Man Proposes: Imaginary Northwest Passages and the British Fur Trade ...

• Main Author: Newham, Douglas
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Université d'Ottawa | University of Ottawa 2024
• Subjects: Northwest Passage; Arctic; Fur trade; HBC; Intellectual History; Cultural History; George Simpson; Samuel Hearne; Exploration; Nineteenth Century; Eighteenth Century; Britain; Canada; Northwest passage
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.20381/ruor-30479; https://ruor.uottawa.ca/handle/10393/46456

This thesis proposes that the Northwest Passage is better understood as a dynamic, socially constructed cultural artefact than it is as a static fact of geography. As an object of the imagination, the meaning of the Passage naturally changed over time as those who did the imagining also changed. The ways in which the Passage was understood in public conversations and speculations, and the ways in which its explorers pictured their task and conducted themselves, therefore, changed dramatically over time. Furthermore, it argues that the study of these changes can be used to help illustrate certain changes and movements that took place within the cultures that sought after the Passage. To pursue such a study, this thesis refers to a number of case studies from the history of the British fur trade during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries - most often with reference to the Hudson's Bay Company, but also to a small number of other outfits. Fur traders launched a plethora of their own expeditions, interacted ...