LAST VOYAGE OF CAPT ROSS. 
297 
tic side after passing the strait turning round to the westward 
towards the northeast cape, and that on the American side round 
Icy cape to the eastward. The same fact has been since ex¬ 
perienced by two Russian corvettes, which found the current 
setting so strongly to the eastward, as to occasion some alarm 
lest they should not be able to return. Proceeding along the 
northern coast of America to Hearne’s River, we have the testi¬ 
mony of Capt. Franklin, that the same kind of drift-wood was 
deposited on the western shores of jutting headlands from thence 
to Cape Turnagain, and from the testimony of the Esquimaux, 
that a considerable part of their supply of wood for sledges, 
boats, bows and other implements, is received from the western 
shore of Melville Peninsula behind Repulse Bay. These are 
unequivocal proofs of a current setting easterly from the pacific 
along the northern coast of America; but we are able to trace it 
still further into the Atlantic. Being impeded in its course 
in this cul cle sac behind the isthmus of Melville Peninsula, it 
is necessarily turned to the northward along the western shore 
of the latter, still finding an outlet by the strait of the Hecla 
and Fury, it rushes through beneath the ice, with which the 
strait is hermetically sealed, at the rate of four miles an hour, 
carrying with it down Fox Channel, large fields, floes, and 
detached masses of ice to the southward, and making together 
with a flood tide of eighteen hours out of the twenty-four in 
the same direction, the navigation up that channel so hazardous 
and harassing as it was found by Capt, Parry, and which render 
all future attempts by the same route hopeless and therefore 
unadviseable. From Fox’s Channel it sweeps along both sides 
of Southampton Island round Hudson’s Bay, and through the 
strait down the coast of Labrador, and across the banks of New¬ 
foundland into the Atlantic. 
There are those who in the plenitude of their sagacity, have 
pretended to discover in the various expeditions that have been 
fitted out by the English government for the discovery of the 
North West Passage, an obstinate and culpable adherence to 
an object, which has been declared unattainable, and which if 
attained would be useless for all the purposes of commerce, 
13 2 Q 
