I

THE GREAT ELIZABETHAN NAVIGATORS

The map of Canada offers to the eye and to the imagination a vast
country more than three thousand miles in width. Its eastern face
presents a broken outline to the wild surges of the Atlantic. Its
western coast commands from majestic heights the broad bosom of the
Pacific. Along its southern boundary is a fertile country of lake and
plain and woodland, loud already with the murmur of a rising industry,
and in summer waving with the golden wealth of the harvest.

But on its northern side Canada is set fast against the frozen seas of
the Pole and the desolate region of barren rock and ice-bound island
that is joined to the polar ocean by a common mantle of snow. For
hundreds and hundreds of miles the vast fortress of ice rears its
battlements of shining glaciers. The unending sunshine of the Arctic
summer falls upon untrodden snow. The cold light of the {2} aurora
illumines in winter an endless desolation. There is no sound, save
when at times the melting water falls from the glistening sides of some
vast pinnacle of ice, or when the leaden sea forces its tide between
the rock-bound islands. Here in this vast territory civilization has
no part and man no place. Life struggles northward only to die out in
the Arctic cold. The green woods of the lake district and the blossoms
of the prairies are left behind. The fertility of the Great West gives
place to the rock-strewn wilderness of the barren grounds. A stunted
and deformed vegetation fights its way to the Arctic Circle. Rude
grasses and thin moss cling desperately to the naked rock. Animal life
pushes even farther. The seas of the frozen ocean still afford a
sustenance. Even mankind is found eking out a savage livelihood on the
shores of the northern sea. But gradually all fades, until nothing is
left but the endless plain of snow, stretching towards the Pole.

Yet this frozen northern land and these forbidding seas have their
history. Deeds were here done as great in valour as those which led to
the conquest of a Mexico or the acquisition of a Peru. But unlike the
captains and conquerors of the South, the explorers have {3} come and
gone and left behind no trace of their passage. Their hopes of a land
of gold, their vision of a new sea-way round the world, are among the
forgotten dreams of the past. Robbed of its empty secret, the North
still stretches silent and untenanted with nothing but the splendid
rec