As a railway is now being actually built after being projected on paper for more than twenty-five years—from the western prairie to a seaport on Hudson Bay, which has for its object the diversion of Western traffic to Europe from New York to some harbor on Hudson Bay, it is necessary to give in detail what the archives of the Hudson’s Bay Company reveal about this route. Hudson Strait opens from the Atlantic between Resolution Island on the north and the Button Islands on the south. From point to point, this end of the strait is forty-five miles wide. At the other end, the west side, between Digges’ Island and Nottingham Island, is a distance of thirty-five miles. From east to west, the straits are four hundred and fifty miles long—wider at the east where the south side is known as Ungava Bay, contracting at the west, to the Upper Narrows. The south side of the strait is Labrador; the north, Baffin’s Land. Both sides are lofty, rocky, cavernous shores lashed by a tide that rises in places as high as thirty-five feet and runs in calm weather ten miles an hour. Pink granite islands dot the north shore in groups that afford harborage, but all shores present an adamant front, edges sharp as a knife or else rounded hard to have withstood and cut the tremendous ice jam of a floating world suddenly contracted to forty miles, which Davis Strait pours down at the east end and Fox Channel at the west.
Seven hundred feet is considered a good-sized hill; one thousand feet, a mountain. Both the north and the south sides of the straits rise two thousand feet in places. Through these rock walls ice has poured and torn and ripped a way since the ice age preceding history, cutting a great channel to the Atlantic. Here, the iron walls suddenly break to secluded silent valleys moss-padded, snow-edged, lonely as the day Earth first saw light. Down these valleys pour the clear streams of the eternal snows, burnished as silver against the green, setting the silence echoing with the tinkle of cataracts over some rock wall, or filling the air with the voice of many waters at noon-tide thaw. One old navigator—Coates—describes the beat of the angry tide at the rock base and the silver voice of the mountain brooks, like the treble and bass of some great cathedral organ sounding its diapason to the glory of God in this peopleless wilderness.
Perhaps the kyacks of some solitary Eskimo, lashed abreast twos and threes to prevent capsizing, may shoot out from some of these bog-covered valleys like seabirds; but it is only when the Eskimos happen to be hunting here, or the ships of the whalers and fur traders are passing up and down—that there is any sign of human habitation on the straits.
Walrus wallow on the pink granite islands in huge herds. Polar bears flounder from icepan to icepan. The arctic hare, white as snow but for the great bulging black eye, bounds over the bowlders. Snow buntings, whistling swans, snow geese, ducks in myriads—flacker and clacker and hold solemn conclave on the adjoining rocks, as though this were their realm from the beginning and for all time.
Of a tremendous depth are the waters of the straits. Not for nothing has the ice world been grinding through this narrow channel for billions of years. No fear of shoals to the mariner. Fear is of another sort. When the ice is running in a whirlpool and the incoming tide meets the ice jam and the waters mount thirty-five feet high and a wind roars between the high shores like a bellows—then it is that the straits roll and pitch and funnel their waters into black troughs where the ships go down. “Undertow,” the old Hudson’s Bay captains called the suck of the tide against the ice-wall; and that black hole where the lumpy billows seemed to part like a passage between wall of ice and wall of water was what the mariners feared. The other great danger was just a plain crush, getting nipped between two icepans rearing and plunging like fighting stallions, with the ice blocks going off like pistol shots or smashed glass. No child’s play is such navigating either for the old sailing vessels of the fur traders or the modern ice-breakers propelled by steam! Yet, the old sailing vessels and the whaling fleets have navigated these straits for two hundred years.
Westward of the straits, the shores dropped to low, sandy reaches at Mansfield Island. Another five hundred miles across the bay brought the ships to Churchill and York (Nelson).
Here, then, came Captain Knight’s fleet. And the terrific dangers of his venture met him—as it were—on the spot. The records do not give the exact point of the disaster, but one may guess without stretching imagination that it was in the Upper Narrows where thirty-five feet of lashing tide meet a churning wall of ice.
The ships were embayed, sails lowered, rudders unshipped, and anchors put out for the night. Night did not mean dark. It meant the sunlight aslant the ice fields and pools in hues of fire that tinted the green waves and set rainbows playing in the spray. Gulls wheeled and screamed overhead. Cascades tinkled over the ice walls. There was the deep stillness of twilight calm, then the quiver of the ship’s timbers forewarning the rising tide, then the long, low undertone of the ocean depths gathering might to hurl against the iron forces of the ice. The crews had been rambling over the ice but were now recalled to be on the watch as the tide rose. Some were at the windlass ready to heave anchors up at first opening of clear water; others ready to lower boats and tow from dangers; others again preparing blasts of powder to blow up the ice if the tide threatened to close the floes in a squeeze. Captain Ward’s men must have been out on the ice, for it happened in the twinkling of an eye as such wrecks always happened, and not a man was lost. Two icepans reared up, smashed together, crushed the frigate Hudson’s Bay, like an eggshell and she sank a water-logged wreck before their eyes. Ward’s crew were at once taken on board by Belcher, and when the ice loosened, carried on down to York and Albany. There was a lawsuit against the Company for the wages of these men wrecked outward bound and kept in idleness on the bay for thirteen months. The matter was compromised by the Company paying ten months’ wages instead of thirteen.
Captain Knight waited only long enough at Churchill to leave the fort provisions. Then he set out on his quest to the north. This could scarcely be described as foolhardy, for his ships carried the frames for houses to winter in the North. From this point on, the story must be pieced together of fragments. From the time Captain Knight left Churchill, in 1719, his journal ceases. No line more came from the game old pathfinder to the Company. The year 1719 passed, 1720, 1721, still no word of him. Surely, he must have passed through the Straits of Anian to the South Sea and would presently come home from Asia laden with spices and gold dust for the Company. But why didn’t he send back one of the little whaling boats to Churchill with word of his progress; or why didn’t some of the men come down from the whaling station he was to establish at Chesterfield Inlet? Henry Kelsey takes a cruise on the sloop Prosperous from York, in 1719, but finds no trace of him. Hancock has been cruising the whaling seas on The Success that same summer, but he learns nothing of Knight. The whole summer of 1721, while whaling, Kelsey is on the lookout for the peaked sails of Knight’s ships; but he sees never a sail. Napper is sent out again on the sloop Success, but he runs amuck of a reef four days from Nelson River and loses his ship and almost his life.