THE MEDITERRANEAN OF CANADA. 225 



seaports of that vast interior now thrown open to settlement, Mani- 

 toba, Keewatin, and the other provinces yet unborn, must be sought 

 in Hudson Bay. The mouth of the Churchill River would undoubt- 

 edly be the future shipping-port for the agricultural products of the 

 Northwest, and the route by which immigrants would enter the coun- 

 try. In Canada the subject was brought before Parliament for the 

 first time in 1878, and thenceforth pressed upon its attention every 

 year, until, finally, after a committee had gathered all available infor- 

 mation upon the subject, it was decided, at the session of 1884, to 

 dispatch a fully equipped expedition having for it's main object the 

 determination of the one point upon which the whole question rested, 

 namely, whether the bay and strait might be relied upon as safe and 

 serviceable highways of commerce. It was, of course, a matter of 

 general knowledge that these waters had been plowed by keels for 

 two hundred and seventy-four years back ; that sailing-vessels of all 

 descriptions, from the pinnace of twenty tons to the seventy-four-gun 

 man-of-war, had passed through the strait and spread their white 

 wings all across the bay ; and that Moose Factory had been visited by 

 a supply-ship with unfailing regularity every year since 1735. But 

 facts like these, encouraging as they might be, were not conclusive, 

 because in all cases these vessels had been free to choose their own 

 time for entering and leaving the bay, and they therefore still left 

 the question open as to whether these waters were navigable during a 

 sufficient portion of the year to render possible the development of 

 a great and permanent commerce. In order that there should be suc- 

 cessful shipping-ports upon the bay, there must, of course, be railways 

 leading from the interior to these ports, and these railways must be 

 assured of a profitable volume of business during a good long season, 

 or they would never be built. The expedition, therefore, was charged 

 primarily with the duty of affixing the limits of the period of naviga- 

 tion, and at the same time was instructed to gather as much informa- 

 tion concerning the climate, resources, flora, fauna, and other features 

 of the region as the limited time at its command would permit. 



On the 22d of July last the steamship Neptune, a wooden vessel, 

 built and equipped with special reference to northern navigation in 

 prosecution of the seal-fishery, set forth from the port of Halifax, with 

 the members of the expedition on board. These were some twenty-six 

 in number, Lieutenant Andrew R. Gocdon, R. N., of the Meteoro- 

 logical Survey of Canada, being in command, and having with him, in 

 the double capacity of geologist and medical officer, Dr. Robert Bell, 

 whose explorations in the vicinity of Hudson Bay have been already 

 referred to. The rest of the party comprised a photographer, eight 

 observers, three carpenters, and twelve station-men. As the observers 

 and station-men were to be left for the winter, they had each of them 

 been carefully examined by medical authority, and pronounced physic- 

 ally well fitted to withstand the rigors of an Arctic climate. 



TOL. XXVII. 15 



