Science and reality: Arthur Dobbs and the eighteenth-century geography of Rupert's Land

In 1670, the Hudson's Bay Company was granted proprietary rights to Rupert's Land, a vaguely defined territory that came to be equated with the drainage basin of Hudson Bay. This paper is concerned with the geography of these lands that developed in the minds of Englishmen in the course of the eighteenth century. Since only slight and fragmentary information was available in England about these territories, there was created at this time a hypothetical physical geography of the Company's lands. This was based largely on the opinions of Arthur Dobbs, whose book in 1744 was the first devoted to the Company and its territories. Dobb's views were not opposed by the Hudson's Bay Company. Indeed, they were well grounded in the scientific thinking of the time, so that what we now regard as having been speculative and grossly exaggerated, gained acceptance in England as geographical reality in the latter half of the eighteenth century.