covering a
passage between Atlantic and Pacific north of 52 degrees. There were
even ingenious fellows with the letters of the Royal Society behind
their names, who affected to think that the great Athabasca Lake, which
Hearne had found, when he tramped inland from the Arctic and Coppermine
River, was a strait leading to the Pacific. Athabasca Lake might be
the imaginary strait of the Greek pilot, Juan de Fuca. To be sure, two
Hudson's Bay Company ships' crews--those under Knight and Barlow--had
been totally lost fifty years before Hearne's tramp inland in 1771,
trying to find that same mythical strait of Juan de Fuca westward of
Hudson Bay.

But so furious did public opinion wax over a Northwest Passage at the
very time poor Bering was dying in the North Pacific, that Captain
Middleton was sent to Hudson Bay in 1741-1742 to find a way to the
Pacific. And when Middleton failed to find water where the Creator had
placed land, Dobbs, the patron of the expedition and champion of a
Northwest Passage at once roused the public to send out two more
ships--the _Dobbs_ and _California_. Failure again! Theories never
yet made Fact, never so much as added a hair's weight to Fact! Ellis,
who was on board, affected to think that Chesterfield Inlet--a great
arm of the sea, {175} westward of Hudson Bay--might lead to the
Pacific. This supposition was promptly exploded by the Hudson's Bay
Fur Company sending Captain Christopher and Moses Norton, the local
governor of the company, up Chesterfield inlet for two hundred miles,
where they found, not the Pacific, but a narrow river. Then the hue
and cry of the learned theorists was--the Northwest Passage lay
northward of Hudson Bay. Hearne was sent tramping inland to find--not
sea, but land; and when he returned with the report of the great
Athabasca Lake of Mackenzie River region, the lake was actually seized
on as proof that there was a waterway to the Pacific. Then the
brilliant plan was conceived to send ships by both the Atlantic and the
Pacific to find this mythical passage from Europe to Asia.
Pickersgill, who had been on the Pacific, was to go out north of Hudson
Bay and work westward. To work eastward from the Pacific to the
Atlantic was chosen a man who had already proved there was no great
continental mass on the south, and that the world did not turn upside
down, and who was destined to prove there was no great open ocean on
the north, and still the world did not tu