OBJECTS OF THE EXPEDITION. 825 



Company, by the Ottawa Kiver, French Eiver, the Great Lakes, Lake Win- 

 nipeg, etc., to Great Slave Lake, whence Indians should be employed as 

 guides and hunters to accompany the party to the banks of the Thlew-ee- 

 choh-desseth (fear not, reader ; this dreadful name shall never again appear 

 in this history, but the stream, of which this is the Indian name, shall here- 

 after be invariably spoken of as the Great Fish River, the translation in 

 English of the name in use among the Indian tribes). Of the course of this 

 river nothing was with certainty known to Back, further than that it rose to 

 the east of Great Slave Lake. The theory respecting the stream, however, 

 was that it flowed northward or north-eastward, and might thus bear onward 

 the canoes of the explorers towards the southern reaches of Eegent 

 Inlet. A winter residence was to be built on the eastern extremity of Great 

 Slave Lake, where, after having made a preliminary excursion to, and survey 

 of, the Great Fish River, Back and his party should reside during the winter 

 of 1833-34, and where, during the spring, he should set his carpenters to work 

 upon such boats as he shou.ld find suitable for the navigation of the rapids 

 and cascades, by which, as in the case of Coppermine River, the course of 

 the stream might be interrupted. " Having passed the first winter," writes 

 Captain Back, " it was proposed that we should start for the sea the moment 

 the ice broke up ; and if an opinion should prove correct, which I had been 

 led to entertain from an inspection of the maps traced by the Indians, that 

 the mouth of the river lay between the 68th and 69th parallels of latitude, 

 and the 90th and 100th meridians of longitude> we should then be less than 

 300 miles from the wreck of the 'Fury' in Regent Inlet." Back was, of 

 course, aware that it was Ross's intention to visit the Avreck of the " Fury " 

 that he might supply himself with stores and coals, and to return and winter 

 beside it. Regent Inlet, therefore, and especially Fury Beach and its 

 vicinity, was the locality in which the search for the lost explorers should 

 naturally commence. If this search should prove unavailing. Back proposed 

 to reascend Great Fish River, pass the winter at the fort by the shores of 

 the lake, and revisit the Polar shores in the following spring, with the two- 

 fold object of continuing the search for Ross, and completing the as yet 

 undiscovered coast-line westward from the mouth of Great Fish River to 

 the Point Turnagain of Franklin. 



For these purposes, as well as for the purpose of making magnetic and 

 other observations. Back was provided with the best astronomical and other 

 instruments. Guns, etc., were provided by the committee organising the 

 expedition, and, finally, the entire enterprise was formally taken under the 

 protection of Government, and constituted a national undertaking. Mr 

 Richard King, a competent medical man, having been engaged to attend to 

 the health of the party, and to make collections in natural history, the pre- 

 parations for the outset of the expedition were regarded as completed. 



Digitized by Microsoft® 



