July, 1809.] The Coast-Line of Repulse Bay Completed. 423 



only by supposing that next to the lofty ideas with which his mind 

 enthusiastically invested every thing Arctic, was the extreme of a 

 strange fascination with the uncouth life he had been leading. He 

 sa3^s himself, at about this same date, that there was nothing in the 

 way of food in which the natives delighted that he did not delight in, 

 and that this may appear strange to some, but was true. He had that 

 day "a grand good feast on the kind of meat he had been longing for — 

 the deer killed last fall ; rotten, strong, and stinking, and for these 

 qualities, excellent for Innuits and for the writer." 



The six weeks which immediately followed his return to the bay 

 were occupied in completing a sketch of Talloon Bay ; in hunting 

 with the natives and in sharing for a time a double tiipik with eleven 

 of them; in Arctic study and meditations on his next Polar journey ; 

 and in preparing for shipment the bone from the whale cached the 

 year previous. He spent several days in surveying, and completed 

 the coast-line by a survey of Talloon Bay, but under trying disad- 

 vantages. 



No whaling- vessels could be reasonably expected to arrive before 

 the first week of August, nor was it at all certain that any would 

 come in during the season. He had, therefore, again to think of 

 the boat journey which might become necessary to York Factory, the 

 difficulty of making which journey in the frail Sylvia had been con- 

 sidered the year before. No lack of provisions would now be a bar 

 to this voyage, for he had well husbanded his old stores, and the addi- 

 tions made on his recent sledge journey were themselves in excess of 

 all present need. "Really we have been blessed, greatly blessed, in 

 the way of provisions. The amount prepared for and acquired on our 



