many pelts were required for each article, and the officer in charge of a post was expected to obtain at least that much. Because the company set the rates, it could be sure of a margin on every transaction, however remote the post.

Life at the posts was hard. The company's employees, known as servants, signed contracts for several years and were usually young men from England and, later, in large numbers from the Orkney Islands, whose windswept farms and fishing economy accustomed them to isolation. They spent long winters in wooden buildings behind palisades, eating salted meat, dried fish and oatmeal, and were expected to be ready for business as soon as the rivers opened. Scurvy, accidents and quarrels were constant hazards, and desertion to the French or to a rival company was not unknown.

The fur trade depended on Indigenous knowledge and labour. Cree hunters supplied most of the pelts and much of the food, and Cree women worked in and around the posts, preparing hides, making snowshoes and acting as interpreters. Many formed lasting relationships with company men, and their mixed-descent children became the Métis people, who would play a central part in the trade of the following century. The company's records, kept in London for hundreds of years, are among the most detailed sources available to historians of western Canada.

Competition was fierce. French traders from Montreal, travelling inland by canoe, intercepted furs before they reached the bay, and the two nations fought over the posts, the French capturing York Fort more than once in the 1690s; the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713 confirmed British possession of the bay. A far greater challenge came from within. In 1779 a group of Montreal merchants formed the North West Company, whose agents lived among the peoples of the interior and could respond to their needs far more quickly. The rivalry produced bitter disputes, occasional violence and heavy spending on exploration, and in 1821 the two companies merged.

The merged company was governed from 1821 by George Simpson, an energetic administrator who reorganised the trade, cut costs and travelled enormous distances by canoe to inspect his posts. For a generation the company exercised effective control over a territory larger than western Europe with a remarkably small staff of clerks, boatmen and post managers.

By then, however, the trade itself was changing. Beaver fur had been wanted chiefly for felt hats, and as silk hats replaced beaver hats in European fashion during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, demand fell away. At the same time, British North America was expanding westward, and in 1870 the company surrendered its territorial rights to the new Dominion of Canada in exchange for payment and land. It kept its stores and its retail business, which is why a company founded to trade furs is now known mainly as a chain of department stores.

Few businesses have survived for three and a half centuries, and fewer still have shaped the map of a continent. The Hudson's Bay Company did both, and the trade it organised left marks on the place names, family histories and provincial boundaries of Canada that remain visible today. For historians, its long life is a reminder that commerce and empire were never separate stories.

A Gothic cathedral is a building designed to be impossibly tall and full of light. The nave of Amiens Cathedral, finished in the thirteenth century, rises to more than forty metres, and Chartres and Cologne reach just as high above towns that were, when they were built, small and poor. Medieval masons had no structural steel, no concrete and no motorised lifting gear, and the mathematical theory that engineers now use to calculate the forces in a vault did not exist. Yet the buildings have stood for seven or eight hundred years.

The style appeared in northern France in the middle of the twelfth century. Its starting point is usually dated to the rebuilding of the abbey church of Saint-Denis, outside Paris, where the abbot, Suger, commissioned a new choir that was consecrated in 1144. Suger wanted light, and wrote about it in theological terms. The means by which light was obtained were technical: a combination of the pointed arch, the rib vault and the flying buttress, which together allowed the upper walls to be opened into great windows.

The pointed arch gives the style its name, though Gothic builders did not invent it: it was already familiar in Islamic architecture and in Burgundy. Its advantage is structural. In a round arch, the load is carried outward as well as downward, pushing the walls apart; a pointed arch directs the thrust more steeply down, so that the same wall can support a wider and higher vault. Arches of different widths can also rise to the same height, which is why a Gothic nave can be flanked by narrower aisles.

Above the arches came the rib vault. Earlier builders had roofed churches with groins, the intersections formed where two barrel vaults meet, but the result was heavy and difficult to build. The Gothic solution was to erect a framework of diagonal stone ribs along those intersections and fill the spaces between them with thin panels of masonry, known as webbing. The ribs carried most of the weight, so the panels could be light, and the ceiling could be divided into repeated bays.

The most distinctive invention was the flying buttress, an inclined arch of stone standing outside the building. It springs from the top of a massive pier in the open air and reaches across to the upper wall. The outward thrust of the high vault is thus carried over the aisle roofs and down into the pier, which is anchored by its own weight. This freed the upper walls from the need to be thick. Pinnacles, the small pointed turrets loaded onto the piers, added weight where it was needed to resist the sideways push.

With the walls relieved of their load-bearing role, they could be filled with glass. The result was the clerestory, the row of tall windows high above the aisle roofs, together with the great circular rose windows over the west doors. The stone between the windows shrank to slender columns, and openings were divided by tracery, frames within frames that grew more elaborate over time.

Building began with a master mason, who designed the church, supervised the works and was paid a wage rather than a fee for a drawing. His tools were geometry and memory. Designs were set out full size on a tracing floor, a plastered surface where lines could be scratched and erased, and details were cut from wooden templates handed to the carvers. Most carving was done at a lodge on the site, in the working season between spring and autumn.

Lifting was done with wooden cranes. The largest were treadwheels, in which one or two men walked inside a great drum, winding a rope around an axle; examples survive in the roofs of several English cathedrals. Blocks were cut square, or ashlar, and laid in courses with lime mortar, and iron and lead were used to hold and protect the stone. Timber for scaffolding and for centring, the temporary frames that supported arches until the mortar set, consumed whole forests.

The timescale could be extraordinary. Salisbury Cathedral, often cited as a rare example of a medieval church put up in one campaign, was begun in 1220 and largely finished by 1258. Chartres was rebuilt after a fire in 1194 that destroyed most of the earlier building. Elsewhere work stopped when money ran out: Cologne was begun in 1248, abandoned in the fifteenth century and not completed until 1880. Ambition could outrun safety, too: at Beauvais the vault of the choir collapsed in 1284, a few years after it was finished, putting an end to an attempt to build higher than any church before it. The fabric accounts recording payments for stone, lead, timber, food and wages are the historian's best source for how such projects were organised.

The buildings themselves, however, remain the principal evidence, because most medieval drawings have vanished. Parchment was expensive and was often reused, and only a handful of design drawings survive. The most famous collection is the sketchbook of Villard de Honnecourt, a thirteenth-century craftsman whose pages show details of cathedrals and machines but no complete plan of any building. In the nineteenth century the French architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc presented Gothic as rational engineering, in which every element had a structural job. Engineers who model the buildings by computer are less certain: some buttresses were added or enlarged after the walls began to crack, which suggests that design proceeded by experiment as much as by calculation.

Almost every large museum now displays, somewhere near its entrance, the name of a company or a family. A wing, a gallery or an entire building may carry the name of a donor, and a major exhibition is likely to be advertised as sponsored by a bank or an airline. The past, in other words, is increasingly paid for by private money. That raises a question which museums have not settled: when a benefactor has an interest in how a particular episode is presented, what does the institution owe to the donor, and what does it owe to the visitor?

The money arrives in several forms. A company may pay for a single exhibition, meeting the cost of transporting objects, producing a catalogue and marketing the show; it may fund a refurbishment or a new storage facility; or it may pay for a gallery to be named after its founder. Wealthy individuals give collections, endow curatorships and leave bequests. Firms also commission histories of themselves, usually to mark an anniversary, and some pay professional historians to write them. The sums involved are rarely disclosed, and the terms are usually known only to the two parties who negotiated them. Each of these arrangements is different, and it is a mistake to treat them as a single phenomenon.

Museum directors defend the practice in practical terms. Public funding for museums has been flat or falling in many countries for more than a decade, while the cost of mounting a serious exhibition has risen. A show that draws on loans from a dozen countries requires insurance, climate-controlled transport and security, and no director can raise that sum from ticket sales alone. Sponsors, they argue, buy publicity rather than influence: the contract specifies the name on the poster, not the argument in the gallery. Directors also point out that the alternative to a sponsored exhibition is frequently no exhibition at all.

Critics reply that influence rarely takes the form of a crude instruction. A curator is seldom told what to write; the risk is that certain subjects are never proposed. Curators are not usually conscious of censoring themselves, which is precisely what makes the process so difficult to detect. A company whose wealth was built on a commodity it would rather not discuss may not need to say anything, because the awkward chapter simply fails to appear in the plan. Influence of this kind is almost impossible to prove and therefore almost impossible to guard against. Campaigners for disclosure argue that the only workable defence is to publish every agreement in full, so that the terms can be judged by outsiders instead of being taken on trust.

Company histories raise a sharper version of the same problem. Business archives are among the most valuable and least used sources available to historians, and a firm that opens them to an outsider performs a service to scholarship. Yet access is often granted on conditions: the right to read the manuscript before publication, to correct matters of fact, or to require the removal of passages the company regards as damaging. Some academic historians accept that such arrangements can still produce honest work where the contract guarantees editorial independence and the historian is free to publish elsewhere if the firm objects.

Naming rights work differently, because a name on a wall is permanent. It is not a transaction that ends when an exhibition closes. A gallery named after a benefactor whose fortune came from a trade that the gallery's own collection documents makes a statement about who the past belongs to. Such a name may be a genuine act of generosity, and it may also convert commercial or colonial wealth into cultural authority.

It does not follow that public money is clean. State funding bodies have priorities of their own: they favour anniversaries, national stories and exhibitions that attract tourists, and governments have been known to take a close interest in how their own record is presented. A curator who depends on a ministry is not obviously freer than one who depends on a bank. Private and public funders differ in the pressures they apply, not in whether they apply any. The realistic choice, therefore, is not between commercial influence and none, but between different kinds of influence, some of which are more visible than others. That is an argument for rules, not for purity.

What would those rules look like? Agreements should be published, including the sum involved, the length of the arrangement and any conditions attached to the gift. Curatorial decisions — the objects shown, the labels and the argument of the exhibition — should be reserved in writing to the museum, and marketing should be kept separate from interpretation. Where a sponsor's own history bears on the subject, the exhibition should say so, and the label should name the funder as plainly as the poster does.

My own view is that refusing private money outright is a gesture that would leave the public with fewer exhibitions and no better history. But acceptance should be conditional, and the conditions should be settled before the money is taken rather than negotiated afterwards. Some offers will fail those conditions and should be declined. The test is not where the money comes from but whether the institution remains free to say what the evidence shows, and whether it is willing to say so when the funder would prefer otherwise.