As McClure and his men had come over the sea from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean, though not all the way by ship, they won a prize of $50,000 which the British Government had long before offered for the finding of the North-west Passage.
Having been found, the North-west Passage was left severely alone. Only one ship ever went through, and then not by McClure’s route, the Prince of Wales Strait. On June 16, 1903, in the little yacht Gjoa, the Norwegian explorer Amundsen, who had already discovered the South Pole, left Christiania with his six companions. Passing Hudson Strait by, they sailed north, struck in west over the top of Baffin’s Land, then turned south into Peel Sound and Franklin Strait and down the east side of King William Land. Then, almost doubling on their tracks, they turned west again and crept along the coast of the mainland, through the length of Coronation Bay, past the mouths of the Coppermine and Mackenzie Rivers, and finally got down into the Pacific through Behring Strait. They cast anchor at Nome, in Alaska, on August 31, 1906. [a]—But No Longer Wanted]
This voyage proved that if a navigator was prepared to spend a few years on the trip, including several winters frozen up in Arctic solitude, he might in the end get through from Atlantic to Pacific by sea, the dream and heart’s desire of countless old explorers. But if the old explorer had the chance to-day, and heard he could get through by land in less than five days by a Canadian railway, the dream would lose its attraction. A North-west Passage was wanted strictly for use, not to ornament a map.
CHAPTER V
The Farthest West
WERE all those good lives wasted, then, and the scores of good ships too, lost in three centuries of wild-goose chase?
But for that wild-goose chase, carried on by brave British sailors from the Pacific as well as the Atlantic, our Dominion of Canada, stretching from sea to sea, would never have come into existence. If we had not taken a vigorous part in the exploration of the Pacific coast, the Russians coming down from the north and Spaniards coming up from the south would between them have seized and held it all, till both their shares were swallowed up by our neighbors of the United States.
It has had a very curious history, this west coast of ours. To begin with, no one dreamed that there was any “west coast of America” at all, for the first explorers all thought America was simply an extension of Asia. Even when they got into the Pacific and sailed up the western shore of Mexico, they expected any day to see land barring their way and bending round to the left, so that, by following the coast, they would presently find themselves among the people of China. They were astonished at the land persistently keeping on their right, however far north they sailed.
In the days of Queen Elizabeth, only a year after Frobisher’s attempt to discover a channel through America in the North-west, his fellow-countryman Sir [a]Captain Cook Explores the Coast] Francis Drake sailed round Cape Horn in the hope of finding the other end of that channel, which imaginative geographers had already drawn on the maps and called the “Straits of Anian.”
How far north Sir Francis got, nobody knows. Up to Oregon, for certain. The weather was bad, with “thick stinking fogs” and “nipping cold” in midsummer; so he turned back, resolved to encircle the globe by going home round Africa and India instead of around America. First, however, he landed in California, finding a “convenient harbour” which was probably San Francisco Bay. The natives were shivering under their furs, in July, but they gave the white men a warm welcome. In fact, the “King” or chief came “with a retinue of about 12,000 men,” “humbly desiring of Drake that he would accept of the Realm,”—putting a feather crown on his head, and three big chains of bone around his neck.
The great commander accepted the gift, took formal possession of the country in the English Queen’s name, and called it New Albion, as Albion was the old name of the Mother-land.