Christopher Middleton FRS (c. 1690 – 12 February 1770) was a British navigator with the Hudson's Bay Company and Royal Navy officer.

[1] On 5 March 1741, Middleton was appointed to the command of HMS Furnace, a Royal Navy bomb vessel which was refitted at Deptford Dockyard and rigged as a three-masted ship.

In May, he left England on Furnace, accompanied by a smaller vessel, the purchased HMS Discovery, under the command of William Moor, and sailed to Hudson Bay in search of a Northwest Passage.

[2] He spent the winter at Fort Churchill, and then proceeded north into Roes Welcome Sound and discovered Wager Inlet, where he was iced in for three weeks.

Middleton returned to England in 1742, where he was presented with the Royal Society's Copley Medal, to whom he presented a paper entitled "The effects of cold; together with observations of the longitude, latitude, and declination of the magnetic needle, at Prince of Wales's fort, upon Churchill-River in Hudson's Bay, North America".