The west coast is devoid of islands, but lying off the east is a string known as the Sleepers, Ottawa, Nastapoka and Belcher groups. The maximum length of the bay is km and its greatest width km. The total area of the Hudson Bay drainage is about 3. The bay lies in a huge saucer-shaped basin, fringed by uplands of the Canadian Shield.
The basin was inundated by seawater after the retreat of glaciation some years ago. The bay is generally shallow, and the land is rising steadily at around 60 cm per years because of isostatic uplift, exposing more and more of the coast.
The surrounding Hudson Bay Lowland see Physiographic Regions is a low plain locked in permafrost and characterized by marshes, peat and innumerable ponds. Much of the hydroelectric potential of the area develops at the point where powerful rivers surge out of the Shield on to the lowlands. An almost unnatural feature of the east coast is the great, semicircular bight, centering on the Belcher Islands, which it has been suggested was caused by a stupendous meteor strike.
The west coast is generally without indentation, low and bleak up to Arviat, and increasingly broken and indented farther north, particularly at the great gashes of Chesterfield Inlet and Rankin Inlet.
The shores are mostly covered with brushes, aspen, willow and dwarf birch growing among moss, lichen and grass. Cliffs of ancient sedimentary rocks are found at points on the east coast. The climate of the region depends largely on the water surface. In January and February the bay is covered with pack ice, preventing any warming effect on the air, and temperatures are consequently very low.
The ice begins to melt in May and rapidly disappears in June, when cloudiness and fog increase. Although , it is a part of the open sea, the salt level of Hudson Bay is low because many rivers bring fresh water into the bay.
While the eastern coastline is rocky with many islands, the western coast is low and swampy. Hudson Bay is, geologically, the center of the Canadian Shield, an area of Canada that consists of old rock formations. The weight of the ice during the last Ice Age lowered the surface of the land. After the ice had melted , water filled the bay.
But just as such relations were starting to form, HBC traders, like other Europeans before them, introduced and advanced the spread of diseases such as smallpox and tuberculosis, to which Indigenous Peoples had no immunity. He notes that disease killed not just individuals but also cultures and sometimes even entire communities. In Saskatchewan, for instance, disease decimated the people of Basquia and Pegogamaw Cree communities.
Elders — those who held important positions within the community and carried traditional knowledge — were particularly susceptible to contamination. Still, the company depended on Indigenous hunters to bring them the furs they sold in Europe. This great fall is owing to our loss of Indians but what is worse, several of the Indians who brought the little we have got are since dead.
To optimize its own fur trade relations, the HBC looked to the French-Canadian traders who had preceded them for more than 50 years. There, they found men who were comfortable travelling to communities and familiarizing themselves with Indigenous cultures.
Long winters, supply shortages, starvation and swarms of mosquitoes. This translated into an explicit ban on intimacy between HBC men and Indigenous women. Enforcing the ban, however, proved difficult. With little control over what happened across the ocean, the company eventually relaxed its restrictions. By the end of the 18th century, the practice of HBC employees marrying Indigenous women was widespread. From to , he fathered five children with four different women, whom he often passed off to someone else, sometimes with detailed instructions.
Other men demonstrated respect for their wives and families. Her husband, Humphrey Marten, recorded her passing at a. Traders and officials relied on them to strengthen ties with male relatives who could provide furs and speak with trappers in Indigenous languages, not to mention cook, clean, care for their children and treat the furs they received.
Still, their labour was rarely rewarded by officials, whose attitudes toward Indigenous women became clear when their husband retired from the company or died. As a result, most men returned to Britain. But the company also banned employees from taking Indigenous wives or children with them. Officials adopted this policy in the wake of the tragic story of Chief Factor Robert Pilgrim and his Cree wife, Thu-a-Higon, who retired to London in with their son. Soon after their return, Pilgrim died.
In his will, he stipulated that his son should stay in England, while Thu-a-Higon was to return to her family in Churchill. While Thu-a-Higon likely agonized over the forced separation from her son, HBC officials agonized over the cost of sending her back and caring for the child. Attitudes toward Indigenous Peoples grew more disdainful by the mids, as HBC officials became more comfortable in the region and relied less on Indigenous knowledge.
As Van Kirk notes, the arrival of white women stratified fur trade society and ushered in disrepute of the very Indigenous customs HBC employees had depended on for so long.
Back in London, the fur trade was making some men — and a few women who held shares in the company — rich. As historian David Chan Smith has calculated, from through this translated into more than one million beaver pelts.
Things could have gone differently. And some Americans were hoping they would. By the mids, profits from the fur trade had dropped. The settler population of Canada and the United States was growing.
Industrialization was spreading. Many rivers, including the Churchill and Nelson, drain into the bay. Hudson Bay moderates the local climate; it is ice-free and open to navigation from mid-July to October. The bay was explored and named by Henry Hudson in his search for the Northwest Passage. The surrounding region was a rich source of furs, and France and England struggled for its possession until , when France ceded its claim by the Peace of Utrecht.
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