CHAPTER XL ALONG THE COAST. PRONATION GULF, the large estuary dotted with the islands forming the Duke of York Archipelago, which the ^^^ party had now reached, was a sheet of water with irregular banks, let in, as it were, into the North American continent. At its western angle opened the mouth of the Coppermine ; and on the east a long narrow creek called Bathurst Inlet ran into the mainland, from which stretched the jagged broken coast with its pointed capes and rugged promontories, ending in that confusion of straits, sounds, and channels which gives such a strange appearance to the maps of North America, On the other side the coast turned abruptly to the north beyond the mouth of the Coppermine river, and ended in Cape Krusenstem. After consulting with Sergeant Long, Lieutenant Hobson decided to give his party a day's rest here. The exploration, properly so called, which was to enable the Lieutenant to fix upon a suitable site for the establishment of a fort, was now really about to begin. The Company had advised him to keep as much as possible above the seventieth parallel, and on the shores of the Arctic Ocean. To obey his orders Hobson was obliged to keep to the west; for on the east — with the exception, perhaps, of the land of Boothia, crossed by the seventieth parallel — the whole country belongs rather to the Arctic Circle, and the geographical conformation of Boothia is as yet but imperfectly known. After carefully ascertaining the latitude and longitude, and veri- fying his position by the map, the Lieutenant found that he was a hundred miles below the seventieth degree. But beyond Cape Krusenstem, the coast-line, running in a north-easterly direction, abruptly crosses the seventieth parallel at a sharp angle near the one hundred and thirtieth meridian, and at about the same elevation as Cape Bathurst, the spot named as a rendezvous by Captain
