Erland Erlandson
Dano-Canadian explorer and fur trader
Erland Erlandson (c. 1790 – 1875) was a Danish carpenter and sailor who, after becoming a British prisoner of war during the Napoleonic Wars, joined the Hudson's Bay Company in British North America. Despite his poor English, his intelligence and hard work saw him promoted from carpenter to clerk to factor. Along with Nicol Finlayson, he crossed northern Quebec to establish the HBC's Ungava District, an ordeal fictionalized in R. M. Ballantyne's 1857 adventure novel Ungava. In 1834, misled by his Indigenous guides, he became the first known European to cross the Labrador Peninsula. He also established several outposts in the interior, including the successful Fort Nascopie, but, effectively barred from further promotion owing to his low and foreign birth, he eventually retired to a homestead in Canada West (present-day Ontario). Having never married, his large estate—usually credited by Canadian historians to two bank thefts—was mostly left to the Toronto General Hospital.
Life
Early life
Erlandson was born around 1790 in Copenhagen, Denmark. He and his father worked as carpenters in the Copenhagen dockyards, which—despite Denmark's nominal neutrality—were preëmptively attacked by the United Kingdom during the Second Battle of Copenhagen in 1807, the onset of the Gunboat and Anglo-Russian Wars. In December 1813, amid the War of the Sixth Coalition, Erlandson was captured by the Royal Navy at age 23 while working as a sailor in the Kattegat. He was held in a prison ship in Chatham, Kent.
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This entry incorporates text from “Erland Erlandson” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.