g's Straits to Melville Island,--a point upon which
few who study the geography of that region can have now a doubt; and
eminent men have long supposed it to be the case,[5] from various
phenomena, such as the shallow nature of the sea between the Mackenzie
River and Behring's Straits, and the non-appearance of heavy ice in
that direction--all indicating that a barrier lay northward of the
American continent. The gallant squadron, under Captains Collinson and
M'Clure, will, doubtless, solve this problem, and connect, either by a
continent or a chain of islands, the ruined _yourts_ of Cape Jakan with
the time-worn stone huts of Melville Island.

[5] The present talented hydrographer of the navy, Sir F.
Beaufort, foretold to the author, a year before it was
discovered, the existence of land north of Behring's Straits.

Situated as these places are, under the same degree of latitude, the
savage, guided by the length of his seasons and the periodical arrival
of bird and beast, would fearlessly progress along the north shore of
the great strait, which may be said to extend from Lancaster Sound to
the Straits of Behring. This progress was, doubtless, a work of
centuries, but gradual, constant, and imperative. The seal, the
rein-deer, and the whale, all desert or avoid places where man or beast
wages war on them whilst multiplying their species, and have to be
followed, as we find to be the case with our hunters, sealers, and
whalers of the present day.

As the northern Esquimaux travelled to the east, offshoots from the
main body no doubt struck to the southward. For instance, there is
every reason to believe Boothia to have been originally peopled from
the north. The natives seen there by Sir John Ross spoke of their
fathers having fished and lived in more northern lands. They described
the shores of North Somerset sufficiently to show that they knew that
it was only by rounding Cape Bunny, that Ross could carry his vessel
into that western sea, from whose waters an isthmus barred him: and
this knowledge, traditional as I believe it to have been, has since
been proved to be correct by those who wintered in Leopold Harbour
finding Esquimaux traces about that neighbourhood, and by the foot
journey of Sir James Ross, in 1848, round Cape Bunny towards the
Magnetic Pole.

In corroboration of my idea that these inhabitants of the Arctic zone
were once very numerous along the north shore of Barrow's Strait and