Three years after his first journey, Mackenzie started on another, with the view of penetrating to the west across the Rocky Mountains, in search of a river of which he had received some intelligence from the natives, and supposed to discharge its waters into Cook's River.

He set out on the 10th October, 1792, and ascended the Peace River towards its source in the Rocky Mountains, a voyage attended with very considerable difficulties, owing to the dangerous rapids and cataracts by which it was so frequently broken, that, as they neared the snow-clad mountains, further progress by water was absolutely impossible. They therefore commenced cutting a passage up the sides of the mountain, and after infinite labour, managed to haul the canoe and baggage to the summit, where they found a small river, deep enough to float the canoe, on which they embarked. Their course led them through numerous settlements of the industrious beaver, who had felled whole acres of large trees in the vicinity, in order to construct their extraordinary dwelling-places.

On the banks of this river they met with a tribe of Indians, who at first received them with great show of hostility, but who were soon reconciled by a few presents. Here the journey was very nearly frustrated; the Indians were, or appeared to be, quite ignorant of any river to the west, which Mackenzie was so anxious to find, flowing into what they were pleased to term the Great Stinking Lake; but while standing near a group of them, with whom his interpreter was conversing, he sufficiently understood one of the Indians, who spoke of a large river near their present station, which flowed towards the mid-day sun, to suspect his guide of false dealing; and so it turned out. The man, heartily tired of the dangers they had already passed through, and expecting only a continuation of

them in their further progress, had returned false answers to Mackenzie's eager enquiries.

The voyage was now resumed, under the guidance of the Indian who gave the information, and they were making excellent progress, when the canoe struck on one of the numerous sharp rocks lying in the bed of the river, and unfortunately this being immediately followed by the passage of a rapid, it made her a complete wreck. They managed, however, to repair her, and again embarked.

Day after day they continued their toils and progress, until they arrived at the habitations of a tribe, from one of whom Mackenzie learnt a great deal, as to the course of the river they now were following, and which he represented as quite impossible to navigate, on account of the dangerous falls and rapids occurring at every few leagues. On the other hand, the land journey to the shores of the western sea was said to be quite practicable; and accordingly Mackenzie, whose ardour neither the desertion of guides, nor the dangers of the route, could suppress, determined to abandon the canoe, and conclude his adventurous journey in this manner.

Laden, therefore, with the thirty days' provision which remained, they commenced their march through a tolerably open country, and at length arrived among a tribe whose houses were like those of the Nootkans, one hundred and twenty feet long, and capable of holding many families, and who most hospitably regaled them with roasted salmon, and delicious ripe raspberries and gooseberries, luxuries abounding on the Pacific side of the North American continent, to which they had long been strangers. Their superstition, however, with regard to the fish frequenting these waters was rather curious; they would not allow venison, which they refused to touch, to be carried in the boat, for fear the smell should drive

away the salmon, who were likewise supposed to have an invincible dislike to iron, and for that reason they refused to give the travellers any supplies of this fish in a raw state, lest it should be boiled in a kettle.

Leaving these hospitable natives, and accompanied by four of them as guides, the voyage was resumed in a large canoe, and on the 20th July, after a passage of thirty-six miles, they arrived at the mouth of the river which discharges itself into the Gulf of Georgia, in the parallel of 50°. Here this daring expedition terminated; Mackenzie returned by the same route, leaving the following token of his triumph over almost insuperable obstacles, written on the face of the cliff in perishable vermillion:

ALEXANDER MACKENZIE,

From Canada by land, the 22nd of July, 1793.

Long since has this simple memorial, so strangely different from the pompous language of Balboa, when nearly three centuries before he achieved a somewhat similar feat, been effaced; but the name and fame of Sir Alexander Mackenzie, as an Arctic hero, are undying.

At the point where Mackenzie's interesting journey terminated, the voyage of Captain Vancouver, who had been a midshipman under Captain Cook, may be said to have commenced, in his search after a passage, which was supposed to exist among the immense archipelago of islands in this quarter. However, after having examined this coast, from the lat. of 41° to 60°, with an accuracy that leaves nothing to be desired, he proved beyond a doubt, that no such passage did exist; an opinion which gained him no little animosity, on his return, from those who upheld this idea.

Lieutenant Kotzebue, a son of the celebrated writer of that name, was likewise despatched in the year

1815 to this quarter. He was furnished, by the noble and patriotic Count Romanzoff, with a small vessel called the Rurick, of not more than a hundred tons. He entered Behring's Straits, and keeping along the American shore, in lat. 68°, stood into a deep opening, which he trusted might prove the desired passage, as he saw nothing but water as far as the eye could reach; but after spending a fortnight in examining carefully this deep sound, no outlet was discovered to strengthen this hope.

The shores of this sound, to which Kotzebue has very properly left his name, were well peopled by a fine race of men, who exactly resembled the description given by Cook of the Tschuktzki on the Asiatic

continent.

Kotzebue observed the skulls and skins of reindeer, from which he inferred that that animal was to be met with in the country around; he also brought home drawings of several elephants' teeth, picked up, and which, if not brought by the great Polar current from the opposite shores of Siberia and Tartary, where they are found in such enormous quantities, are very curious, as being the first that have been discovered in the New World.

CHAPTER XIV.

Spirit of Enterprise re-kindled through the exertions of Sir John Barrow-Expedition under Ross and Parry-Expedition under Buchan and Franklin-Brief Biography of Franklin-Continuation and Termination of Voyage.

THE Commencement of the nineteenth century was a glorious era for the prospects of further geographical research in the Polar Seas. Much money had hitherto been spent, and many lives had been lost, in unavailing efforts to clear up a question which was becoming more and more interesting, in proportion as the difficulties of its solution seemed greater; when at this time the renewal of these efforts, after a lapse of half a century, on a much grander scale, was determined on by his Majesty's government, seemingly with a great probability of success.

The late esteemed secretary of the Admiralty, Sir John Barrow, Bart., was the principal mover in this, and, indeed, in every other similar project that has since been entered into with the same purposes in view. He collected and arranged chronologically everything that was known of Polar voyages, wrote learned disquisitions in the Quarterlies, to prove that the winters for three years previously had been very wet, owing to the vast quantities of Polar ice which had drifted from their fastnesses into the broad Atlantic, and thereby greatly increased the probability of making the passage; pressed upon the English nation