Davis Inlet was named after John Davis, an Englishman in search of the North West Passage in 1586. A. B. Hunt and Company established a trading post at Davis Inlet in 1831, which the Hudson Bay Company bought in 1869 and the provincial government took over in 1942. Before a decline of the caribou in the Labrador interior in the early 1900s, the Naskapi Innu only came out to the coast to trade.