Three hundred twenty-five years ago—on Sept. 5, 1697—wooden warships from England and France waged a bitter, hours-long battle in Hudson Bay. Though long since forgotten, the clash marked the largest naval action ever fought off what today is far northeastern Canada.
What historian Peter C. Newman called “the greatest Arctic sea battle in North American history” pitted the French fourth-rate ship of the line Pélican, commanded by Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville, against English Capt. John Fletcher’s fourth-rate frigate HMS Hampshire and two armed merchant ships. The brutal fight epitomized the struggle between the rival European powers to control the newly discovered, largely unknown and potentially lucrative lands just south of the Arctic Circle and led to the largest transfer of territory in the New World to date.
Hudson Bay was named after English explorer Sir Henry Hudson, who first probed its reaches in 1610–11 at the behest of the Dutch East India Co., only to be set adrift by mutineers and left to an unknown fate. It is the second largest bay in the world (after the Bay of Bengal), with a surface area of some 470,000 square miles. If measured by shoreline, however, Hudson Bay is the world’s largest. Unlike many other large bodies of water, it is relatively shallow, with an average depth of only 330 feet.
Hydrographically an extension
