And when Middleton failed to find water where the Creator had
placed land, Dobbs, the patron of the expedition and champion of a
Northwest Passage at once roused the public to send out two more
ships--the _Dobbs_ and _California_. Failure again! Theories never
yet made Fact, never so much as added a hair's weight to Fact! Ellis,
who was on board, affected to think that Chesterfield Inlet--a great
arm of the sea, {175} westward of Hudson Bay--might lead to the
Pacific. This supposition was promptly exploded by the Hudson's Bay
Fur Company sending Captain Christopher and Moses Norton, the local
governor of the company, up Chesterfield inlet for two hundred miles,
where they found, not the Pacific, but a narrow river. Then the hue
and cry of the learned theorists was--the Northwest Passage lay
northward of Hudson Bay. Hearne was sent tramping inland to find--not
sea, but land; and when he returned with the report of the great
Athabasca Lake of Mackenzie River region, the lake was actually seized
on as proof that there was a waterway to the Pacific. Then the
brilliant plan was conceived to send ships by both the Atlantic and the
Pacific to find this mythical passage from Europe to Asia.
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