The King of Baffin Land

Terry A. Crowley is an associate professor of history at the University
of Guelph, and the author of Agnes Macphail and the Politics of
Equality.

By the first half of the 20th century, there were few physical frontiers
for white men to conquer other than the northern reaches of Canada.
Between 1909 and 1940, Hudson’s Bay Company factor and fur trade
commissioner W. Ralph Parsons pushed the extension of the fur trade into
the eastern Arctic and Hudson Bay. This biography portrays Parsons as a
decent, hardworking, honest, and God-fearing soul who, although not
insensitive to Native peoples, was intent on building a small empire of
more than two dozen new trading posts in the North. His goal fulfilled,
Parsons returned home with a handsome pension that was to give him a
very comfortable retirement.

More hagiography than biography, this book presents too many repetitive
reports about Ralph Parsons’s leadership and too much family history.
There is inadequate attention to the economic

and social changes that the eastern Arctic Inuit underwent as the fur
trade and Christianity made inroads into this remote part of Canada.