VOYAGE TO THE PACIFIC OCEAN. 43 



" cover the nature and course of the opening, for 

 " three weeks successively, he found the flood con- 

 " stantly to come from the eastward ; and that it was 

 " a large river he had got into;" to which he gave 

 the name of Wager River.* 



The accuracy, or rather the fidelity of this report 

 was denied by Mr. Dobbs, who contended that this 

 opening is a strait, and not a fresh water river, and 

 that Middleton, if he had examined it properly, 

 would have found a passage through it to the Western 

 American Ocean. The failure of this voyage, there- 

 fore, only served to furnish our zealous advocate for 

 the discovery, with new arguments for attempting it 

 once more; and he had the good fortune, after getting 

 the reward of twenty thousand pounds established by 

 act of parliament, to prevail upon a society of gentle- 

 men and merchants to fit out the Dobbs and Cali- 

 fornia; which ships, it was hoped, would be able to 

 find their way into the Pacific Ocean, by the very 

 opening which Middleton's voyage had pointed out, 

 and which he was believed to have misrepresented. 



This renovation of hope only produced fresh dis- 

 appointment. For it is well known, that the voyage 

 of the Dobbs and California, instead of confuting, 

 strongly confirmed all that Middleton had asserted. 

 The supposed strait was found to be nothing more 

 than a fresh water river, and its utmost western navi- 

 gable boundaries were now ascertained, by accurate 

 examination. But though Wager's Strait had thus 

 disappointed our hopes, as had also done Rankin's 

 Inlet, which was now found to be a close bay; and 

 though other arguments, founded on the supposed 

 course of the tides in Hudson's Bay appeared to be 

 groundless, such is our attachment to an opinion 

 once adopted, that, even after the unsuccessful issue 

 of the voyage of the Dobbs and California, a passage 

 through some other place in that bay was, by many, 



* See the Abstract of his Journal, published by Mr. Dobbs. 



