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“How Frigid Zones Reward the Advent‟Rers Toils”: Natural History Writing and the British Imagination in the Making of Hudson Bay, 1741-1752

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“How Frigid Zones Reward the Advent‟Rers Toils”: Natural History Writing and the British Imagination in the Making of Hudson Bay, 1741-1752 “How frigid Zones reward the Advent‟rers Toils”: Natural History Writing and the British Imagination in the Making of Hudson Bay, 1741-1752 by Nicholas Melchin B.A., Ottawa University, 2005 A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS in the Department of History Nicholas Melchin, 2009 University of Victoria All rights reserved. This thesis may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopy or other means, without the permission of the author. ii Supervisory Committee “How frigid Zones reward the Advent‟rers Toils”: Natural History Writing and the British Imagination in the Making of Hudson Bay, 1741-1752 by Nicholas Melchin B.A., Ottawa University, 2005, Supervisory Committee Dr. Elizabeth Vibert (Department of History) Supervisor Dr. Andrea McKenzie (Department of History) Departmental Member iii Abstract Supervisory Committee Dr. Elizabeth Vibert (Department of History) Supervisor Dr. Andrea McKenzie (Department of History) Departmental Member During the 1740‟s, Hudson Bay went from an obscure backwater of the British Empire to a locus of colonial ambition. Arthur Dobbs revitalized Northwest Passage exploration, generating new information about the region‟s environment and indigenous peoples. This study explores evolving English and British representations of Hudson Bay‟s climate and landscape in travel and natural history writing, and probes British anxieties about foreign environments. I demonstrate how Dobbs‟ ideology of improvement optimistically re- imagined the North, opening a new discursive space wherein the Subarctic could be favourably described and colonized. I examine how Hudson Bay explorers‟ responses to difficulties in the Arctic and Subarctic were seen to embody, even amplify, central principles and features of eighteenth-century British culture and identity. Finally, I investigate how latitude served as a benchmark for civilization and savagery, subjugating the Lowland Cree and Inuit to British visions of settlement and improvement in their home territories. iv Table of Contents Supervisory Committee ...................................................................................................... ii Abstract .............................................................................................................................. iii Table of Contents ............................................................................................................... iv List of Figures ..................................................................................................................... v Dedication .......................................................................................................................... vi Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: From “Arctic Tempests” to “North benign”: Natural History Writing, Improvement and the Transformation of the North .......................................................... 28 Chapter 2: “Limit the Fury of the Lawless North”: Writing a Colonial Geography of Hudson Bay ....................................................................................................................... 68 Chapter 3: “Nor would exchange their native Clime, or Modes”: Climate, Landscape and the Representation of Indigenous Peoples of Hudson Bay ............................................. 111 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 153 Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 159 v List of Figures Figure 1: Hudson Bay and Strait, drawn by John Gilkes, from Glyndwr Williams, Voyages of Delusion, 2002, 6. ............................................................................................ 3 Figure 2: Part of a map of Hudson Bay and the inland country, from Arthur Dobbs, An Account of the Countries Adjoining to Hudson’s Bay, 1744. ........................................... 13 Figure 3: Map of the 1746 expedition‟s route to Hudson Bay, from Henry Ellis, A Voyage to Hudson’s Bay, 1748. ..................................................................................................... 17 vi Dedication For Naomi, words cannot express. Introduction [L]andscapes can be most parsimoniously defined as perceived and embodied sets of relationships between places, a structure of human feeling, emotion, dwelling, movement and practical activity within a geographical region which may or may not possess precise topographic boundaries or limits. As such, landscapes form potent mediums for socialization and knowledge for to know a landscape is to know who you are, how to go on and where you belong. Personal and social identities are played out in the context of landscapes and the multitude of places that constitute them. To be human is to be place-bound in a fundamental way. Places are elemental existential facts, and the social construction of place, in terms of others, is a universal experiential medium.1 Christopher Tilley Landscape might be seen more profitably as something like the “dreamwork” of imperialism, unfolding its own movement in time and space from a central point of origin and folding back on itself to disclose both utopian fantasies of the perfected imperial prospect and fractured images of unresolved ambivalence and unsuppressed resistance.2 W.J.T. Mitchell This study is about a landscape. Or rather, I am interested in the ideas that a certain group of people in history had about a foreign landscape, and the people who inhabited it. I am less interested in the actual details of this landscape, though these will become important from time to time, than in the notions by which this landscape was known, how these ideas influenced the ways people acted in relation to it, and how this interaction transformed their ideas of both the landscape and themselves. As the quotations cited above indicate, I embrace the perspective that understandings of landscapes are influenced by a complex mixture of factors, including the actual physical conditions of a place as well as the particular assumptions and notions of observers about that place. This is not a contest where either „reality‟ or „bias‟ wins out. Rather, it is a medium or moment of contact, wherein both reality and identity are defined in relation to one another. This study treats landscapes as a canvas upon which hopes and fears are painted. 1 Christopher Tilley, The Materiality of Stone: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology (Oxford, Berg Publishers, 2004), 25. 2 W.J.T. Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” in Landscape and Power, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 10. 2 The landscape that I am interested in is Hudson Bay. Or more specifically, the “dreamwork” of Hudson Bay: I am concerned with the shape that people‟s ideas about this landscape bent it into, the manners in which ideas about this place influenced perceptions of its inhabitants, and the moments and ways through which this peculiarly large indent in the Arctic coast of North America came to be seen as a notable landscape in the English and British imagination.3 When European countries first started exploring the Americas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it was not evident that this region would be of any significance to England. Even after Henry Hudson first happened upon the bay that now bears his name in 1611, this vast and difficult to reach inland sea was visited less than a handful of times over the next half century by European explorers. And while many of these explorers ended up perishing in Hudson Bay, they were in truth less interested in the region itself than in discovering a route through it to the Orient. It was only with Radisson and Groseilliers‟ realization that the Bay region carried an enormous and untapped wealth in furs that Hudson Bay came to be a destination in its own right. In 1670, the Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson‟s Bay (the Hudson‟s Bay Company) was incorporated by royal charter and established an English presence on the Bay-side, 3 On the subject of using the terms „British‟ versus „English‟, I follow Linda Colley‟s interpretation that an important element in the formation of a distinct sense of British nationalism was the sporadic but ongoing conflict with France over the course of the eighteenth century. However, I do not seek to downplay the role that empire played in this process, seeing these forces as mutually reinforcing rather than competing factors. The use of the terms “British Empire” and “British Colonies” by historian John Oldmixon (an author who will figure prominently in my analysis) in 1708 points to how metropolitan promoters and historians were self-identifying as British Nationalists even in the earliest stages of the “forging” period that Colley blocks out. In this study, for the period leading up to the eighteenth century, I will solely use the term English to describe these peoples and their activities. As my analysis moves into the eighteenth century I will employ the terms British and Britain where authors or subjects are referring to this emerging nation, which includes England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, or English and England where authors or subjects are only referring to England. See Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1701-1837 (New Haven and London: Yale University
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