78 PROCEEDINGS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. 



of the account of his travels.'*^ After a careful discussion of waterways he con- 

 cludes as follows : 



" By opening this intercourse between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and 

 forming regular establishments through the interior, and at both extremes, as 

 well as along the coasts and islands, the entire command of the fur trade of North 

 America might be obtained, from latitude forty-eight north to the pole, except that 

 portion of it which the Russians have in the Pacific. To this may be added the 

 fishing in both seas, and the markets of the four quarters of the globe. Such would 

 be the field for commercial enterprise, and incalculable would be the produce of it, 

 when supported by the operations of that credit and capital which Great Britain so 

 pre-eminently possesses. Then would this country (Great Britain) begin to be re- 

 munerated for the expenses it has sustained in discovering and surveying the coast 

 of the Pacific Ocean, which is at present left to American adventurers, who with- 

 out regularity or capital, or the desire of conciliating future confidence, look alto- 

 gether to the interests of the moment. ' ' He was not dreaming of steam railways 

 reaching Vancouver from Montreal in five days, but merely of making less arduous 

 such a journey by canoe and foot as he practically fijiished when having reached 

 the Pacific he wrote : "I now mixed up some vermilion in melted grease, and 

 inscribed in large characters, on the south-east face of the rock on which we had 

 slept last night, this brief memorial : ' Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada, by 

 land, the twenty-second of July, one thousand seven hundred and ninety-three. ' ' ' 

 Captain George Vancouver being commissioned by the King on a voyage of 

 discovery particularly to try once more for a passage between the North Pacific and 

 North Atlantic Oceans, spent the years from 1790 to 1795f at sea during which 

 time he surveyed the coast of North- West America. We are, however, more con- 

 ■cerned with the work of another explorer who spent his life between the Great 

 Lakes and the Pacific, but who, because of the indifference of his countrymen, is less 

 famous than Vancouver. I refer to David Thompson, Astronomer and Surveyor, 

 as he styled himself, first to the Hudson's Bay Company, then to the North -West 

 Company, and later acting with the International Boundary Commission, who from 

 1784 to 1850, as the forty volumes of records and maps made with his own hand 

 and now in the Crown Lands Department of the Province of Ontario show, 

 laboured strenuously for science, practically without a fellow-worker. In the pub- 

 lished journals of Alexander Henry-j- edited by Elliott Coues, footnotes and other 

 information from the unpublished journals of David Thompson appear, and Mr. 

 •Coues also gives us facsimiles of three sections and the title part of the great map 

 be evidently hoped would be published. Elliott Coues says in his preface : "It 

 lias long been a matter of regret among those versed in the history and geography 

 of the Greater North-West that this luminous record of the life work of so modest, 

 so meritorious an explorer as Thompson was — of so scientific a surveyor and so 

 great a discoverer — has never seen the light, either under government patronage or 

 by private enterprise. ' ' And later in the same preface : ' 'The irony of the event is 

 the world's revenge on David Thompson ; but the world can never be allowed to 

 forget the discoverer of the sources of the Columbia, the first white man who ever 

 voyaged on the upper reaches and main upper tributaries of that mighty river, the 

 pathfinder of more than one way across the continental divide from Saskatchewan 

 and Athabascan to Columbian waters, the greatest geographer of his day in British 

 America, and the maker of what was then by far its greatest map — that ' Map of 

 the North-West Territory of the Province of Canada. From actual surveys during 

 the years 1792 to 1812 ' as the legend goes." 



During the years 1819 to 1822 inclusive, Captain, afterwards Sir John Franklin, 

 acting under a royal commission, was carrying out an " expedition from the shores 

 of Hudson's Bay by land, to explore the northern coast of America, from the mouth 

 of the Coppermine River to the eastward. ' ' This, and subsequent arctic expedi- 

 tions, not only resulted in some important geographical discoveries, but gave to the 



* " Voyag-es from Montreal on the River St. Lawrence, thoug-h the Continent of North America to the Frozen 

 and Pacific Oceans." Alexander Mackenzie, London, 1801. 



t "A Voyage of Discovery to the Northern Pacific Ocean," etc. Captain Georg-e Vancouver, 3 vols and 

 atlas, London, 1708. 



t ' ' New Light on the Early History of the Greater North-West," etc. Edited by Elliott Coues, 3 vols, 

 New York, 1897. 



