d facts, and of having, from interested motives, in concert
with the Hudson's Bay Company, decided against the practicability of the
passage, though the discoveries of his own voyage had put it within his
reach.

He had, between the latitude of 65 deg. and 66 deg., found a very considerable
inlet running westward, into which he entered with his ships; and,
"after repeated trials of the tides, and endeavours to discover the
nature and course of the opening, for three weeks successively, he found
the flood constantly to come from the eastward, and that it was a large
river he had got into," to which he gave the name of Wager River."[38]

[Footnote 38: See the Abstract of his Journal, published by Mr Dobbs.]

The accuracy, or rather the fidelity, of this report, was denied by Mr
Dobbs, who contended that this opening _is a strait, and not a
fresh-water river_; and that Middleton, if he had examined it properly,
would have found a passage through it to the western American Ocean. The
failure of this voyage, therefore, only served to furnish our zealous
advocate for the discovery, with new arguments for attempting it once
more; and he had the good fortune, after getting the reward of twenty
thousand pounds established by act of parliament, to prevail upon a
society of gentlemen and merchants to fit out the Dobbs and California;
which ships, it was hoped, would be able to find their way into the
Pacific Ocean, by the very opening which Middleton's Voyage had pointed
out, and which he was believed to have misrepresented.

This renovation of hope only produced fresh disappointment For it is
well known, that the voyage of the Dobbs and California, instead of
confuting, strongly confirmed all that Middleton had asserted. The
supposed strait was found to be nothing more than a fresh-water river,
and its utmost western navigable boundaries were now ascertained, by
accurate examination. But though Wager's Strait had thus disappointed
our hopes, as had also done Rankin's Inlet, which was now found to be a
close bay; and though other arguments, founded on the supposed course of
the tides in Hudson's Bay, appeared to be groundless, such is our
attachment to an opinion once adopted, that, even after the unsuccessful
issue of the voyage of the Dobbs and California, a passage through some
other place in that bay was, by many, considered as attainable; and,
particularly, Chesterfield's (formerly: called Bowden's) Inlet, lying
between la