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magazine / apr10
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April 2010 issue |
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In Hudson’s wake
In a five-year surge, explorers fill in the map of the eastern Arctic
By Steven Fick and Douglas Hunter
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| Click map to enlarge |
On April 17, 400 years ago, Henry Hudson departed
London in a ship called Discovery with 22 other
Englishmen. The voyage is best remembered for an
insurrection in which Hudson, his son and seven other crew
members were cast adrift in James Bay, never to be seen again.
But stop and consider how, between 1610 and 1616, an astonishingly
large portion of Canada’s eastern Arctic was probed by
Hudson and the expeditions that followed.
Until Hudson came along, Europeans knew little of the eastern
Arctic, notwithstanding the late-16th-century voyages of
Martin Frobisher and John Davis. Frobisher claimed that the
dead end in eastern Baffin Island, now known as Frobisher Bay,
was a strait leading to China. Hudson went looking for this
non-existent strait and, instead, made a huge leap forward in
sailing the length of a different strait, between Baffin Island and
northern Quebec.
Frobisher’s expeditions had called this Mistaken Strait, because
he thought it led nowhere. Davis saw promise in it, in a sidelong
glance of open water beyond a tidal rip he called Furious Overfall.
Hudson sailed west, beyond Furious Overfall, and arrived at an
expanse of water leading south: Hudson Bay. He pushed south to
probe James Bay, overwintering there in 1610-11.
After Hudson’s disappearance the following June, expeditions
kept coming. In 1612, Thomas Button led a two-ship expedition
that overwintered at the mouth of the Nelson River. In
1615, William Baffin, sailing with Robert Bylot — one of the
survivors of the Hudson mutiny — made a meticulous inspection
of the north shore of Hudson Strait, as far west as Foxe
Channel. In 1616, they turned their attention to what became
known as Baffin Bay. In coasting its entire perimeter, they
probed as far north as latitude 78 degrees 45 minutes, an incredible
achievement in the age of sail.
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