James Knight

James Knight (* around 1640 ; † around 1720 ) was a British navigator and governor of the Hudson's Bay Company , who was killed in search of the Northwest Passage .

Life

Knight joined the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) in Deptford near London in May 1676 and worked his way up from a simple carpenter to governor. In 1693, under his leadership, Fort Albany was recaptured from the French. In 1714 he accepted the French withdrawal from the Hudson Bay area , and in 1717 he arranged for the Prince of Wales to be rebuilt in a strategic position.

In 1718 he resigned from his post as governor at HBC. Although he is said to have been around 80 years old at this point in time, he suggested that the company lead an expedition to discover the Northwest Passage . The last time Luke Foxe and Thomas James were looking for the legendary sea route was in the early 1630s. He traveled to England, where he was able to convince the HBC governing body to fund his project.

On June 5, 1719, Knight set sail with the frigate Albany and the sloop Discovery and a crew of 40 from Gravesend . Since Knight had fallen out with his successor at HBC, Henry Kelsey - he accused Kelsey of embezzlement - Kelsey forbade him to contact any HBC station during his trip. So he chose a sheltered harbor on the eastern tip of Marble Island for the first winter, the location of which Foxe had already described. During the winter he traded with an Inuit settlement nearby. The expedition has been missing since then.

Fate of the expedition

Since there was no news of the expedition, the HBC put together a rescue expedition in June 1722 under the leadership of John Scroggs . After arriving on Marble Island, he soon came across the wreckage of the two missing ships. Apparently without carrying out further investigations, he recorded in his log that all expedition participants had been killed by Inuit. The case was thus initially closed for HBC.

It was not until 1760 that the HBC returned to Marble Island after seeing large numbers of bowhead whales off its coast . In 1767 whalers rediscovered the harbor with the two shipwrecks, and they noticed a brick house that was undoubtedly built by whites. Samuel Hearne learned from the Inuit interview that Knight and his men had starved to death or died of scurvy within two years . This was a recognized declaration for over 200 years.

In 1989 the archaeologist Owen Beattie went to Marble Island in search of the graves of the expedition members. Although it was to be assumed that the men would have buried at least the first dead properly, to his surprise he found no cemetery; the few bones of human origin were mostly from Inuit. Instead, he came across a multitude of animal bones, which indicated that the expedition members had had a quite extensive food supply.

Based on these findings, it is now doubted that the men in their camp on Marble Island starved to death or died of scurvy . Their fate is not clear. Since they have been shown to have consumed polar bear meat , there is a possibility that at least some of them developed trichinosis . Trichinae are very common in Hudson Bay polar bears and have resulted in deaths on many other Arctic expeditions. As a result, the crew was possibly so weakened that they could no longer get the two ships afloat and were killed trying to reach the mainland just 12 km away with dinghies or across the ice. An attack by the Inuit on the decimated team also seems to be an option.

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• William James Mills: Exploring Polar Frontiers: A Historical Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara 2003, ISBN 1576074234 , p. 355 ff.
• Ernest S. Dodge: Knight, James. Dictionary of Canadian Biography, 1966, accessed July 15, 2013 .