James Knight (c. 1640 – c. 1721) was an English director of the Hudson's Bay Company and an explorer who disappeared on an expedition to find the Northwest Passage.
The long wars of the Grand Alliance and the Spanish Succession between England and France had spread to North America and battered the Company financially and logistically.
Four of the Company's five trading posts were lost to the French; Knight led an expedition in 1693 that successfully recaptured Fort Albany, the only one retained by the English.
Knight was determined to find the Northwest Passage, a then-hypothetical route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through the Canadian North.
On 20 November 1765, "two Inuit boys informed the commander at Fort Churchill, Moses Norton, that their Elders had told them a story about two ships having been wrecked on Marble Island many years ago.