Hudson Bay

In the autumn of 1534, Frenchman Jacques Cartier reached what later became Quebec and Montreal, the first European to do so. Then in 1576 the English began to take an interest. Martin Frobisher went further north looking for a path to Asia, followed by John Davis; but both men missed a region tucked into Canada’s northern heart, which afterwards emerged as the foundation of her prosperity.

IT was not until 1602 that the channel later known as Hudson Strait was discovered by George Weymouth [?1585-?1612], an English mariner. He apparently had no knowledge of the great inland sea to which the way was opened, having proceeded only about one hundred leagues up the strait.* A few years later Weymouth’s log books fell into the hands of Henry Hudson [?1565-?1611], who had already won renown in the search for a North-East Passage* to Asia and, in the employ of the Dutch East India Company, had explored the river now known as the Hudson.* He examined carefully the records of Weymouth’s discovery and was much impressed with the possibility that the strait might prove to be the long-sought North-West Passage.*

In the spring of 1610 Hudson set out in Weymouth’s boat, the Discovery, a small vessel of only fifty-five tons, with a crew of twenty-three men. With the greatest difficulty he got his craft through the ice which blocked the strait during the early summer. There, before his gaze, opened a vast expanse of clear water southward and westward as far as eye could see.

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* A league is three miles, and a hundred leagues is three hundred miles, whether we are talking about a statute mile (5280 ft) or the slightly longer nautical mile (6076 ft). The Hudson Strait, measuring from Killiniq Island northwest to Nottingham Island, stretches to some 480 miles (or about 420 sea miles) in all.

* A route east passing around the top of Norway, across northern Russia, and down into the Pacific Ocean through the Bering Strait between Russia and Alaska. Early navigators such as Hudson were defeated by the ice and storms that prevailed most of the year, but thanks to the current warming phase, new shipping technology and active assistance from Russia’s Northern Sea Route Administration, the Northeast Passage is increasingly navigable for merchant ships of all nations.

* The Hudson River is the waterway on which the city of New York now stands. Giovanni da Verrazano (1485-1528) of Florence visited the river’s estuary in 1524, but Henry Hudson went some 150 miles upstream as far as the site of what is now Albany.

* A route west from the Atlantic Ocean (specifically the Labrador Sea west of Greenland) across to the Arctic Ocean and thence down through the Bering Strait between Alaska and Russia to the Pacific Ocean on the western side of North America. Sixteenth-century explorers hoped that such a path existed but they had no way of knowing whether it did until they had successfully navigated and charted it — a feat not achieved until 1906, owing to the almost year-round ice and the narrow, intricate waterways.

Précis

Variations: 1.increase the length of this precis to exactly 65 words. 2.reduce the length of this precis to exactly 55 words. 3.introduce one of the following words into the precis: about, although, because, if, may, not, unless, whereas.

Précis

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