James Knight

James Knight was a director of the Hudson's Bay Company and an explorer who died in an expedition to the Northwest Passage.

Knight was born in England and joined the Hudson's Bay Company in 1676 as a carpenter. In 1682, he became Chief Factor of the trading post of Fort Albany in James Bay where he made himself rich. In 1697, he bought stock in HBC and, in 1711, he gained a seat on the board of directors.

The long wars of the Grand Alliance and the Spanish Succession with France had spread to Canada and battered the HBC. Four of the company's five trading posts were lost to the French. However, among the provisions of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 was the restoration of these posts. In 1714, Knight was sent out to take possession of York Fort and restore the company's fortunes. Despite the damage to the fort from the French occupation, and the hardships of the climate, he succeeded in rebuilding the company's business, and, in 1719, it paid its first dividend for 20 years.

Knight was determined to explore the country to the north and west of Hudson Bay, hoping to find mineral resources and perhaps the Northwest Passage. In 1715, he organized a mission to promote peace between the local Cree and the Chipewyans who lived further north. The mission was accompanied by Thanadelthur, a Chipewyan woman who had been captured by Cree and escaped to York Fort. With Thanadelthur acting as interpreter, the mission travelled more than 1,000 km northwest, returning to York Fort in 1716 with ten Chipewyans. They carried copper knives, but Knight convinced himself that their stories of a river where lumps of "yellow mettle" could be found — perhaps Coppermine River — indicated the presence of gold. And their stories of a sea to the west — probably the Great Slave Lake — he interpreted as a bay leading to the Pacific.

In 1717, Knight established a new trading post at the mouth of the Churchill River, but another mission north from there experienced only terrible hardship in the winter of 1717–1718 and made no discoveries. Knight returned to Britain in 1718 and persuaded the company governor, Sir Bibye Lake, to fund an expedition on two vessels, the ship "Albany" of 100 tons, and the sloop "Discovery" of 40 tons. Knight sailed on 5 June 1719 with two other company ships: "Albany Frigate" (Capt. George Barlow) and the sloop "Discovery" (Capt. David Vaughan). [cite book |title=Ordeal by ice; the search for the Northwest Passage |last=Mowat |first=Farley |authorlink= |coauthors= |year=1973 |publisher=McClelland and Stewart Ltd |location=Toronto |format=The Voyage of Captain Knight |pages=95 |oclc=1391959] They parted in Hudson Bay in July, and never returned.

Their fate was uncertain for many years. We now know that the two ships reached Marble Island in the northwest of Hudson Bay and anchored in a sheltered inlet at the east of the island. The expedition landed their supplies, built buildings of stone and brick, and spent the winter ashore. However, for some reasonm they were unable to sail again in the spring, for the wrecks of both ships lie at the bottom of the bay where they were found by divers in 1991–1992. It is possible that they were damaged in passing the shallow bar, or that they were crushed by ice during the winter.

In 1767, a whaling expedition discovered the 1719 camp and found many graves, and in 1769 another whaler reported being told by an elderly Inuk of Marble Island that the expedition had starved to death over two winters in 1719–1721. However, a series of archaeological investigations carried out from 1989-92 by University of Alberta researchers led by Owen Beattie and John Geiger have cast doubt on this version of events as only one human vertebra and three teeth were found around the buildings. The graves elsewhere on Marble Island are Inuit, not European. The plentiful remains of local wildlife — caribou, seals, geese — suggest that the explorers did not starve, or at least not in the first winter. But piles of coal suggest that they didn't spend a second winter. It seems much more likely that the expedition attempted to escape, either by crossing the 30 km strait to the mainland while frozen, or else by setting sail in the ships' boats in the spring or summer of 1720.

References

*John Geiger & Owen Beattie, "Dead Silence: The Greatest Mystery in Arctic Discovery", Bloomsbury/ Penguin, 1993.
*Glyn Williams, "Voyages of Delusion: The Search for the Northwest Passage in the Age of Reason", Harper Collins, 2002.

External links

* [http://www.biographi.ca/009004-119.01-e.php?&id_nbr=873 Biography at the "Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online"]
* [http://www.hbc.com/hbcheritage/history/people/associates/knight.asp Biography of James Knight] from the [http://www.hbc.com/ Hudson's Bay Company.]