The world’s second-largest “bay” built a fur empire
Hudson Bay covers about 1,230,000 square kilometres of northeastern Canadian saltwater—politically all Nunavut even though its long shores also touch the provinces of Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec. Only the Bay of Bengal is a larger water body that still answers to “bay.”
Eastern Cree speakers call it Wînipekw or Wînipâkw, meaning muddy or brackish water, the same root behind Lake Winnipeg. It averages only about 100 metres deep, against 2,600 in the Bay of Bengal, and measures roughly 1,370 by 1,050 kilometres, with James Bay as its southern arm. Hudson Strait links it to the Atlantic side and Foxe Channel to the Arctic, and its drainage reaches some 3,861,400 square kilometres, even dipping into Minnesota and Montana. The IHO’s 2002 draft filed it under the Arctic Ocean, though other bodies group it with the Atlantic.
Henry Hudson entered aboard Discovery on 2 August 1610 while hunting a passage to Asia and charted much of the eastern shore. After a winter stuck in ice near James Bay, his crew mutinied on 22 June 1611 and cast him adrift in a small boat; he was never found. In 1668 the ship Nonsuch came back loaded with beaver pelts, and in 1670 the Crown chartered the Hudson’s Bay Company with a monopoly over Rupert’s Land. France fought the grant but gave up its claim in the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713.
Company posts such as York Factory and Prince of Wales Fort traded with Indigenous trappers for generations. The Deed of Surrender in 1870 passed roughly 3,900,000 square kilometres to Canada. Churchill opened as a wheat port in 1929, closed in 2016, and resumed grain shipments in September 2019 after a First Nations-led consortium bought it.
Churchill averages minus 6 °C a year, far colder than Stockholm at the same latitude. Ice covers the bay from mid-December to mid-June, though its extent is dropping about 19.5 percent per decade. Some 700 cubic kilometres of river water a year keep salinity low, which raises the freezing point. Western Hudson Bay supports about 54,473 belugas, and the Hudson Bay Lowlands form Canada’s largest continuous peatland, where Wapusk National Park shelters denning polar bears.
Source: Hudson Bay
