Hudson Bay
Hudson Bay, which washes off the northeastern shores of Canada, is part of the Arctic Ocean. The region is dominated by a cold Arctic climate, and for most of the year ice cover prevents navigation, but despite the harsh weather conditions, extreme tourism has developed on the shores of Hudson Bay. Travelers come here to visit the wild tundra, watch polar whales, see polar bears, and marvel at the northern lights.
Video: Hudson Bay
Contents- Highlights
- History of Hudson Bay
- Geography
- Fauna
- Climate and weather
Interesting places near Hudson Bay - Shopping
- Local food
- Where to stay
- Transportation
- How to get there
Highlights
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Getting to the shores of the bay is not easy, because there are no highways here. The only railway line is laid in the harbor of the city of Churchill, built on the western shore of Hudson Bay. There are several hotels and a small airport. All trips to the region’s national parks, home to polar bears and reindeer, begin from Churchill.
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Local tour bureaus operating at the hotels organize boat trips to whale and seal habitats, offer helicopter tours, extreme off-road trips on snowy tundra. Churchill is also home to the regional visitor center for Canada’s national parks, where you can join group tours to surrounding reserves or buy an individual tour.
.History of Hudson Bay
During the last ice age, much of Hudson Bay and the surrounding land was ice bound. About 15,000 to 12,000 years ago, when the North American ice sheet had mostly melted away, large animals such as caribou, musk oxen, and bears migrated to the coastal tundra. Following the prey were the tribes of Arctic peoples who hunted.
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On the northern shores of the bay, within what is now Nunavut, settled peoples known in archaeology as the Dorset culture. These people, closely related to the Eskimos, lived in houses made of stone and blocks of drifted snow that formed small villages. On land they hunted with spears, bows and arrows, and at sea they harvested seals with bone harpoons.
.About 1000 years ago, the Thule people, ancestors of the modern Inuit, came to the shores of Hudson Bay from the Great Lakes region. They pushed the Dorset culture into the northernmost areas of the bay. In Inuit folklore, these people are described as the Sivullirmiut (first inhabitants). They were good-natured giants who did not want to engage in conflict. It is known that the last of them moved to remote islands in the northern waters of Hudson Bay and lived in seclusion for several centuries, avoiding contact with the outside world.
In the early 20th century, a ship of Canadian whalers approached Coates Island, inhabited by the primitive inhabitants of this Arctic region. Among its crew that came ashore were sailors who had the flu. The locals had no immunity to the virus, and they all became ill and died. The epidemic spread to neighboring islands, where no one survived. The ancient language spoken by the first inhabitants of Hudson Bay disappeared along with the people who had gone into the next world.
.In the language of the Inuit, the modern inhabitants of the coast, the bay was anciently called Wi-nipâkw (“Wi-nipâk”), meaning “muddy salt water”. Interestingly, a vast taiga lake and the large Canadian city of Winnipeg, the capital of the province of Manitoba, located southwest of the shores of Hudson Bay, are named by this slightly distorted word.
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In the early 17th century, the British East India Company was actively seeking new maritime trade routes to India and China, as well as to the spice islands in Indonesia. The negociants turned to the famed English navigator Henry Hudson, and commissioned him to find a western route from the Atlantic to the Pacific through Arctic waters in the upper latitudes of North America.
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The captain made several voyages to the shores of the New World. In the fall of 1610, his two-masted sailing ship Discovery, leaving Greenland on the starboard side and the Labrador Peninsula on the port side, crossed the Labrador Sea and entered a wide strait. After sailing about 800 kilometers further northwest, the ship stopped in the ice of a huge gulf.
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With the onset of the polar summer of 1611, the ice slowly melted, and Hudson was determined to continue exploring the bay. But some of the exhausted crew revolted, demanding a return home. The captain and a few loyal sailors were forcibly put into a lifeboat, supplied with weapons and food, and the sailing ship set a return course.
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Of the 13 emaciated mutineers who were sick with scurvy, only 8 returned to England. The mutinous sailors were arrested and tried, but they escaped punishment. Seafarers who had been to the New World were too valuable a source of information in those days. They were kept alive in return for detailed descriptions of the routes and conditions of sailing above the Arctic Circle.
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In 1612, the navigator Sir Thomas Button set out to rescue Henry Hudson, but the search was futile. The expedition found not the slightest trace of any camp, nor any wreckage of the lifeboat. And so, the story of Arctic discovery was added to yet another dramatic page.
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Both the strait and the bay were later well studied and named after the discoverer, Henry Hudson. By the way, his name lives on in the name of the Hudson River, discovered by the navigator back in 1609. Now at the mouth of the river stands one of the largest cities in the world – New York.
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In the XVII century on the shores of Hudson Bay appeared military forts and factories – centers of trade in quality furs of Arctic foxes, foxes, black beavers, skins of elk and deer, highly valued in Europe. Trappers (trap) were engaged in fur extraction. They were skillful trackers and hunters, whose adventures are vividly described in Fenimore Cooper’s novels and Jules Verne’s book “The Land of Furs”. A beaver pelt became the equivalent of local currency. A few pelts could buy a gun, a boat, a barrel of gunpowder. In European countries beaver hats of all styles, up to high aristocratic cylinders, military triangles and kivers became prestigious. Soon the entire fur trade was monopolized by the powerful Hudson’s Bay Company. This corporation still exists today and is among the oldest trading firms in the world. Today, the company owns a chain of large department stores and supermarkets in Canada.
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Geography
Hudson Bay is part of the Arctic Ocean (in the Western geographical tradition, the Arctic Ocean), to which it is connected by a mass of narrow straits between hundreds of rocky islands in its northern part. To the east, the Hudson Strait leads to the bay, which enters the North Atlantic.
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The bay is a vast shallow body of water deeply cut into the land in northeastern Canada. It is 1,370 kilometers long from north to south and 1,050 kilometers long from west to east. It has a water surface area of 1,230,000 km², three times the area of the Baltic Sea.
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The winding coastline of Hudson Bay is cut by bays and capes. There are many islands in the water area. Most of these archipelagos are located in the southeastern part of the bay. The average depth of the water body is not great – 100 meters. Several depressions up to 270 m deep are found on the bottom.
To the eastern shores of Hudson Bay goes the province of Quebec, to the southern water area adjoins the province of Ontario. The western shore is divided between the province of Manitoba and the territory of Nunavut, which means “our land” in the Inuit language. In 1999, the Canadian Parliament set aside this vast region for Arctic Indigenous peoples to live in with rights of independent self-government.
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The vast territory of Nunavut encompasses the entire north shore of Hudson Bay, as well as all the islands in its waters, and extends far into the Arctic. It is in this maze that the Northwest Passage, so long sought by mariners, is located. The province has an area of 2,038,722 km², comparable to the size of Mexico or Saudi Arabia. However, according to the 2022 census, only 40,586 people live here. There are no highways or railroads. Locals travel by snowmobile or traditional polar transportation – dog sleds. The administrative center of the region is the city of Iqaluit, where there is a small airport providing air communication with Ottawa. Iqaluit was founded by English navigators in the middle of the 17th century as a base camp on the shore of a convenient bay that protected small sailing ships from bad weather. However, modern ocean-going ships can not approach the moorings of the shallow harbor, delivered cargo has to be transported by boat. Nearby Iqaluit is home to a national wildlife park and two biosphere reserves.
The sparsely populated shores of Hudson Bay are home to no more than a dozen settlements ranging from 430 to 2,650 residents. These settlements are often separated by dozens or even hundreds of kilometers of tundra plains crisscrossed by rivers and dotted with lakes.
.On the western shore of the bay, in the province of Manitoba, is the port town of Churchill, located near the mouth of the river of the same name. The river and township are named after John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, a prominent English general of the 17th and 18th centuries and an ancestor of Winston Churchill. Today, Port Churchill is the region’s most visited tourist destination by travelers.
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The southeastern shore is marked by a strange anomaly called the “Arch of Nastapoka”. It is a geometrically regular arc clearly visible from space, as if drawn with a giant circular. It is assumed that the arc – part of a meteorite crater with a diameter of about 456 kilometers. Approximately in the center of the alleged circle is the archipelago of the Belcher Islands. Some geologists argue that the anomaly is of tectonic origin.
.140 km southeast of Nastapoka, within Tursujuk National Park, are two Clearwater Lakes, whose meteoric origin is undisputed. The lakes are lined by a pair of craters 36 and 26 kilometers in diameter and up to 178 meters deep. Probably, a double asteroid fell here and split in the Earth’s atmosphere. The catastrophe occurred 470 million years ago..
Fauna
The cold waters of Hudson Bay reveal a wide variety of ichthyofauna. There are polar flounder, capelin, char and cod, halibut and salmon, and predatory killer whales. In the waves one can see many marine mammals: whales, dolphins, ringed seals and harp seals. The bay is home to about 60,000 beluga whales.
The coastal tundra has been home to polar bears, musk oxen, and caribou since ancient times. In the past, fur-bearing animals were massacred here, but hunting for them has long been banned, and animal populations are slowly recovering.
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In order to preserve the biodiversity of the waters and limit the impact on indigenous cultures, the Canadian government has declared Hudson Bay a “Mare clausum”, i.e. an area closed to free entry of foreign ships. The ban applies primarily to fishing and whaling vessels.
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Climate and weather
Most of Hudson Bay is located in the subarctic climate belt. To the south of the water area is wedge-shaped Jarvis Bay, which extends to the temperate boundary where the climate is slightly milder.
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Cool summers in the region are damp and foggy, with the warmest month being July, when the air warms up to +10 °C.
.Due to the runoff of numerous rivers, the salinity of sea water in the Gulf is reduced, which contributes to its rapid freezing in winter. Ice flow, blocking the entrance to the bay through the Hudson Strait, appears in October and lasts until June. After the pack ice melts, a short period of navigation begins in the waters of Hudson Bay, although ships avoid ice floes still drifting through the waters until August. In the summer, ocean-going cargo ships occasionally call at Port Churchill, while Canadian Coast Guard cutters cut channels in the ice and supply food and supplies to coastal villages.
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In winter, gale force winds rage over the frozen bay. The speed of air masses reaches 110-150 km/h, and the air cools to -32…-28 ° C.
.The weather station of the seaport in Churchill recorded record-breaking air temperatures. In February 1979, the mercury columns dropped to -45.4 °C, and in August 1991, +36.9 °C was recorded.
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Northern lights are not uncommon over Hudson Bay. They occur in the skies frequently, for 300 nights a year. This epic spectacle is especially vivid during winter, from January through March.
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Interesting places near Hudson Bay
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Another exciting adventure is a boat tour of Hudson Bay at the height of the beluga whale migration (June-July), swimming to the mouth of the Churchill River. These 5-meter-long animals are unusually curious. Beluga whales have long been unafraid of people and swim right up to the sides of boats, look at passengers with shiny black eyes and willingly allow themselves to be photographed.
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You should definitely visit the local history museum “Itsanitak”, located in the center of the village. Its exposition tells about the history, culture and art of the indigenous Inuit people. There are archeological finds, carved products from walrus tusks, national outfits, samples of ancient weapons, wooden pies of natives and other artifacts. The museum is open from 1:00 to 4:30 p.m., the entrance fee is symbolic.
.On the seashore a couple of kilometers west of Churchill lies the wreckage of a Curtis C-46 twin-engine transport plane built back in World War II. The plane, nicknamed “Miss Piggy”, crashed after taking off from the local airfield on November 13, 1979. Engine failure forced the pilots to make an emergency landing right on the coastal boulders. Fortunately, none of the people on board were seriously injured, and the fuselage was left lying around the town as a local landmark..
Forty-five kilometers south of Churchill is Wapusk National Park. In the Aboriginal language this word means polar bear. You can get here only by all-terrain vehicle or helicopter, in summer – by boat, or chartered seaplane. However, there are few tourists here. The park administration limits crowded excursions, as visitors trample fragile tundra mosses and lichens. The properties of frozen ground are such that over time the trails turn into ditches and then into gullies. Even faster erosion affects the ruts left by the wheels of off-road vehicles. The best season to visit the park is winter, when the ground is covered with snow.
The park spreads along the Hudson Bay coast over 11,475 km². The floodplains are home to a large population of polar bears, where the females produce cubs. Travelers can see vast tundra, peat bogs lying above the permafrost layer, long moraines and streams left by ancient glaciers. It is one of the wildest primitive landscapes of the Canadian North. The park is home to reindeer, wolves, and many birds nesting in the park. Among them are Arctic owls and loons, Canada geese, sandpipers, and peregrine falcons. In 2012, rangers spotted seven brown grizzly bears wandering into the park from the taiga forests that lie to the southwest.
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In the spring, the exotic Hudson Bay Quest dog sled races are held between the communities of Gillam and Churchill. The sleds are equipped with satellite trackers and fans follow the race online. The 354-kilometer route runs through the tundra, crossing through Wapusk National Park.
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There are hurricane winds on the track, frost reaches -40 ° C.
. Part of the track is laid along the line of the Hudson Bay Railroad. The competition lasts 36-48 hours, but if weather conditions worsen, we have to put up tents and wait out a snowstorm. The mushers carry food supplies, food for 10 dogs of a standard sled and all necessary equipment in their sleds. There are checkpoints along the route with teams of rangers, doctors and veterinarians ensuring the safety of the riders. Here participants can rest.Tourists can also ride in a sled pulled by dogs. The hotel administrator will help arrange such a ride with one of the owners of sleds. These vehicles are usually owned by Aboriginal people living in the city.
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Shopping
As a memento of the trip, tourists often buy a miniature symbolic inuksuk made of sea pebbles or slate. The walls of the living room will decorate the panel with images of Arctic landscapes (from 110 $). Attract attention cute statuettes carved from wood and soft soapstone (from $ 27), dolls in national dress, sewn from leather and fur (from $ 65).
.When traveling on the tundra very useful parka – a warm jacket made of reindeer skin with a fur hood (from 247 to 675 $), will not hurt fur mittens with embroidered pattern. For philatelists, there are limited edition sets of collectible Inuit-themed postage stamps ($6.43 per set).
.Local cuisine
Traditional Canadian cuisine evolved from the culinary preferences of the indigenous peoples of North America using seasonal ingredients (river and saltwater fish, venison, mushrooms, berries), as well as immigrants from Europe, mainly Britain and France.
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On the basis of ground pansawan prepare a tasty pemmican. Smoked meat is fried on lard with onions and potato slices. The special flavor of the dish is given by cranberry, aronia, currant berries.
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In Churchill, almost all cafes and restaurants are located in hotels or motels. Local culinary establishments compete in the best preparation of the national dishes. The atmospheric Lazy Bear Cafe, for example, is worth a visit. Here you can try stew from moose breast under maple sauce, various fish specialties, pickled mushrooms, desserts. The cost of main dishes of Canadian cuisine is $9-24. There is a menu for vegetarians. Alcohol is not served here.
.Since almost all products are delivered to the city from afar, prices in local restaurants are quite high. Dinner for two will cost about $100-120$.
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Where to stay
Two dozen cozy hotels and small guesthouses await tourists in Churchill. The counters offer sightseeing tours of the surrounding tundra, there are also ski and snowshoe rentals, warm waterproof clothing and shoes. In hotels you can rent all-terrain vehicles, kayaks, motor boats. Rooms are well heated, bathrooms are provided with hot water. Despite the remoteness from the centers of civilization, the Internet works steadily in the city. In the rooms of many hotels there are kitchenettes, refrigerators. But the TV is often located only in the common lounge, where the chairs for spectators are arranged.
One of the best, but also the most expensive hotels in the city is Bear Country Inn. The room rate is $245 per night. In the middle price category – rooms in the Churchill Hotel & Guesthouse motel, which has its own restaurant, snowmobile park. The price range is $129-131, breakfast included.
.Near the train station is the Iceberg Inn, where you can stay for $148-181. Cheaper rooms are offered by the Beluga Beach House. A night’s stay here will cost $98.
.Transportation
The only transportation hub on the shores of Hudson Bay is the port city of Churchill, located 1000 km north of Winnipeg, the provincial capital of Manitoba. There is a regional airfield in the vicinity of Churchill, a railroad line to the seaport, which runs freight and passenger trains, and cargo ships arrive at the harbor in the summer. There are no highways in the region: the construction of highways is hindered by permafrost, which invariably destroys the roadbed, as well as an untold number of rivers over which bridges need to be built.
In summer, locals navigate the bay in canoes and motorboats; in winter, they drive airboats and off-road vehicles across the snowy ice. When the waters of Hudson Bay are free of ice, passenger seaplanes appear at the Port of Churchill.
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For group excursions to the tundra realm of polar bears, there is a special transportation – a “tundra buggy” bus with wide, large-diameter wheels. The spacious interior of the tourist all-terrain vehicle is raised high above the chassis, with an open viewing platform at the back, from where it is quite safe to view and photograph wild animals.
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Wealthy tourists rent sightseeing helicopters. A 60-minute flight over the protected tundra can be arranged at the Hudson Bay Helicopters office, located in Churchill.
.How to get there
It is possible to travel to the shores of Hudson Bay by rail. Hudson Bay Rail trains run from Winnipeg to Churchill. Travel time is 44 hours and 55 minutes, with tickets starting at 254 Canadian dollars ($187).
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