LOOKING FOR A NORTH-WEST PASSAGE
Luke Foxe and Thomas James (1631–2)
The discoveries of Henry Hudson quickened the pulses of English financiers. After more than a hundred years of searching, Hudson Strait (as the Furious Overfall was rather drably named) and the ‘sea’ into which it led (later to be called Hudson Bay) seemed at last to be the door to the North-West Passage. The scramble to open it began as soon as the mutineers returned. On 26 July 1612 the ‘Company of the Merchants Discoverers of the North-West Passage’ was formed by Royal Charter. Its members included not only the men who had sponsored Hudson’s last expedition, but a string of luminaries – Prince Henry, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Francis Bacon and Robert Hakluyt. Towards the bottom of the list was Richard Bylot, the man who had brought Hudson’s ship, the Discovery, back to London. Even before the company was formed, one Thomas Button had been sent to Hudson Bay with the Discovery and the Resolution, taking Bylot as an advisor. The two ships explored the southern and western coasts of the bay, overwintered and returned in 1613, having found no exit and with their crews suffering from scurvy. In 1614 Bylot sailed again in the Discovery under William Gibbons, but they did not even reach Hudson Bay, becoming stuck in a bay on the Labrador Coast, where they stayed so long, because of either the weather or the captain’s indifference, that the crew called it Gibbons His Hole. Bylot was subsequently given sole charge of the Discovery and resumed the attack in March 1615. Before the ship left London one of the expedition’s sponsors, John Wolstenholme, came aboard to promise everyone triple wages if they discovered the Passage. But even with this inducement, Bylot managed only to chart the northern coast of the Bay. There was a channel to the north-west that looked hopeful, but his exceptionally capable pilot, a man named William Baffin, concluded that it was too shallow to be the seaway they sought. In Baffin’s opinion, the seas to the west of Greenland offered a better chance of success. Bylot took his advice, and in March 1616 sailed with him for Davis Strait.
Baffin was an indefatigable observer. As the Discovery went north into what would later be called Baffin Bay, he recorded the plants and animals they found, the nature of the Inuit, the manner in which they lived and how they constructed their kayaks. He noted, too, the strange way in which his compass contradicted the star sightings that gave him true north. At the top of Baffin Bay the needle pointed to the south-west, a deviation of 56° and ‘a thing almost incredible and matchless in the world beside’. Baffin and Bylot returned to London on 30 August 1616, having discovered at least three inlets that might be of interest: Smith Sound and Jones Sound to the north of Baffin Bay and Lancaster Sound to the west. They warned, however, that any future expeditions in this direction would have to battle an expanse of ice – the Middle Pack – that occupied the northern part of the bay and was extremely dangerous.
The warning was so severe that nobody bothered Baffin Bay for two centuries. Instead, they concentrated on Hudson Bay. In May 1631 two ships left England to explore the channel that Baffin had disparaged. The Charles was led by Luke Foxe, a colourful adventurer from London who had spent the last 25 years trying to obtain an Arctic command and had such a high opinion both of himself and his chances of success that he called himself ‘North-West’ Foxe. A strait-laced Bristol man, Captain Thomas James, commanded the Henrietta Maria. It had been suggested that they travel together, but the rivalry between England’s two largest commercial ports was too intense for such a display of cooperation. Accordingly, when they sailed in May 1631 (within a few days of each other) they departed from opposite sides of the country. In his journal, James described the equipment and supplies aboard the Henrietta Maria, dutifully complimenting the abilities of all the men aboard. Foxe’s account was not only more robust but gave an illuminating picture of what a Carolean expedition deemed necessary for a stay in the ice. ‘I was victualled compleatly for 18 Moneths,’ he wrote, ‘but whether the Baker, Brewer, Butcher, and others were Masters of their Arts, or profession, or no, I know not; but this I am sure of: I had excellent fat Beefe, strong Beere, good wheaten Breade, good Iceland Ling, Butter and Cheese of the best, admirable Aquae vitae, Pease, Oat-meale, Wheat-meale, Oyle, Spice, Sugar, Fruit and rice; with chyrurgerie, as Sirrups, lulips, condits, trechissis, antidotes, balsoms, gummes, unguents, implaisters, oyles, potions, suppositors, and purging Pils; and if I had wanted Instruments my Chirurgion had enough.’ Not everything was to his liking, however. Although he had chosen most of his crew, the master and mate had been foisted upon him. He was dismissive of both. The mate, whose name he never quite gathered, shrivelled into obscurity as either Yurin or Hurin. As for the master, Foxe didn’t even bother with his name, referring to him simply as ‘the most arrogant bull calf that ever went or came as Master and the most faintheartedest man’.
Foxe went through Hudson Strait and into the Bay, whose north coast he followed until he came to Southampton Island, which Bylot and Baffin had discovered in 1615. Here he found, not the shallow waters Baffin had mentioned, but a deep channel that he christened Sir Thomas Roe’s Welcome. He didn’t go far up it, instead sailing south to fill the gaps in Bylot’s map of Hudson Bay. As he went, he crammed his journal with overblown descriptions of the kind he hoped his readers might enjoy. The Northern Lights were ‘Pettiedancers’ and ‘most fearful to behold’. Of an Arctic dawn he wrote, ‘This morning Aurora blusht, as though shee had ushered her Master from some unchast lodging, and the ayre so silent as though all those handmaides had promised secrecy’. But now and then he vented his true feelings: of another dawn he wrote, ‘This fulsome ugly morning presented the foulest chilhe that the whole voyage brought forth.’ (Conversely, he also said that one July day was as warm as any to be had in England.)
‘North-West’ Foxe was becoming tired of the North-West Passage. It was not as easy as he had hoped, and the charting of Hudson Bay was boring. Entertainment, however, presented itself at the Bottom of the Bay (later christened James Bay), where Thomas James of Bristol was searching for an outlet, as Hudson had done. The Charles and the Henrietta Maria met at the end of August. Politely, James sent a lieutenant to ask Foxe to lunch. Foxe took the officer into his cabin and quizzed him remorselessly for several hours about James’s achievements – which weren’t many – before accepting the invitation. The ‘lunch’ started in the afternoon and continued until the following morning, James treating his guest ‘with variete of such cheere as his sea provisions could afford’. To Foxe, ‘This 17 houres was the worst spent of any time of my discoverie’. It wasn’t just that James was a bit prissy, nor that the Henrietta Maria leaked – ‘[it] threw in so much water as wee could not have wanted sause if we had had roast Mutton’ – but that the ship stank. No doubt the Charles stank too, but Foxe was particular when it came to a rival. The smell was so bad that he wondered ‘whether it were better for James’s company to be impounded amongst ice, where they might be kept from putrefaction by piercing air, or in the open sea to be kept sweet by being thus pickled’. Foxe’s irritation peaked when he saw that the Henrietta Maria was flying an English flag, as if it was a royal emissary. When James told him that he flew the flag because he carried letters from the King of England to the Emperor of Japan, Foxe retorted, ‘Keepe it up then, but you are out of the way to Iapon, for this is not it’.
They stayed together long enough to chart the promontory marking the north-western tip of Bottom of the Bay. James named it Cape Henrietta Maria after his ship. Foxe called it Wolstenholmes Ultimum Vale because ‘I do beleeve Sir John Wolstenholme will not lay out any monies in search of this Bay’. (James’s name stuck.) After this they parted company, James examining the Bottom of the Bay, while Foxe returned for another stab at Roe’s Welcome. The seas were clear, and he reached a latitude of 66° 47’ N, discovering a new channel (Foxe Channel) and a new bay (Foxe Basin). If he had gone further he would have discovered a strait that, had it been navigable, would have led in a roundabout way to the North-West Passage.* But he did not. He turned back at a
place he called, with suitable bravado, Foxe His Furthest. For all his 18 months’ supplies and the excellence of his beef, beer and bread, his men were already suffering from scurvy. He went home at once, and at the end of October was able to write: ‘The 31, blessed be Almighty God, I came into the Downes with all my men recovered and sound, not having lost one Man, nor Boy, nor any manner of Tackling, having beene forth neere 6 moneths, all Glory be to God.’ This was an exceptionally good record: it was very rare for any ship to return from the Arctic with its full complement. But lives were not what Foxe’s sponsors were interested in. Having failed to discover the Passage and returned sooner than expected, he was given a cool welcome. He received £160 14s 6d for his expenses, and for his time and trouble, nothing.
When Foxe reached his furthest north he announced that it would be a waste of money to spend a winter in the Arctic. Dutiful James had no such qualms. He had already decided to overwinter, and for the rest of the summer he doggedly explored the Bottom of the Bay. Although he did not know it, he was covering much the same ground as Hudson had done in 1611. And the events that followed were very similar to those that had befallen Hudson. The Henrietta Maria’s anchor slipped and the revolving capstan injured several people, one of whom, the gunner, had to have his leg amputated below the knee. Unable to find a sheltered cove, James, like Hudson, put his ship into the shallows – off Charlton Island. Hardly had he done so when on 19 November the gunner said that he was going to die and would like to spend the rest of his time drunk. With James’s permission he enjoyed three days of oblivion before expiring on the 22nd. They rowed a good distance from the ship before tipping his body into the sea. James was now becoming worried by the ferocity of Arctic conditions. The wine, oil, vinegar and every other liquid ‘was frozen as hard as a piece of wood, and we must cut it with a hatchet’. Most alarming were the conditions in which the gunner had died: despite being in the ship’s smallest, warmest cabin, with as many clothes as could be fitted on him and a pan of hot coals burning around the clock, it was so cold that ‘his plaister would freeze at his wound, and his bottle of Sacke at his head’.
Before winter set in for good they were hit by a storm that threw jagged clumps of ice at the ship, tearing off its rudder. Fearing that if he left the ship at anchor it would either be carried away or crushed, James took the drastic precaution of going below with the carpenter’s auger and drilling a hole in its hull. In this manner, he hoped, the ship would not only remain where it was but, as the water froze within, would be protected from the ice without. Lined along the shore, the crew watched the Henrietta Maria sink. James rowed back and gave them a dispiriting speech of encouragement: they should not be dismayed, he said, because ‘if it be our fortunes to end our dayes here, we are as neere heaven as in England; and we are much bound to God Almighty for giving us so large a time of repentance’.
Hudson may have been the first Englishman to survive a winter in the Arctic. James, however, was the first to describe what it was like. On Charlton Island they constructed a hut, 20 feet square, which they roofed with canvas, insulating the walls with stacks of firewood. It was still bitterly cold, ice forming within a yard of the fire. They had plenty of wood, but water was more of a problem. They were suspicious of melted snow, which they found ‘very unwholesome either to drinke or dresse our victualls. It made us so short-breathed that we were scarce able to speake.’ Instead they dug a well, whose ice they broke laboriously on a daily basis. In a surprisingly modern touch, James recognized that facial hair became clumped with ice and offered only an illusory protection against the cold. He refused to let the men grow beards or moustaches but had the surgeon shave them regularly.
Christmas found them well. They ‘solomnised [it] in the joyfullest fashion we could’. But the coming months were uncomfortable. Being incompetent hunters, they had not laid up a store of fresh meat and their diet consisted solely of flour and salt beef. Nor had they gathered enough firewood to fight the terrifying cold. ‘They must worke daily,’ James wrote, ‘and goe abroad to fetch wood and timber, notwithstanding that most of them had no shooes to put on. Their shooes, upon coming to the fire, out of the snow, were burnt and schorcht upon their feete.’ By February 1632 two-thirds of the crew were sick from either scurvy or frostbite. To illness was added anxiety. If the ice did not melt, and the Henrietta Maria remained where it was, how were they going to escape?
The carpenter asked – and the crew asked too – for permission to build a boat. James agreed. Throughout March, April and May the carpenter toiled away. As he did so, the supplies they had taken ashore in November began to run out. James had not expected the winter to last so long. On 9 May he led a party over the ice to chip at the Henrietta Maria’s frozen hold, uncovering five barrels of beef and pork, four of beer and one of cider. ‘It has layne under water all winter, yet we could not perceive that it was anything the worse,’ James recorded. But the barrels’ contents were of no use against scurvy. James cleared a patch of earth and sowed it with peas in the hope of growing some ‘greene thing to comfort us’, but the peas did not sprout and the men began to die. Among them was the carpenter, who had yet to complete their boat. On the same day they buried the carpenter, the gunner’s corpse bobbed up alongside the ship. James was astonished at the manner in which he was preserved – ‘as free from noysomeness as when he was first committed to the sea’ – and at the curious nature of his flesh, ‘which would slip up and downe upon his bones like a glove on a man’s hand’. He was laid in the soil of Charlton Island alongside the others.
By June the Henrietta Maria was still ice-bound, but the land had come to life. Patches of vegetation appeared, among them a plant that James called ‘vetch’ but which might have been scurvy grass. They fed on it avidly, twice a day gathering clumps which they boiled with oil and vinegar, crushed into their beer or just ate raw. The benefit soon showed: ‘For now our feeble sicke men, that could not for their lives stirre these two or three months, can indure the ayre and walke about the house; our other sicke men gather strength also, and it is wonderful to see how soon they were recovered.’ Their renewed strength, combined with the gradual disappearance of the ice, gave them hope that they might be able to salvage the Henrietta Maria. They plugged the holes, pumped it dry and, to their wonder, it floated. On 24 June they erected a cross bearing pictures of the King and Queen of England, then lit a celebratory beacon. The fire got out of control, engulfed their camp, spread across the island, and by 1 July had burned its way through 16 square miles of forest. James left, hurriedly, on the 2nd.
As he went, he stopped at a nearby island to gather fuel. A stone’s throw from the waterline he discovered the remains of a fireplace and two stakes set about 18 inches into the ground. The stakes seemed to have been driven in with the head of a hatchet, and when he uprooted them he found they had been sharpened by an iron blade. Clearly this was not the work of Indians or Inuit. ‘I could not conceive to what purpose they had been there set,’ James wrote. ‘This did augment my desire to speake with the Savages; for without doubt, they could have given notice of some Christians with whom they had some commerce.’ What he may have found was the 20-year-old campsite of Hudson’s marooned company.
Before going home James chose to complete his mission. He went up the west coast of Hudson Bay, poked his nose into Foxe Channel and sailed north of Southampton Island before retreating. On 26 August, with the sea freezing around the ship, he asked his crew what they wanted to do. Without hesitation they said that they very much wanted to go home. The Henrietta Maria docked at Bristol on 23 October 1632.
James became a hero, his journal being published in 1633 to great acclaim. But his winter in the Arctic had ruined his health. He spent two years fighting pirates in the Bristol Channel before dying on 4 May 1635. Foxe, who had not spent a winter in the ice, survived little longer. His own account, written in typically breezy style, came out in the year of James’s death and was widely ignored. He died soon after its publication.
Foxe and James had not discovered much, but between them they had demolished the myth of the North-West Passage – or at least that any navigable passage might be found through Hudson Bay. In James’s words, it would never be passed ‘without extraordinary dangers’. A century later Christopher Middleton caused a brief stir when he took the Furnace and Discovery through Roe’s Welcome, but all he found was a couple of inlets that led nowhere. It would be many decades before Britain reignited the question of the North-West Passage.
COLONIZING THE AMERICAN WILDERNESS
René La Salle (1669–87)
Less than 100 years after Columbus landed in the West Indies, northern Europe was firmly entrenched in the New World. In a surge of activity, men such as Walter Raleigh, Samuel de Champlain and Henry Hudson planted the flags of England, France and Holland along the coast of North America. Small bands of colonists followed, and by the mid-17th century they had established themselves on the eastern seaboard. Predominantly agricultural, with little in the way of centralized government, these settlements were more a statement of intent than a source of profit. Their wealth did not even begin to approach that of the Iberian colonies in South and Central America. To the west, however, lay a land of limitless promise. The French, from their territories along the St Lawrence River, were the first to exploit it.
Nouvelle France, as the first Canadian colony was called, was a rough and ready place. Theoretically under the jurisdiction of the French Crown, its royal overseer, or intendant, had little control over either the frontiersmen or the missionaries who probed constantly westwards. Its winters were harsh and its harvests unreliable. Nevertheless, it was the most profitable colony in North America. Indian trappers from the Great Lakes and beyond brought furs – predominantly beaver – that the traders of Nouvelle France purchased for a few trinkets, then sold at astronomical prices in Europe. Even after the intendant and his favourites had taken their percentages, it was still possible to make a decent living. All one had to do was put up with the rudimentary conditions. The allure of its open frontier drew a steady dribble of adventurers. Among them was René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, who landed at Montreal in 1667.
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