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In 1670 the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) had been founded as a commercial
enterprise to obtain furs with trading rights over the vast region
named Rupert's Land, but the Company was in its early years unwilling
to undertake costly and dangerous discovery ventures. Nevertheless
it was Company veteran and former governor, James Knight, who in
his seventies in 1719 made the next attempt to find a passage to
the East. Knight's expedition in the Albany and Discovery sailed
from Gravesend accompanied by two HBC supply ships, but after the
latter left for their Company posts in Hudson Bay, Knight's two ships
vanished into oblivion.
However, the idea that there was a passage did not vanish, and
throughout the 18th century there were a number of "voyages
of delusion" (so described by Glyn Williams in his Voyages
of delusion: the Northwest Passage in the Age of Reason, 2002
– BL: YC.2002.a.7400) in search of one. Among these were the
voyages of Christopher Middleton and of William Moor and Frances
Smith. The instigator of both of these expeditions was the indefatigable
Irish MP Arthur Dobbs who was one of the main publicists for the
Northwest Passage. Dobbs fell out with Middleton after the latter
failed to find a passage and a pamphlet war between the two ensued.
Moor and Smith fell out with each other and were questioned by a
Parliamentary Committee on their return home. Despite these setbacks
Dobbs continued to believe in the existence of a passage until his
death.
Other expeditions in the 18th century seemed to prove that there
was no such passage through the continent despite the publicists
and speculative geographers. Samuel Hearne was chosen by the HBC
to search for a western passage across the barren lands of northern
Canada. He travelled in the 1770s along the Coppermine River to
the Arctic Ocean. His glimpse from the Coppermine of a possible
ice-free sea would revive hopes for a passage, and four years after
his return a new attempt would be made by way of the Pacific. In
July 1776, James Cook, the greatest navigator of the age, began
his third circumnavigation with the intention of searching for the
Northwest Passage. He reached the Pacific coast in 1778 and sailed
north to Alaska and then through Bering Strait only to find his
way blocked by a great mass of ice. Cook turned back to meet his
tragic death in Hawaii on 14 February 1779 although his ships under
the command of Charles Clerke resumed the fruitless Arctic search
until Clerke in turn died of consumption.
Cook
had discovered a river (Cook Inlet) on his voyage that fur trader
Peter Pond believed was the mouth of a large river flowing
westward
from the Great Slave Lake. In 1789 Alexander Mackenzie set out
from Fort Chipewyan on Lake Athabasca to test Pond's theory.
But he found
that the river (the Mackenzie) led to the Arctic not the Pacific.
George Vancouver, who was on Cook's second and third expeditions,
completed Cook's work on the Northwest coast, exploring it in
detail over three summers in the 1790s. In his journal, which he
published
in 1798, he claimed he had removed "every doubt" about
the existence of a passage "between the North Pacific, and
the interior of the American continent, within the limit of our
researches".
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