a pencil,
and, like children, they will draw. Teach them and they will learn,
oblige them and they will be grateful. "Gentle and loving savages," one
of our old worthies called them, and the Portuguese were so much
impressed with their teachable and gentle conduct, that a Venetian
ambassador writes, "His serene majesty contemplates deriving great
advantage from the country, not only on account of the timber of which he
has occasion, but of the inhabitants, who are admirably calculated for
labour, and are the best I have ever seen." The Esquimaux, of course,
will learn vice, and in the region visited by whale ships, vice enough
has certainly been taught him. Here are the dogs, who will eat old
coats, or anything; and, near the dwellings, here is a
snow-bunting--robin redbreast of the Arctic lands. A party of our
sailors once, on landing, took some sticks from a large heap, and
uncovered the nest of a snow-bunting with young, the bird flew to a
little distance, but seeing that the men sat down, and harmed her not,
continued to seek food and supply her little ones, with full faith in the
good intentions of the party. Captain Lyon found a child's grave partly
uncovered, and a snow-bunting had built its nest upon the infant's bosom.

Sailing round Melville Peninsula, we come into the Gulf of Akkolee,
through Fury and Hecla Straits, discovered by Parry. So we get back to
the bottom of Regent's Inlet, which we quitted a short time ago, and
sailing in the neighbourhood of the magnetic pole, we reach the estuary
of Back's River, on the north-east coast of America. We pass then
through a strait, discovered in 1839 by Dean and Simpson, still coasting
along the northern shore of America, on the great Stinking Lake, as
Indians call this ocean. Boats, ice permitting, and our "Phantom Ship,"
of course, can coast all the way to Behring Strait. The whole coast has
been explored by Sir John Franklin, Sir John Richardson, and Sir George
Back, who have earned their knighthoods through great peril. As we pass
Coronation Gulf--the scene of Franklin, Richardson, and Back's first
exploration from the Coppermine River--we revert to the romantic story of
their journey back, over a land of snow and frost, subsisting upon
lichens, with companions starved to death, where they plucked wild leaves
for tea, and ate their shoes for supper; the tragedy by the river; the
murder of poor Hood, with a book of prayers in his hand; Franklin at Fort