54 Transactions i899-*oo 



There was not much known of our Arctic Coast at that time. 

 Samuel Hearne, as we have already seen, had discovered the 

 Coppermine River, and thus had become known as the first white 

 man to visit our Arctic shores. Though it was not part of his 

 work to investigate the ocean, there is no doubt that he realized 

 that he was looking on water that was salt. He was a salt 

 water mariner as well as land traveller. 



When Franklin was a "wee" baby of three summers, Alex- 

 ander McKenzie was forcing his way down the valley of the 

 "Big River" as it was called for many years till Franklin him- 

 self gave it the name it now bears — -McKenzie River — in 1825, as 

 he stood on the eminence from which McKenzie, 36 years before, 

 looked upon the great ocean of the North, the first white man to 

 do so. 



Excepting the mouths of the McKenzie and the Coppermine 

 rivers, nothing was known of our Arctic Coast line when 

 Franklin and his companions set foot on our shores at York 

 Factory in Hudson Bay and began organizing their expedition. 

 His first winter was spent on the banks of the Saskatchewan. 

 During the succeeding summer he was treading closely in the 

 steps of Hearne down the Coppermine River, from the mouth of 

 which he explored the shores of Coronation Gulf to the east, as 

 far as Point Turn Again, a distance of "over 550 miles. 



In his second overland expedition, he and Dr. Richardson 

 divided their forces at Point Separation, he himself going down 

 one of the eastern mouths of the McKenzie river delta and ex- 

 ploring within 160 miles of Point Barrow, the cape which Beechy 

 reached in 1826 coming through Behring Strait. Richardson ex- 

 plored the coasts between McKenzie River and Coppermine 

 River. As he stood upon a cape on the south shore of Dolphin 

 and Union Strait (named after his two boats) Richardson saw to 

 the north a great land and named it Wollaston L,and "after the 

 most distinguished philosopher, Dr. Hyde Wollaston."* 



*Most of Wollaston's papers deal more or less directly with chemistry, 

 but they divergfe beyond that science on all sides into optics, physiology, 

 botany, acoustics, astronomy, and even touch on art. He discovered the 

 metals palladium and rhodium. The Royal Society awarded him a Royal 

 Medal for his process of manufacturing- platinum — a work, which, in its im- 

 mediate effects, it is almost impossible to over-estimate since it made platinum 

 crucibles g-enerally available, thus supplying- analytical chemistry with the 

 most powerful instrument of advance. — Ency. Brit. 



