The Hunt for Yellow Mettle: James Knight, the hbc , and the Northwest Passage of the Early Eighteenth Century

In 1719, James Knight set sail for the Northwest Passage in the ships Albany and Discovery, hoping to access distant gold deposits on the American, not Asian, continent. He died in the North, somewhere in the vicinity of Marble Island, his goals unfulfilled. This article does not continue the investigation into the circumstances of his death but, instead, seeks to clarify the contradictory and ambiguous body of scholarship that has been written about his life. Through a fresh examination of Knight’s journals and documents produced by the Hudson’s Bay Company (hbc) Committee in London, this article asserts that Knight was motivated in his actions by an explicit desire to prop up the then ailing business of the hbc and that he had the full backing of his superiors in pursuing such a course. It also proposes that, by reframing Knight not as an eccentric outsider but, rather, as an agent enacting the will of a large, chartered corporation, his goals and assumptions can be used as an appropriate point of comparison to those of other significant engagements with the Northwest Passage. The ideologies underpinning the Knight expedition, in contrast to those of later periods, help prove that the Northwest Passage of the early eighteenth century was yet to acquire its more abstract connotations and was instead viewed principally as a simple commercial tool.