Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 31.djvu/260

 and 1828?); for Malton in 1830; for North Nottinghamshire in 1835 and in 1837. The last seat he held from 1837 till his death, which took place in Lower Grosvenor Street, London, on 9 Feb. 1846. He was buried in Firbeck Church, Yorkshire, on 17 Feb. Knight married in 1828 Henrietta, third daughter of Anthony Hardolph Eyre of Grove, Nottinghamshire, but had no issue. By his will he directed that his Langold estate should be sold for the benefit of some friends. His other estates at Firbeck, Kirton, and Warsop were left to his widow for her life; the Firbeck estate and mansion were to go after her death to the ecclesiastical commissioners for charitable uses. Some manuscripts relating to Knight's tour in 1810–11 remained in the hands of his family. In parliament Knight was a fluent but infrequent speaker. He was a kind landlord, and on 19 Oct. 1841 was presented by his tenants with his portrait, painted at a cost of 250 guineas. He held the office of deputy-lieutenant of Nottinghamshire, and was a member of the commission for the advancement of the fine arts. Tom Moore (Diary, v. 222) relates that Lord Wellesley, who once found Gally Knight overcome with sea-sickness, applied to his case the Horatian lines:

 KNIGHT, JAMES (d. 1719?), arctic voyager, for many years an agent of the Hudson's Bay Company, appears to have been governor of Fort Albany in 1693. In 1714 he was appointed governor of the Nelson River settlement, and in 1717 or 1718 established Prince of Wales's fort at the mouth of Churchill River. From the friendly Indians he heard of a mine, which may possibly have been copper, or more probably pyrites, such as had formerly beguiled Frobisher, but which his fancy at once set down as gold. He hastened to England and urged the company to fit out an expedition to search for it. The company reluctantly equipped two vessels, which sailed in June 1719, with instructions to search for the Straits of Anian and to discover gold and other valuable commodities to the northward. Except so far as related to the conduct of the ships, the command was vested in Knight. Nothing further was heard of them, and it was at first supposed that they had found the fabled straits and were returning to England from the Pacific. But in 1722 a search expedition was sent out under the command of Captain John Scroggs. It met with no success, and the fate of Knight and his companions remained shrouded in mystery till in 1767 the ships' hulls, some of their guns and anchors, and other traces of the presence of Europeans were found at Marble Island by a whaling party. Further examination among the Eskimos elicited the facts that the ships had arrived late in the autumn, presumably of 1719, that in getting into the harbour one, or, more probably, both of them sustained serious damage, that the men built a house and sojourned there that winter and the next, suffering great hardships. At the beginning of the second winter the original fifty had dwindled to twenty, and at the end of that winter to five, all of whom died shortly after, in May or June 1721. As Knight is described as a very old man, verging on eighty, we may conjecture that he died among the first, that is in the end of 1719 or early months of 1720.

 KNIGHT, JOHN (d. 1606), mariner, apparently of Scottish birth, was in 1605 associated with two other Scots, Cunningham and Lyon, in command of a Danish expedition to the coast of Greenland, which sailed from Copenhagen on 2 May. On the 30th, in lat. 59° 50′, they sighted high land, which they called Cape Christian, but the ice prevented them from reaching it. On 12 June they sighted high land on the west coast of Greenland, and named Cape Anna after James I's queen, Cape Sophia after her mother, King Christian's Fjord, and Cunningham Fjord, in lat. 67° 10′. Some small islands off Cape Sophia were named Knight's Islands (Danish Gov. Chart, 1832). This marks the extent of their voyage, of which few particulars have been preserved. They returned to Copenhagen in August, and Knight, passing on to England, was in the next year employed by the East India merchants to discover the north-west passage. In the Hopewell of forty tons he sailed from Gravesend on 18 April 1606, and, leaving the Orkneys on 12 May, fell in with a large ice-field, and after a long passage made the coast of Labrador, in about lat. 57°, on 19 June. The ice was still very troublesome, and after pushing through it for a couple of days the Hopewell anchored. In a violent gale on