e impression. Hudson Bay lies in the same
latitude as the North Sea and the Baltic, which are freighted with
Russian and German commerce, but the climate, of course, is colder.
The ice, which has given the great inland sea its ill repute, comes
from the Pole and goes out through the Straits, seldom coming down the
Bay in the season of navigation.

The Straits are the real crux of the Hudson Bay route to Europe, and
there is no narrow neck of land to cut a way of escape through to open
sea as at Kiel and Cape Cod. The Straits have been navigated by
fur-traders since 1670, but the fur-traders could take a week or a
month to the four hundred and fifty miles of Straits. They could
afford the time to float back and forward with the ice packs for six
weeks, and as many as seven vessels have been wrecked in ten years. To
this tale of wreckage in the Straits, friends of the Hudson Bay route
answer as follows:

First, the fur-traders' vessels were little discarded admiralty vessels
of small tonnage and rickety construction. Give us ice jammers such as
the Russians use on the Baltic, built narrow and high of oak, not
steel, to ride and crush down through the ice; and we can take care of
high insurance rates. Second, the Straits are still an utterly
uncharted sea four hundred and fifty miles long and from seventy to one
hundred and fifty wide. This is not so long as the passage up the St.
Lawrence. In such an inland sea as these Straits there must exist safe
as well as unsafe channels, shelters, smooth reaches. Let us get the
Straits charted and marked with buoys, with telegraph and cable points,
and we shall navigate these four hundred and fifty miles. The
questions of lighthouses need not bother the Straits, for the season of
navigation is also the season of long daylight.

V

Three advantages must be put on the credit side of the Hudson Bay route:

Distances to tidewater cut by half.

Distances to Europe cut by a third.

Rates reduced on grain as eight to one.

Against these advantages must be placed three handicaps:

The danger of an uncharted sea in the Straits.

High insurance.

Necessity for enormous elevator and storage room.

Mr. Hill's wheat country may begin wheat cutting in July. The Canadian
Northwest is lucky if it cuts before the eighth of August. Consider
the area of the big wheat farms! The whole of August is taken up with
cutting and threshing. It is September or October, before the