Even stolid-going England was infected by the rage for imaginary oceans
and continents. The Hudson's Bay Fur Company was threatened with a
withdrawal {174} of its charter because it had failed to find a
Northwest Passage from Atlantic to Pacific. Only four years after the
death of Bering, an act of Parliament offered a reward of twenty
thousand pounds to the officers and crew of any ships discovering a
passage between Atlantic and Pacific north of 52 degrees. There were
even ingenious fellows with the letters of the Royal Society behind
their names, who affected to think that the great Athabasca Lake, which
Hearne had found, when he tramped inland from the Arctic and Coppermine
River, was a strait leading to the Pacific. Athabasca Lake might be
the imaginary strait of the Greek pilot, Juan de Fuca. To be sure, two
Hudson's Bay Company ships' crews--those under Knight and Barlow--had
been totally lost fifty years before Hearne's tramp inland in 1771,
trying to find that same mythical strait of Juan de Fuca westward of
Hudson Bay.
But so furious did public opinion wax over a Northwest Passage at the
very time poor Bering was dying in the North Pacific, that Captain
Middleton was sent to Hudson Bay in 1741-1742 to find a way to the
Pacific.
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