Inuit Contact and Colonization

Henry Hudson

McGhee, Robert The Last Imaginary Place: A Human History of the Arctic World, Oxford University Press Inc., New York, 2005, p. 192

The tragic pattern began with Henry Hudson, an explorer who made four remarkable voyages in four successive summers searching for a northern route to Asia.

In 1607 and 1608 he had sailed for England in Spitsbergen waters and the Barents Sea; he returned to the region in 1609 for the Dutch, but ice and unrest among the crew diverted him westwards to America and the Hudson River. All three voyages demonstrated his outstanding seamanship and nose for discovery, but faults in Hudson's personality must be blamed for the dissent and threatened mutiny that dogged the ventures.

In 1610 he sailed from England again in the tiny barque Discovery, with a crew of twenty-two men, intent on penetrating the channel off the northern tip of Labrador that Martin Frobisher had named Mistaken Strait. This he accomplished, surviving the fog and ice and massive tides of what is now known as Hudson Strait, and discovering that this turbulent stretch of water was the gateway to a huge and almost landlocked sea. Discovery sailed southwards along the rocky and island-studded eastern coast of Hudson Bay, and penetrated the shallow southern extension that we know as James Bay. With a continuous water horizon to the west and no means of measuring longitude, Hudson probably thought that he had reached a northern sector of the Pacific Ocean, and was travelling southwards along the western coast of America. (The Last Imaginary Place, p. 192)

1 McGhee, Robert The Last Imaginary Place: A Human History of the Arctic World, Oxford University Press Inc., New York, 2005, p. 192