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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