James Knight

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Contact and Colonization James Knight McGhee, Robert, The Last Imaginary Place: A Human History of the Arctic World, Oxford University Press Inc., New York, 2005, p. 203 James Knight, a man in his sixties with long service to the Hudson's Bay Company. Knight had heard rumours from native sources that he interpreted as indicating that both gold and a Northwest Passage existed somewhere along the Hudson Bay coast to the north of the Churchill River. He persuaded the Company to provide him with two ships, the Albany and the Discovery, and to outfit an expedition in search of wealth and fame. The ships and their crew of about forty men sailed in June of 1719 and were never seen again. The first indication of their fate surfaced almost fifty years later, by which time the Company was regularly sending small ships north from Churchill to hunt whales and to trade with the Inuit of northern Hudson Bay. One such vessel landed on Marble Island, an eerily bleak quartzite outcrop lying 500 kilometres to the north of Churchill and 15 kilometres off the coast, where they discovered the remains of a house, a scatter of anchors and other items too large to have been salvaged by Inuit, and the hulls of two ships sunk in the shallow water of an adjacent harbour. Two years later the crew of the Company ship met Inuit in the area who told them a pathetic story. One autumn, they had encountered about fifty men, gadlunaat, who were building the house on Marble Island. When they visited the following spring there were many fewer, and by that autumn only twenty unhealthy men survived. That winter the Inuit lived nearby and supplied the gadlunaat with meat and blubber. When they returned after hunting on the mainland in the spring only five were alive, and three of these died soon after eating the raw seal meat and blubber the Inuit gave them. The final two survivors spent their time on the top of a nearby hill, looking to the south for the arrival of help, but eventually one perished and the other died while trying to bury him. The Inuit named this white outcrop Dead Man's Island, and began avoiding it as a place of illness and misfortune. (The Last Imaginary Place, p. 203) 1 McGhee, Robert, The Last Imaginary Place: A Human History of the Arctic World, Oxford University Press Inc., New York, 2005, p. 203 .

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