Kinngait

Kinngait's high hills rose on Dorset Island off southwestern Baffin Island, in a country inhabited by Inuit descended from the Thule people. Their traditions remembered earlier inhabitants as the Tuniit. The Inuit place-name referred to the hills themselves, joining local geography with the history of the people who lived around them.

On 24 September 1631, the English navigator Luke Foxe gave the cape the name Dorset, honouring Edward Sackville, Earl of Dorset, one of his sponsors. Foxe was searching unsuccessfully for a Northwest Passage. His naming brought this Inuit coastal landmark into European maritime geography, centuries before the establishment of a permanent Hudson's Bay Company trading post.