CHAPTER III
SEEKING POND’S | OUTLET

Tue expedition was assembled and by nine on the morning
of 3 June all was in readiness for the order to start. Every
member in his time had travelled far on many a hazardous
trip. The innumerable lakes and rivers in the drainage
basins from the Churchill to the St. Lawrence were the
highways and by-ways of their journeyings. Athabasca
River and its lake they also knew, but “English Chief”
and Laurent Le Roux had been farther afield, the former
to the forts on Hudson Bay, the latter to Great Slave Lake.

Mackenzie had Pond’s map, and in imagination had
plotted the route through the unknown north-west quarter
of the continent to the Pacific. Captain Cook’s latitudes
and longitudes at points on the western sea-board were
known to him, and he surmised that the northern river
might lead him out of Great Slave Lake to one of the several
embouchures known to open out upon the Western Sea.
What the intervening distance held was merely a matter
of conjecture.

‘The journey must be completed in the short season of
three or four months, or in two seasons if it became necessary
to winter. Therefore the preparations were careful and
thorough in every detail; not that the fur-trader, explorer
by instinct, is ever careless in his arrangements. Comfort,
success, life itself depend upon meticulous attention to all
the minutie of the voyage. Hence, however furious the

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