The Hudson's Bay Company's Activities: Forthcoming Publication of Documents by Hudson's Bay Record Society

Rich, E. E.

doi:10.2307/3634007

Cited by 3 publications

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“…All of which appeared to the sanguine gentleman mere child's-play. It appears now, by report of everyone employed on the Expedition that M. Bellot (the Frenchman) was the main-spring of the party, he alone being capable of taking the requisite astronomical observations (Rich 1953: 231–235).…”

Section: Searching For Franklinmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘The last duty of an officer’: Lieutenant de vaisseau Joseph-René Bellot, 1826–1853, in the Franklin Search

Barr¹,

Forestier-Blazart²,

Forestier-Blazart³

2013

Polar Record

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Lieutenant de vaisseau Joseph René Bellot, (1826–1853) participated, as second-in command, in Lady Franklin's private expedition in search of her missing husband on board Prince Albert, under the command of Captain William Kennedy in 1851–1852. Having wintered at Batty Bay on the east coast of Somerset Island, Kennedy and Bellot sledged south in the spring of 1852, to Bellot Strait, which they discovered. Having passed through the strait, they crossed Peel Sound, and continued west across Prince of Wales Island to Ommanney Bay, then back across Prince of Wales Island, north to Cape Walker, and back to Batty Bay via the north coast of Somerset Island and Prince Leopold Harbour. They discovered no trace of the missing Franklin expedition. In 1853 Bellot again volunteered to go to the Arctic, this time as supernumerary on board the supply ship Phoenix, Captain Edward Inglefield. From Beechey Island, Bellot volunteered to carry dispatches north up Wellington Channel to Captain Sir Edward Belcher who was in that vicinity. Having been driven out of sea on an ice-floe, Bellot disappeared during a gale, and it is assumed that he was blown off the ice into the water and was drowned. Memorials to Bellot may be found on Beechey Island, at Greenwich, England and at Rochefort, France, but probably the most enduring memorial to him is the name ‘Bellot Strait’, applied by Kennedy to the narrow strait between Somerset Island and Boothia Peninsula which represents an integral component of one variant of the northwest passage.

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Section: Searching For Franklinmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘The last duty of an officer’: Lieutenant de vaisseau Joseph-René Bellot, 1826–1853, in the Franklin Search

Barr¹,

Forestier-Blazart²,

Forestier-Blazart³

2013

Polar Record

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“…Trumpeter Swans were notoriously early in their spring migrations (Hearne in Tyrrell 1934) and that 20 April record probably referred to Trumpeters. About 100 years later, in 1783-85, the swan flight into James Bay had almost disappeared; John Thomas recorded daily in his journals (Rich and Johnson 1954) the numbers and species of fish and game brought to Moose Fort, and he never mentioned swans. Banko (1960), however, quoted C. P. Wilson that 18 swan skins from the Moose River and Eastmain posts were sold in London in 1828.…”

Section: Reports From Northern Ontariomentioning

confidence: 99%

The pre-settlement breeding distribution of Trumpeter, Cygnus buccinator, and Tundra swans, C. columbianus, in eastern Canada

Lumsden

1984

The Canadian Field-Naturalist

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Explorers and fur traders reported swans present and sometimes abundant on the St. Lawrence, the Lake St. Clair area, and the Hudson Bay Lowlands of Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec. Many of those records were probably of Trumpeter Swans (Cygnus buccinator), which have not bred in the east for more thana century. Their bones have been found ina number of archaeological sites, the easternmost being the Port au Choix site in Newfoundland. The second richest find of Trumpeter Swan bones in North America is at the Jesuit mission site at Ste. Marie-among-the-Hurons, Midland, Ontario. Tundra Swans (Cygnus columbianus) bred only north of the tree line. They were probably exterminated in the southern Hudson Bay region during the period of the fur trade, and recently have reoccupied parts of their range on the coasts of Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec. Possibly Tundra Swans originally bred on Ungava Bay, and perhaps locally in Labrador. Trumpeter Swans disappeared from much of their range well before English-speaking settlers reached the plains. It is likely that Indians could not kill many swans with bows and arrows, but once they got firearms they reduced or exterminated Trumpeter Swans over wide areas. Trumpeter Swans may have bred to the east of the currently accepted limits of their range in areas withan ice-free period exceeding 145-150 d, and where calcium levels in the soils and food plants were high, particularly where glacial lakes and post-glacial seas had inundated the land, and where limestone forms the bedrock.

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“…Buttressing the fact that McClintock's expedition had discovered this section of the passage is the fact that later in 1859 Sir Allen Young (McClintock's sailing master) had also explored the west side of the strait. Moreover McGoogan appears to have overlooked the fact that Rae's stated objective for his 1853–1854 expedition was a coastal survey, namely ‘the completion of the survey of the northern shores of America’ and not a search for a northwest passage (Rich 1953:222). By his own argument, therefore, McGoogan has made the case that Rae cannot even have discovered Rae Strait!…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Finally there is the matter of the perception of Rae Strait as being the ‘final link’ in a navigable northwest passage, as McGoogan argues on the basis of what Rae and his Cree companion Thomas Mustegan had seen of the ice in Rae Strait. In his letter to the HBC Committee in London on his findings, Rae reported that Rae Strait was ‘full of rough ice’ (Rich 1953: 281). In his Fatal passage McGoogan (2001:189) correctly relays this piece of information on one page, but on the next page he quite unwarrantedly interprets this as ‘young ice’.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Misinterpretation and obfuscation

Barr¹

2014

Polar Record

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The thrust of my note (Barr 2014), to which Ken McGoogan was responding (McGoogan 2014), was that in discovering Rae Strait in the spring of 1854 John Rae did not discover the final link in the northwest passage, since a substantial section of that particular variant of the passage some 240 km in length (namely Franklin Strait and Larsen Sound) lying further north, had not yet been discovered. McGoogan has wrongly concluded that I must therefore support the notion that Sir John Franklin discovered the passage. This is an unwarranted assumption. I do not subscribe to this belief; in this, at least McGoogan and I are in agreement. As David Buisseret, the editor of the The Oxford companion to world exploration has elegantly defined it, geographical discovery is ‘the process by which one or more people leave their society and venture to another part of the world [. . .] then return in order to explain what they have seen’ (Buisseret 2007, I: xxiii). Neither Franklin nor any of his officers and men returned.

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The Hudson's Bay Company's Activities: Forthcoming Publication of Documents by Hudson's Bay Record Society

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

‘The last duty of an officer’: Lieutenant de vaisseau Joseph-René Bellot, 1826–1853, in the Franklin Search

‘The last duty of an officer’: Lieutenant de vaisseau Joseph-René Bellot, 1826–1853, in the Franklin Search

The pre-settlement breeding distribution of Trumpeter, Cygnus buccinator, and Tundra swans, C. columbianus, in eastern Canada

Misinterpretation and obfuscation

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