l899-'oO TRANSACTIONS 1 7 



A thousand place-names bestowed on headland and cape and 

 promotory, on gulf and strait and channel and bay, on river and 

 lake, on islands great and islands small — some of them hoary with 

 age before Poutrincourt sailed into and named Port Royal, or 

 Champlain dug the first cellar in Quebec, some of them but of 

 yesterday, — testify to the unresting diligence with which the men 

 of the past and of the present have sought fame and fortune in 

 the Frozen Sea which tumbles round the occult precincts of the 

 elusive North Pole. 



Taken as a whole these place-names have been baptised in the 

 death-throes of full 2,000 men who have lost their lives from 

 starvation, from cold, from disease, from wild beasts, from drown- 

 ing and from murder most foul. On an average one human life 

 has been sacrificed for each place-name given, possibly two for 

 each. 



From the seventeen score of persons drowned on the voyage 

 from Iceland to Greenland in 983-4 to the criminal taking off of 

 Henry Hudson, his son and his seven faithful friends, by the 

 mutinous crew of the "Discoverie" in the wild waters of the west 

 coast of our District of Ungava ; from the fifty who perished on 

 Marble Island, dying one by one till the last man fell dead as he 

 tried to dig a grave for his comrade, to the ghastly find of 30 

 skeletons of men in an inlet appropriately named Starvation Cove 

 by the horrified discoverers, and that other find by Eskimos in 

 Terror Bay of a tent, the floor of which was completely covered 

 with the bones of white men ; from the destruction of the remain- 

 der of Franklin's men as with hunger-shrunk bodies they toiled 

 homeward from Montreal island in the estuary of the Great Fish 

 River, just under the Arctic Circle, down to the present time, 

 precious human lives have been dropping, one by one, score by 

 score, into the abyssal depths of northern seas. 



Thousands of women have, like the psalmist, "eaten ashes 

 for bread and mingled their drink with weeping" because of the 

 loss of husband and son and lover in voyages and expeditions of 

 which these place-names are the memorial tablets, nor were their 

 burdens lightened by any Rudyard Kipling of the times with his 

 song of "The Absent Minded Beggar" of more value than many 

 "cloths of gold," as a "pot boiler."* 



*The newspapers announce that the "Absent Minded Beg-gar" produced 

 for the war fund the syni of $485, qqo. 



