easons for the
granting of the charter, and the fur buyers' petition against the
charter had set forth that small effort had been made in that
direction. Now, at Churchill, Richard Norton and his son Moses, servants
of the Company, had heard strange rumours from the Indians of a region
of rare metals north-west inland. All these things the governor on the
Bay, James Knight, pondered, as he cruised up and down from Albany to
Churchill. Then the gold fever beset the Company. They sent for Knight.
He was commissioned on June 3, 1719, to seek the North-West Passage,
and, incidentally, to look for rare minerals.

Four ships were in the fleet that sailed for Hudson Bay this year.
Knight went on the _Albany_ with Captain Barlow and fifty men. He waited
only long enough at Churchill to leave provisions. Then, with the
_Discovery_, Captain Vaughan, as convoy, he sailed north on the
_Albany_. On his ship were iron-bound caskets to carry back the precious
metals of which he dreamed, and the framework for houses to be erected
for wintering on the South Sea. With him went iron-forgers to work in
the metals, and whalers from Dundee to chase the silver-bottoms of the
Pacific, and a surgeon, to whom was paid the extraordinary salary of L50
on account of the unusual peril of the voyage.

What became of Knight? From the time he left Churchill, his journal
ceases. Another threescore lives paid in toll to the insatiable sea! No
word came back in the summer of 1720, and the adventurers had begun to
look for him to return by way of Asia. Then three years passed, and no
word of Knight or his precious metals. Kelsey cruised north on the
_Prosperous_ in 1719, and Hancock on the _Success_ in 1720; Napper and
Scroggs and Crow on other ships on to 1736, but never a trace did they
find of the argonauts. Norton, whaling in the north in 1726, heard
disquieting rumours from the Indians, but it was not till Hearne went
among the Eskimos almost fifty years later that Knight's fate became
known. His ships had been totally wrecked on the east point of Marble
Island, that white block of granite bare as a gravestone. Out of the
wave-beaten wreckage the Eskimos saw a house arise as if by magic. The
savages fled in terror from such a mystery, and winter--the terrible,
hard, cutting cold of hyperborean storm--raged on the bare, unsheltered
island. When the Eskimos came back in the summer of 1720, a great many
graves had been scooped among the drift sand and b