“I saw with indescribable emotions Point Barrow stretching out to the northward and enclosing Elson Bay, near the bottom of which we were now,” Lieutenant Elson having been in charge of the Blossom’s barge which reached this “farthest” in 1826. Upon the return of Simpson the party took up winter quarters at Great Bear Lake.
The following June they descended the Coppermine, where, in shooting the rapids, they “had to pull for their lives, to keep out of the suction of the precipices, along whose base the breakers raged and foamed, with overwhelming fury. Shortly before noon, we came in sight of Escape Rapid, of Franklin; and a glance at the overhanging cliffs told us that there was no alternative but to run down with full cargo.” “In an instant,” continues Simpson, “we were in the vortex; and, before we were aware, my boat was borne toward an isolated rock, which the boiling surge almost concealed. To clear it on the outside was no longer possible; our only chance of safety was to run between it and the lofty eastern cliff. The word was passed and every breath was hushed. A stream which dashed down upon us over the brow of the precipice, more than one hundred feet in height, mingled with the spray that whirled upwards from the rapid, forming a terrific shower-bath. The pass was about eight feet wide, and the error of a single foot on either side would have been instant destruction. As, guided by Sinclair’s consummate skill, the boat shot safely through those jaws of death, an involuntary cheer arose.
“Our next impulse was to turn round to view the fate of our comrades behind. They had profited by the peril we incurred, and kept without the treacherous rock in time.”
Hardly had they reached the coast before they were stopped by the ice, and hopelessly delayed many days. The season was rapidly advancing, and yet no real work had been accomplished. On the 20th of August, Simpson and seven men started on a ten days’ walk to the eastward of Boathaven. Progress was both difficult and discouraging. On the 23d they reached an elevated cape, beyond which further progress was impossible. Of this scene Simpson writes:—
“I ascended the height, from whence a vast and splendid project burst suddenly upon me. The sea, as if transformed by enchantment, rolled its free waves at my feet, and beyond the reach of vision to the eastward. Islands of various shapes and sizes overspread its surface, and the northern land terminated to the eye in a bold and lofty cape, bearing east-northeast, thirty or forty miles distant, while the continental coast trended away southeast. I stood, in fact, on a remarkable headland, at the eastern outlet of an ice-obstructed strait. On the extensive land to the northward, I bestowed the name of our most gracious sovereign, Queen Victoria. Its eastern visible extremity I called Cape Pelly, in complement of the governor of the Hudson Bay Company.”
In 1839, Simpson and Dease made a more successful journey. The ice conditions being better, they sailed through the strait that separates Victoria Land from the mainland. They pushed on to Simpson Strait, which divides Boothia from the mainland, and later doubled Point Ogle. Upon reaching Montreal Island in Back’s Estuary, they found certain provisions left there by Captain Back five years before. On the 25th of August, 1839, they erected a cairn at their farthest point near Cape Herschel.
Exploring 150 miles of the shores of Victoria Land as far as Cape Parry and the Bays of Wellington, Cambridge, and Byron, they crossed Coronation Gulf and finally reentered the Coppermine River, after a voyage of more than 1600 miles in the Polar Sea. For his remarkable achievements, Simpson was awarded the Founder’s Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society of London.
RAE’S OVERLAND JOURNEY
In 1846, the Hudson Bay Company fitted out another expedition to be sent into the field for the purpose of surveying the northeast corner of the American mainland; the mouth of the Castor and Pollux to the Gulf of Akkolee, so as to link the discoveries of Dease and Simpson and those of the second voyages of Ross and Parry.