urnsoN 



HUDSON BAY COMPANY 



ending ill it iM.ld promontory, at whose f>4it lire the 

 wharves; its former West Indian trade and its 

 whale li-ln'i i>- have Itcen abandoned, lull it IIOH 

 still ;ui active river trade. Hudson has a line 

 'milt IIOUM-, a city hall, several foundries and blast- 

 furnaces, and manufactures of fire-engines, paper, 

 leather, Hour, &c. Pop. ( I'.MHI JI.VJH. 



Hudson. C,KO|{I;K, the 'Railway King,' was 

 horn near York in .March 1SOO. There he subse- 

 quently carried <>M biuineM a* a linen-draper. In- 

 heriting a fortune of 90,000 in 18'28, Hudson with- 

 drew from business, and began to interest himself 

 in local politics and in railway speculation. He 

 liei-ame the ruling spirit of the York and North 

 .Midland Railway Company; and his ventures and 

 schemes for amalgamating various railway com- 

 panies were attended with extraordinary success. 

 Hudson was elevated to the dictatorship of rail- 

 u.iv speculation. Kvcryt.hing he touched .turned 

 to gold. He Ixmght large estates, was three 

 times elected lord mayor of York, and was sent 

 to parliament hy the electors of Sunderland ( 1845). 

 But the railway mania of 1847-48 plunged him 

 into ruin. He was accused of having ' cooked ' 

 the accounts of companies with which he was con- 

 nected, and of having paid dividends out of capital. 

 Legal proceedings were instituted against him, and 

 his suddenly-acquired gains were almost entirely 

 swept away. The constituency of Sunderland, 

 however, continued to elect him as their repre- 

 sentative until March 1859. He afterwards lived 

 in comparatively narrow circumstances, and died 

 in London, December 14, 1871. 



Hudson* HKNRV, a distinguished navigator, 

 of whom we know nothing before April 1607, when 

 we find him starting, in a small vessel with ten 

 sailors, on his first unfortunate voyage for the 

 discovery of a north-east passage. In his second 

 voyage in 1608 he reached Nova Zembla. He 

 undertook a third voyage in 1609 from Amsterdam, 

 at the expense of the Dutch East India Company. 

 Giving up all hope of finding a north-east passage, 

 he sailed for Davis Strait, then steered southwards 

 in search of a passage, discovered the mouth of 

 the river which now bears his name, and sailed 

 up its waters for 150 miles. He sailed upon his 

 last voyage in April 1G10, in the Discoverie of 70 

 tons, and reached Greenland in June. Steering 

 westward, he discovered the strait now known as 

 Hudson Strait, and passed through it, and entered 

 the great bay which has received the name of 

 Hudson Bay. Although very insufficiently sup- 

 plied with provisions, he resolved to winter in these 

 desolate regions, in order to prosecute his dis- 

 coveries further in the following spring. The food 

 fell short, and the men, dissatisfied with Hudson's 

 determination to continue the voyage, mutinied, 

 and cast him adrift in a shallop, with eight others, 

 on Midsummer Day 161 1. The real ringleaders per- 

 ished miserably in a scuffle with savages, and the 

 survivors, after great suffering, reached England. 

 See George Asher's Henry Hudson, the Navigator 

 (Hakluyt Society, 1860). 



Hudson Bay, a gulf, or rather inland sea, in 

 the north-east of North America, is completely 

 landlocked except on the north, where (Southamp- 

 ton Island and Fox Channel lie between it and the 

 Arctic Ocean, and where Hudson Strait, running 

 500 miles south-east, connects it with the Atlantic. 

 Including its south-eastern extension, James's |;,iy 

 (q.v.), it measures alnmt 1000 miles in length and 

 600 in average width, and has an area of some 

 500,000 sq. m. The eastern shore, called the East 

 Main, is for the most part rocky, and is fenced with 

 several small islands ; the western shore, the ^ Vst 

 Main, is generally flat. This sea, the great drain- 

 age reservoir of the Canadian North-west Terri- 



tories, receives the precipitation from over an are* 



(.1 nearly .'{,000,000 Hq. in. < M the numeroUK rivers 

 which bring down thin water only two need be 

 mentioned tin- < 'hnrchill, whose deep and narrow 

 mouth forms the Ix-st huilx.ui on the shore* of 

 Hudson Bay, and the Nelson, of wlume total 

 com^e of UMI miles only 70 or 80 are navigable. 

 Hitherto the only Im-iiM-s- that hot* lieen to any 

 extent developed in this region has Ix-en tin- fur 

 trade of the Hudson Bay Company 'q.v.), though 

 fish oil has also Itt-en exported, nf late \- 

 however, a movement has been on f<x>t for opening 

 up a direct communication from England with Mani- 

 toba and the North-west of Canada by way of Hud- 

 son Bay and Strait. The scheme provides for a 

 railway from Winnipeg to Fort Nelson on the bay, 

 a distance of 650 miles, of which 40 mile- were con- 

 structed by the end of 1890. The chief objection 

 to the project is that, although the bay is quit < 

 to navigate, and is only covered with ice in winter 

 to a distance of about 10 miles from the shore, yet 

 the passage of Arctic drift-ice through Fox Channel 

 and Hudson Strait in early summer renders the suc- 

 cessful navigation of the latter waterway somewhat 

 uncertain. The strait can, however, be traversed 

 by vessels on an average for al>out three months 

 annually. This route would effect a saving of 775 

 miles as compared with the route by way of Mon- 

 treal, and of 1130 as compared with that by New 

 York. 



See Captain W. Coats' s Geography of Hudson's linn, 

 1727-51, edited by J. Barrow for the Hakluyt Society 

 (1852) ; Dr Kobert Bell in Proc. Roy. Geoff. Soe. ( 1881 ) ; 

 W. Shelford in National Review (1886) ; and C. R. Maik- 

 hain in Proc. Roy. Geoff. /Soc. (1888). 



Hudson Bay Company, a corporation formed 

 in 1670 by Prince Rupert and seventeen noblemen 

 and gentlemen for importing into Great Britain 

 furs and skins obtained by barter from the Indians 

 of North America. The company was invested wit h 

 the absolute proprietorship and the exclusive right 

 of traffic over an undefined territory, which, under 

 the name of Rupert's Land, comprised all the 

 regions discovered, or to be discovered, within the 

 entrance of Hudson Strait. This was taken as 

 meaning all lands that drained into Hudson Bay or 

 Hudson Strait. For more than a century, however, 

 the grantees confined themselves to the coast dis- 

 tricts. Down to 1713 they had also to contend 

 against the hostile acts of the French of Canada, 

 who destroyed their forts, ruined their goods, and 

 captured their ships. But after Canada passed from 

 the French to the British in 1763 adventurers from 

 the great lakes began to penetrate, in quest of 

 peltry, far up the Saskatchewan towards the Rocky 

 Mountains. And their enterprises, coming to be 

 prosecuted with more systematic energy, led in 

 1783 to the formation of'the North-west Fur Com- 

 pany of Montreal. After a period of stubborn 

 competition, the Hudson Bay Company coalesced 

 with its formidable opponent in 1821. The sphere 

 of their laliours was now practically coincident 

 with all British North America, U-twecn the 

 Pacific and Atlantic, and the Arctic Ocean and the 

 United States. In 1838 the Hudson I lay Company 

 again acquired the sole right of trading for itself 

 for a penod of twenty-one years ; on the expiry of 

 this concession the fur trade in British North 

 America was thrown open to the world. Finally, 

 in ls<i<), the company made a formal cession to the 

 British government of whatever territorial claims 

 remained, receiving an indemnity of 300,000 from 

 the Dominion of Canada, to which the whole 

 territories were forthwith annexed. It was, how- 

 ever, stipulated that the company should retain all 

 ite forte, with 50,000 acres and one-twentieth of all 

 the land lying within the 'fertile belt ' from the 

 Red- River to the Rocky Mountains. Besides Mill 



