The road to Cathay and the Hudson's Bay Company

Abstract

There had been no English expedition to search for the North-west Passage for 40 years before the Hudson's Bay Company received its royal charter on 2 May 1670. Early enthusiasm, generated largely by Sir Humphrey Gilbert and the “Colleagues of the Fellowship for the discovery of the North-West Passage”, had been put to the test by the maritime skills of Frobisher and of Davis. But, although Frobisher had returned from his first voyage, in October 1576, convinced that he had found the passage and had “passed above fiftie leagues therein”, he had in fact crossed westwards from the coast of Greenland to enter Frobisher Bay on Baffin Island (Collinson, 1867, p 72); experience was to prove that no passage lay that way. Davis, too, came back from his first voyage convinced that, in 1585, he had in all likelihood been in “the place and passage by us laboured for” (Hakluyt, 1927, Vol 5, p 333). He had then entered Cumberland Sound, also on Baffin Island. Davis's second voyage brought him to Hudson Strait and convinced him (as Frobisher in turn had thought) that the great “overfall” of the water there betokened a vast sea to the westwards. He was sure that the passage could now be found without further cost. But Davis's third voyage, in 1587, took him, first, north through Davis Strait up the coast of Baffin Island and then, crossing eastwards, up the coast of Greenland as high as lat 73 °N, where he still found the sea open although the wind was contrary. Returning down the coast, he was again impressed by the “great ruttes” of the “overfall” in Hudson Strait and he concluded that, of the four possible openings for the passage, this one was the most likely. The others were to be found due north up Davis Strait, which he thought might be no more than a great gulf, or through Frobisher Bay or through Cumberland Sound, in both of which he had been held by ice (Hakluyt, 1927, Vol 5, p 281–336.)