Great Fish River, to its estuary; but he had been able to survey but little of the neighboring coast in either direction; and, with the exception of this point, the region between the 115th and 83d degrees of longitude, from the Coppermine River to the offshoot, called Melville Peninsula, was still unexplored. It would appear from the instructions that the exploration of this interval to its full eastward extent did not enter into the immediate contemplation of the directors. The party is merely instructed, starting from the Coppermine, to reach, if possible, the scene of Captain Back’s discoveries; deciding, as in case of success it must, on its way the question at issue between Sir John Ross and Sir George Back, whether Boothia, the land so named by the former officer, be a peninsula joined on to the main land to the west of the Tlewocho, or whether, as Back opined, a strait existed which had escaped Ross’s observation. It will be seen that Mr. Simpson more than performed the service indicated in this instruction; that, after discovering and passing through the strait suspected by Sir G. Back, and thus disposing of the presumed peninsula, and of Sir J. Ross’s famous discovery of a difference of level between the seas on either side, he followed the coast-line to some little extent beyond the point where Back was repelled by the advanced state of the season. From this summary it will be seen that, for some ten degrees of longitude, the coast of the continent still presents a field for further adventure. We have been robbed of one peninsula, but it appears nearly certain that a considerable tract of land, of which the eastern continuous coast has been ascertained by Parry and Franklin, deserves the name it bears of Melville Peninsula; that it shoots out to the north for some 5° of latitude, and is joined to the main land by a narrow isthmus near Repulse Bay. This latter fact does not indeed rest as yet on actual observation, but there is every reason to put faith in the Esquimaux accounts, which bring a gulf of the Polar Sea to within 40 or 50 miles of Repulse Bay.
Our author’s narrative is prefaced by an interesting though meagre sketch of his biography, by the pen of a surviving brother. The boy is not always father to the man. The transformation of a sickly and timid youth, educated for the Scottish church, into the hardy man who walks fifty miles a-day in snow-shoes, is one of those phenomena which we believe to be quite as common as the instances of juvenile promise and precocious aptitude for a particular career so often traced out by the biographers of eminent men. In 1829, at the age of twenty-one, Mr. Simpson, despairing of early advancement in the Kirk, and averse from the usual resource of private tuition, accepted from the governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, Mr., now Sir George Simpson—(a relative, we presume, but in what degree is not stated)—an offer of employment under the Company, and sailed for North America. By the same powerful interest it appears that he was appointed, in 1836, to the second station in command of the expedition which forms the subject of the present narrative. There can be no doubt that during his apprenticeship he showed qualities which justified his selection, and no one who peruses the record will accuse the governor of nepotism.
To any one acquainted with the numerous works of Mr. Simpson's predecessors, his volume can of course present little attraction in the way of novelty. The incidents, whether of the summer's journey or the winter’s residence at one of the Company's forts, admit of little variety, as described either by a Back or a Simpson. The same exertions of fortitude and endurance, the same devices of skill and ingenuity to meet danger in its various forms of river-rapid, of marine ice, of fog, and squall, and current, are required of each successive arctic adventurer; but the simplicity and concision of the present narrative prevents weariness even with these details. There is one fact, evidence of which pervades the volume, and which makes us rise from its perusal with peculiar satisfaction; we mean the truly humanizing and Christian effect of the operations of the Hudson’s Bay Company on the aboriginal tribes. The period is not distant when the “bella plus quam civilia,” which raged between the Hudson’s Bay Company and a rival association, reddened the desert with other blood than that of the beaver or musk-ox. The blessings, indeed, usually bestowed by the white Christian on the red heathen are soon enumerated;—fire-arms, fire-water, and the small-pox; but probably in no part of the world had the European invaders set a worse example to the native tribes than here, or enlisted them into more savage contests than those which raged, within the present century, within the dominions and between the subjects of the British crown in North America. It is perhaps useless now to inquire into the relative guilt of the parties engaged, and to attempt to discriminate between aggression and lawful resistance. The true history of such contests would rival in unprofitable tedium the Florentine and Pisan wars of Guicciardini. We know no better picture of the character of the struggle than is to be found in the work of Mr. Ross Cox, a gentleman who from an adventurous trader has become an efficient and trusted officer of the Irish police. His narrative, published in 1830, has scarcely an equal for incident and adventure, unless it be in Mr. Irvine’s charming volume, the “Adventures of the Followers of Columbus.” We shall have occasion to remark, that some of his observations on the habits of native tribes derive confirmation from the volume under review. It is gratifying to us, as Englishmen and Christians, to be able to show the reverse of such a picture. Subsequently to the coalition effected between the two companies in 1821, their system towards the natives appears to have been one which Howard and Wilberforce would have approved, and might have di-
